Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

Philosophy of language
INTRODUCTION
Grayling (1982, pp. 173–5) distinguishes between the linguistic philosophers, whose
interest is in solving complex philosophical problems by examining the use of certain
terms in the language, and philosophers of language, whose interest is in the connection
between the linguistic and the non-linguistic—between language and the world. This
connection is held by philosphers of language to be crucial to the development of a
theory of meaning, and this is their central concern. The philosophy of language is also
known as philosophical semantics (compare SEMANTICS). To a philosopher of
language, this entry will seem oversimplistic; but my aim is to make accessible to
linguists some of the concepts and issues which have been central in the development of
the discipline and which have influenced linguistics in more or less direct ways, or which
linguistics could usefully draw on, but which are often ignored because they seem
wrapped in complexities which are difficult to take on board by non-philosophers.
THE IDEATIONAL THEORY OF MEANING
Let us begin by examining a very early theory of meaning, one which assumes that
meaning is attached to, but separable from words, because it originates elsewhere,
namely in the mind in the form of ideas. This theory was developed by the British
empiricist philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), and is commonly known as the
ideational theory of meaning. Locke (1977, Book 3, ch. 2) writes:
1. Words are sensible Signs, necessary for Communication. Man, though
he have great variety of thoughts, and such from which others as well as
himself might receive profit and delight; yet they are all within his own
breast, invisible and hidden from others, nor can of themselves be made to
appear. The comfort and advantage of society not being to be had without
communication of thoughts, it was necessary that man should find some
external sensible signs, whereof those invisible ideas, which his thoughts
are made up of, might be known to others. For this purpose nothing was
so fit, either for plenty of quickness, as those articulate sounds, which
with so much ease and variety he found himself able to make. Thus we
may conceive how words, which were by nature so well adapted to that
purpose, came to be made use of by men as the signs of their ideas; not by
any natural connexion that there is between particular sounds and certain
ideas, for then there would be but one language amongst all men; but by a
voluntary imposition, whereby such a word is made arbitrarily the mark of