Read more
Inquiry into the nature and purpose of language has long been a central concern of Western philosophy, within both the analytic, Anglo-American tradition, and its Continental counterpart. Language: Key Concepts in Philosophy explains and explores the principal ideas, theories and debates in the philosophy of language, providing a clear and authoritative account of the discipline. The text covers the work on language of the major philosophers in both traditions, including Frege, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, Davidson, Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida and Butler. The book equips readers with the requisite philosophical tools to get to grips with central concepts and key issues, and raises challenging questions students can then explore on their own. Coverage of each issue provides the reader with a full account of the state of the question and a thorough assessment of the arguments entailed in the available literature on that subject. Philosophy undergraduates will find this an invaluable aid to study, one that goes beyond simple definitions and summaries to really open up fascinating and important ideas and arguments.>
List of contents
1. Communication and Speech Acts
1.1 The communicative functions of language
1.2 Communication and performance
1.3 Knotty performances: locutionary contents, illocutionary forces and perlocutionary effects
2. Meaning, Sense and Interpretation
2.1 Two traditions in Philosophy of Language
2.2 From Frege to Donnellan: reference, names and descriptions
2.3 Interpretation and translation: neo-empiricist and hermeneutic approaches to linguistic understanding
3. Indeterminacy and Language Learning: Communication as the Meeting of Minds
3.1 Meaning scepticism
3.2 Two philosophical models of language learning
3.3 Enculturation and shared intentionality
3.4 Conversation analysis
4. Linguistic Creativity and Relativism
4.1 Linguistic creativity and the sociology of language
4.2 Metaphor
4.3 Linguistic relativism
5. Speakers, Linguistic Communities and Histories of Use
5.1 Idiosyncrasies and conventions
5.2 Communities, deconstruction and histories of use
6. Language and Identity
6.1 Interpellation and censorship
6.2 Tongues untied
Notes
References
Further Suggested Reading
Index
About the author
Jose Medina is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, USA.
