Episode 39: Nicholas Asher discusses the philosophy of language
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Thank you.
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast ordinarily recorded at the University of Chicago, but which today is being brought to you from Amsterdam. I'm Matt Teichman, and with me today is Nicholas Asher, Director of Research at the CNRS, which is the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and also Director of Research at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse, which is a computer science research institute in Toulouse, and and a former longtime professor of both philosophy and linguistics at the University of Texas at Austin. And he is here to talk with us about the philosophy of language. Nicholas Escher, welcome. Thank you, Matt. So I think a pretty obvious starting question would be something like, what is the philosophy of language?
What are some of the questions that philosophers of language concern themselves with?
Right. Well, as in any subdiscipline of philosophy, there are a host of issues that philosophers of language are interested in. They're interested in theories of meaning. What is the meaning of an expression? How do the meaningful expressions compose to make larger expressions? units of meaning so they're interested in the meanings of everything from words even more themes of words all the way up through sentences discourses and finally conversation and I hope we'll have a chance to talk about all of those
maybe to explain what some of those things are like a morpheme is part of a word like maybe the root or a prefix or a suffix right and composing is a term for like the process by which the meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of the individual words in it or maybe in the case of morphology the process by which the meaning of a whole word is determined by the meanings of the little parts of the word like the prefixes and suffixes and roots
right I'll just give one example. I mean, not all morphology is semantically significant. Most people would say that case marking or gender marking, especially in languages like French or German, the fact that girl in German is neuter, das Mädchen, really doesn't or shouldn't reflect on the meaning of that term. But on the other hand, suffixes like I-O-N, and that takes us from a verb like invent to a noun, invention, or other morphological suffixes like "-er", so from invent to inventor, or inventor in that case. These are interesting because they take an expression like a verb, which you might think involves a relation or an event, so to invent is to do something. But when you think about what happens when you add this little ION on it, you now, one reading of this is that an invention is the thing that was invented, and an inventor is the person who did the inventing.
And more generally, these morphological suffixes show us that there is a systematic way of mapping things that might be relations or higher order meanings involving relations or properties into objects. And this is something that philosophers are interested in. So if you have something like the property of being blue... you have blueness, you have blue, the color, and these can also be used as nouns. And so they would seem to denote or pick out objects in the kind of ontology that is associated with our use of natural language. And I can give you just some examples about why composition is interesting. So, I mean, why can't we just look at a dictionary?
What is the philosophy of language and why does it matter?
Well, If you look up the meaning of runs or invents to continue with our example, you see that inventing involves a process. But if I say Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals, I need to know that bifocals is what Benjamin Franklin invented and that Benjamin Franklin was the inventor. So I need some syntax, but I also need to know how these things fit together to give us the meaning of the whole sentence, which is something like a statement.
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