Philosophy of language

Introduction
Scope and background
- Thought, communication, and understanding
- The “mist and veil of words”
- Skepticism
- Traditional questions
Words and ideas
Frege’s revolution
Russell’s theory of descriptions
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logical positivism
The later Wittgenstein
Ordinary language philosophy
Later work on meaning
- Indeterminacy and hermeneutics
  - Quine
  - The hermeneutic tradition
  - Indeterminacy and truth
- Chomsky
- Causation and computation
- Teleological semantics
Practical and expressive language
- Speech acts
- Implicatures
- Metaphor and other figures

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

Austrian postage stamp featuring a portrait of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, with German text above and below, and a denomination of 5 schillings.

At a Glance

philosophy of language summary

Related Questions

Can humans think without using language?
How can two expressions have the same referent but different senses?
How did Donald Davidson argue against strong linguistic relativism?
How did Donald Davidson use Alfred Tarski’s theory of truth to explain meaning?
How did Frege distinguish an expression’s sense from its referent?
How did Gilbert Ryle distinguish between knowing that something is true and knowing how to do something?
How did Gottlob Frege’s work change the role of language in modern philosophy?
How did Johann Gottfried von Herder connect the development of language with the development of thought?
How did John Locke describe words as signs of ideas in the mind?
How did Noam Chomsky’s theory of universal grammar influence philosophers interested in language?
How did Russell analyze the phrase “the greatest prime number” without treating it as the name of an object?
How did Saul Kripke argue that proper names refer directly to the same object in every possible world?
How did W.V.O. Quine criticize verificationism and the idea of fixed word meanings?
How did medieval grammarians explain the process of turning thoughts into speech?
How did ordinary language philosophy use everyday speech to investigate philosophical problems?
How do higher primates provide evidence of nonlinguistic thought?
How do prelinguistic infants show that some thinking can occur without language?
How do semantics and pragmatics differ in the study of language?
How do speech acts such as promises and requests use language to perform actions?
How do words such as “I,” “you,” “here,” and “now” depend on the context of an utterance?
How does Bertrand Russell’s theory of descriptions explain statements about things that do not exist?
How does linguistic relativity describe the relationship between language and thought?
How does philosophy of language differ from linguistics?
How does philosophy of language examine the relationship between language users and the world?
How does pragmatics explain meanings that speakers imply without stating literally?
How does the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explain differences between the worlds experienced by speakers of different languages?
How does the order of events in a sentence affect conversational implications?
How does truth-conditional semantics explain the meaning of a sentence?
Why did later Wittgenstein reject the idea of constructing an ideal language?
Why did logical positivists connect a sentence’s meaning to its possible verification by experience?
Why do some cultures treat names as powerful or taboo?
Why does the sentence “Mary has three fingers on her right hand” often imply that she has only three fingers?
Why is “The present king of France is bald” false rather than meaningless in Russell’s theory?
Why is it impossible to identify an existing language as the original language of all humanity?
Why is the statement “Venus is the morning star” informative even though both expressions refer to Venus?
Why is the word “nobody” better understood as a quantifier than as a name?
Why were the “bowwow” and “pooh-pooh” theories of language origin criticized?
What is ethics?
How is ethics different from morality?
Why does ethics matter?
Is ethics a social science?

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External Websites

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of language

Written by

Simon W. Blackburn

Distinguished Research Professor, Department of Philosophy, University of North Carolina; Fellow, Trinity College, University of Cambridge. Author of Truth: A Guide and others.

Simon W. Blackburn

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Britannica Editors

Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree....

Britannica Editors

Last updated

Nov. 3, 2026 •History

Philosophy of language, philosophical investigation of the nature of language; the relations between language, language users, and the world; and the concepts with which language is described and analyzed, both in everyday speech and in scientific linguistic studies. Because its investigations are conceptual rather than empirical, the philosophy of language is distinct from linguistics, though of course it must pay attention to the facts that linguistics and related disciplines reveal. Language use is a remarkable...

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