ABSTRACT
I said in Chapter 1 that the question ‘what is meaning?’ is fairly philosophical, and indeed there has been a long history of interaction between the fields of linguistics and philosophy – and especially between philosophy and the linguistic subfields of semantics and pragmatics, the two subfields most closely associated with the question of linguistic meaning. In fact, some of the most influential names in pragmatics are actually philosophers. Philosophy of language is heavily focused on questions of meaning: the relationship between language and thought, the locus of meaning, and the relationship between meaning and truth. In this chapter we will consider all of these issues and more. Due to the brevity of this volume, I will not present a thorough review of philosophy of language (for example, I won’t address the question of an innate universal linguistic faculty, or cover the more general theory of signs known as semiotics); instead, we will focus on what philosophy can tell us specifically about meaning in human language.
