Page 30 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Introduction
initial 'baptism' of an object by a proper name, on Kripke's account—is done by 'ostension' (or deixis): names are attached to stereotypical samples which are pointed at or have their reference fixed by a small set of experiential properties. But the observed properties of the stereotype are not incorporated into the mean- ing of the term, indeed it might turn out that the natural kind has none of the properties essentially that are experienced in the stereotype (science might reveal that it is not essential to being a lemon that it is either yellow or bitter). In this way Putnam's theory is realist (see Realism) and antiverificationist, in that the exis- tence of natural kinds is independent of the experi- ences on which humans base their claims about them. Although Putnam has significantly modified his realist theory, his work has been enormously influential in philosophy of language, especially among those who pursue naturalized accounts of meaning and who seek to extend the underlying insights of causal theories of reference (e.g., Devitt and Sterelny, 1987). For a detailed account of naturalized semantics and causal theories of natural kind terms, see Reference, Philo- sophical Issues.
3.5 Truth
The concept of truth underlies nearly all investigations in philosophy of language, certainly those concerned with both meaning and reference. Section 2.1 showed how meaning is sometimes elucidated through appeal to truth-conditions. Within Fregean semantics truth- values stand to sentences rather as objects stand to names; just as the sense of a name determines its reference so the thought a sentence expresses deter- mines its truth-value. But when the focus turns on truth itself, philosophers of language have a number of principal interests: the first is to account for the meaning of the truth predicate 'is true,' another is to identify appropriate truth-bearers, and a third addresses the paradoxes associated with truth.
One longstanding debate about the meaning of 'is true' centers on whether the predicate is logically redundant: an influential view is that the statement that snow is white is true is identical to the statement that snow is white. Various 'minimalist' theories of truth— theories that reject as unnecessary such substantive elucidations as given in traditional 'correspondence' or 'coherence' accounts—have been at the forefront of debate in the 1990s (Horwich 1990) though they are by no means unchallenged (Blackburn 1984). The debate is outlined in Truth.
What are the appropriate subjects of the truth- predicate? Many candidates have been offered, and not only linguistic ones: beliefs, thoughts, and judg- ments have all been designated truth-bearers. So also have sentences, statements, and propositions. Most sentences—for example, all those containing indexical expressions—can be assigned truth-values only rela- tive to contexts. Statements are contenders for truth-
assessment precisely when viewed as contextualized uses of sentences, though an ambiguity in the term statement makes it unclear whether an act of stating can be true or false or only what is stated (the content) (Strawson 1971). Finally, the most traditional truth- bearer is thought to be a proposition, considered as an abstract, even timeless, entity expressed by sentences and corresponding roughly to the meaning of a sen- tence in context. A great deal of controversy sur- rounds the idea of a proposition and different conceptions have been developed with more or less commitment to abstract entities (see the discussion in Proposition; also Singular/General Proposition).
Semantic paradoxes (see Paradoxes, Semantic) have long been associated with truth, the oldest being the liar paradox which, in its standard version, asks for the truth-value of This sentence isfalse: seemingly, if the sentence is true, then it must be false, if false, then it must be true. Within philosophy of language the problem has been addressed both in connection with formalized languages (Tarski 1956) but also within the semantics of natural language. (Different stra- tegies are outlined in Paradoxes, Semantic and Truth and Paradox; see also Formal Semantics; Meta- language versus Object Language; Deviant Logics.)
4. Conclusion
This article has addressed only a selection of topics within the philosophy of language centered on the key areas of meaning and reference, broadly conceived, along with certain issues on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics. Each of the topics has its own subtle ramifications and developments, and there are many more topics besides which philosophers would want to classify within this important branch ofthesubject;see,forexample,Analyticity; Concepts; Emotive Meaning; Identity; Innate Ideas; Inten- sionality; Natural Deduction; Ontological Com- mitment; Private Language; Vagueness. While it is common to think of philosophy as dealing withcon- ceptual or a priori questions, in contrast to linguistics conceived as an empirical inquiry, in fact that dis- tinction between the disciplines is by no means clear- cut. For one thing, philosophers are increasingly sensitive to work in related empirical fields and draw on it substantially (philosophers, of course, like other students of language, also draw on their own linguistic intuitions), but within theoretical linguistics work is sustained at no less a conceptual level than found in philosophy. There is no doubt that in some areas— formal semantics, the theory of implicature, quanti- fication theory, indexicality, anaphora, and so forth— there is commonality of approach between phil- osophers and theoretical linguists. But in other
areas—perhaps in the theory of reference or in approaches to truth or questions of intentionality and prepositional attitudes—philosophers do have a dis- tinct contribution, at a foundational level, to an
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