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 focus on questions about meaning and communication. Students can expect to gain a basic grounding in 'foundational' issues in philosophy of language. We will also look at more 'applied' work where the distinctions and insights developed in the foundational work are put to use. One might, indeed, think of this course as concerned with the philosophical foundations of natural language semantics.
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 words mean? And how does this knowledge enable us to use language as we do? We will study these questions and related ones.
We'll also look at some questions about the nature of the explanations that are being offered here. The sort of 'knowledge' we need to attribute to people to explain their ability to use language generally involves concepts (like c-command in syntax, or satisfaction, in semantics) of which most speakers seem to have no knowledge. So what kind of 'knowledge' exactly are we attributing? These issues have acquired a new significance with the emergence of large language models like ChatGPT.
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.
Finally, we'll then turn our attention to slurs, racial and otherwise, such as "ni***r", "fa***t", and "c**t". 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.
Let me emphasize that we will be doing philosophy in this course. You will, indeed, learn something about past discussions of the sorts of issues just mentioned. But our goal will be to use that knowledge as a basis for thinking through the issues for ourselves.