Philosophy of Language is a very large and extremely active area, and no semester-long course could possibly introduce students to all of it. In this course, we will try to do two main things: First, to give students a basic grounding in 'foundational' issues in philosophy of language; and Second, to look at more 'applied' work where the distinctions and insights developed in the foundational work are put to use.
The foundational discussions begin with the observation that language is, among other things, for communication. So Alex says, "There are turkeys on Main Street!" and other people come to believe (and even, perhaps, to know) that there are turkeys on Main Street. How does that happen? Well, a first thought is that Alex uttered some words, and those words have meaning, and her audience knows what those words mean, namely: that there are turkeys on Main Street. But what is it for words to mean what they do? How do we know what our words mean? And how does this knowledge enable us to use language as we do? We will study these questions and related ones.
Now, it is obvious that words have meaning, and that what a word means in part determines what you can use it to say. But it is also obvious that what a word means does not always completely determine what it is used to say on any given occasion. This is most obvious for words like "this" and "that": Which object one refers to with "this" depends upon details of the circumstances in which one uses it. Much the same is true for "I", "you", "here", "now", "yesterday", and the like. And there are lots of other words that seem to exhibit similar behavior. So the use of language seems to involve a complex interplay between relatively stable features of language, such as what a word means in English, and the shifting features of communcative context. We'll spend some time exploring this matter, too.
After spring break, we'll turn our attention to applications. Our first topic will be metaphor. Romeo says, as he gazes up at his beloved, "It is the east, and Juliet is the sun!" Surely what he means is not the obviously false claim that Juliet is a huge ball of fire in the center of the solar system. What he means is...what exactly? Our interest will be in how metaphors work, and in particular how "metaphorical meaning" is related to the literal meanings of words, e.g., how what Romeo means is related to what he clearly doesn't mean.
We'll then turn our attention to slurs, racial and otherwise, such as "ni***r", "fa***t", and "ch**k". Such words are offensive and hurtful—so much so that I've not even written them out. How do slurs work their black magic? What is it about them that is so offensive? Is it something about what those words mean? Or is it something about the way they are used? Here is a good 'case study' for the work on context we did earlier.
Finally, we will look at some work on pornography. Feminists have long been concerned about its influence. Indeed, in the late 1970s, pornography become the central concern of many feminists. The usual charge was that pornography causes sexual violence. The causal connection was always hard to prove, however, and in the 1980s the argument shifted. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon argued that pornography somehow makes it the case that sexual violence is legitimate. Many people have found that claim unintelligible. But in the early 1990s, Rae Langton offered an interpretation of it grounded in philosophy of language, and there has been a robust debate about Langton's arguments ever since. We'll read Langton's now famous discussion and some reactions to it.