Leibniz (1646–1716) claimed that language is the mirror of the mind. Since, unlike the omniscient God, we do not have direct access to other people’s minds, we can grasp what they think, wish, believe, etc. via the sentences they use in the expression of their thoughts. So the story goes. Frege reinforces this view when he initiated what is now known as the linguistic turn. Actually, according to Dummett (1993), Frege is the father of analytic philosophy insofar as he stressed that in order to explain what a thought is we have to focus on the sentence used to voice it. Thus, language takes priority in order of explanation. For, following Dummett, there are two axioms of analytic philosophy: (i) a philosophical account of thought can be attained through a philosophical account of language and (ii) a comprehensive account can only be so attained.

Of course, someone who points at a cow and says “That is a horse” might still, in some contexts, be judged to have made a perfectly acceptable contribution to the conversation, for instance, if they were making a joke, or using the term horse metaphorically or ironically. Yet this doesn’t seem to entail that the English word horse must literally mean something like ‘horse-or-cow’; rather, what it shows is that sometimes we use bits of language to convey things other than their literal meaning. It seems that we, as ordinary speakers, are sensitive to a difference between standing meaning and what we might call conveyed or communicated meaning. In philosophy of language, this has come to be understood as a difference between “semantic” meaning on the one hand, which picks out something like literal meaning, and “pragmatic” meaning on the other, which focuses on communicated, contextually derived meaning.

Since its inception at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, modern philosophy of language has moved, first from offering new approaches to solving traditional philosophical problems, next to providing a conception of meaning and interpretation for languages of logic, and finally to laying the foundations of the empirical study of natural languages. So far in the twenty-first century, the latter focus has been dominant. Because the foundations of linguistic science are incomplete, this focus is likely to remain central for decades to come.

The philosophical study of the intersections between philosophy and literature can be roughly divided into two fields, namely, philosophy and literature and philosophy of literature. Works falling under philosophy and literature examine philosophy as a genre of literature or the literary features of individual philosophical works (philosophy as literature) or the philosophical aspects of particular literary works (literature as philosophy). Philosophy of literature, in turn, consists of systematic exploration of general issues related to literature from the viewpoints of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics. Rather than individual literary or philosophical works, philosophy of literature focuses on more global matters, such as the concept of fiction or the principles of literary interpretation.

The concept of truth and competing philosophical theories on what truth amounts to have an important place in contemporary philosophy. The aim of this chapter is to give a synopsis of different theories of truth and the particular philosophical issues related to the concept of truth. The literature on this topic is vast, and we must necessarily be rather selective and very brief about complex questions of interpretation of various philosophers. The focus of the chapter is mainly on selected systematic issues and the most influential and well-established philosophical theories and key concepts.

Since generative grammar was born a half-century ago, it has had a close relationship with analytic philosophy. This relationship has cut in two directions – philosophy has informed generative grammar, and generative grammar has provided evidence for certain philosophical positions. The result has been a kind of symbiotic relationship. In this chapter, I am going to look at the relationship in both directions, with examples of how philosophy has (mis)informed linguistics, and how linguistics has (mis)informed philosophy. I use the optional prefix mis- because sometimes philosophers have led linguists down paths to nowhere, and vice versa.

The notion of reference can be conceived as a dyadic relation between an expression and an entity or a set of entities; these entities, which will be usually extralinguistic, are the referent of the expression. Nonetheless, it is relevant to make two qualifications. On the one hand, the term reference is very often used ambiguously, since it frequently occurs instead of the expression referent; however, the context will help avoid possible misunderstandings. On the other hand, reference can be understood not as a dyadic relation between a linguistic expression and its referent, but as a triadic relation between speakers, an expression and the referent. Nonetheless, we will not emphasize this distinction, since the assertions about the reference of expressions could be paraphrased as ones about the speakers’ use(s) of them in order to refer.

John is rich, Katherine is tall, Derek is intelligent, This chili is spicy, we hear such expressions uttered all the time and they do not seem in the least problematic. On the contrary, it appears that we could not do without them. They are incredibly convenient: if instead of saying that Katherine is tall we had to specify exactly how tall she is and instead of saying that John is rich we had to provide a list of all his assets and belongings, we would not be able to communicate at all. On the one hand, we do not usually have all the relevant facts, and on the other – even if we had them – specifying all the details is time-consuming and ineffective. It is much easier to use rough-and-ready evaluations such as tall – short, rich – poor, etc. The common feature of all such assessments is their vagueness. Predicates like rich, tall, and intelligent are vague in a sense that their extensions seem not to have precise boundaries.

A rational subject, S, may take different (and possibly conflicting) attitudes toward the judgment that a given individual is F – for example, she may reject it as false or accept it as true – depending on how that individual is presented. She may think that Emile Ajar is a genius, while thinking that Romain Gary is a has-been (hence, not, or no longer, a genius). Since Emile Ajar is Romain Gary, our subject S ascribes to the same individual the property of being and not being a genius. Is that irrational of her? No, of course not, for she does not know that Ajar is Gary.

This chapter provides an overview of the philosophy of argument. It describes the conceptual and systematic aspects of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, and illustrates how the insights developed within these classical disciplines are reflected in approaches within the present-day field of argumentation theory. The overview starts, in Section 31.2, with a general introduction into the philosophy of argument, elucidating its research questions and the characteristics of the main perspectives from which these questions are answered. Then, in Section 31.3, how philosophers of argument conceptualize argumentative discourse at large is discussed. The section first focuses on dialectical taxonomies of dialogue types and communicative practices in which argumentation plays a central role. Subsequently, it presents the classical rhetorical theory of genres of speech.

Of the various disciplines which investigate different aspects of human language, this Handbook concentrates predominantly on philosophy of language (with some additional discussion of linguistic philosophy and philosophy of linguistics) and, to some necessary degree, also on linguistics. Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is concerned with theoretical and applied analyses of human natural language and with constructing appropriate levels of linguistic representation. Philosophy of language, on the other hand, provides philosophical investigations into the phenomenon of language in general, concentrating especially on the problems of meaning, reference, truth, and understanding. Linguistic philosophy is a philosophical method, an approach to philosophy.

Reference is the relation between the words we use and the pieces of the world those words represent, a relation that allows us to talk about things. If semantics is conceived as a theory of truth conditions, the theory of reference constitutes the foundation of semantics, since it focuses on the fundamental blocks that contribute to truth conditions and that determine the capacity of language to represent fragments of the world.

Indexicality is a special, systematic kind of context dependence which characterizes expressions such as I, here, or that. The linguistic meaning of indexicals contains a rule that constrains the ways in which their semantic value depends on the various features of the context of their use. If A utters a sentence which does not contain indexical expressions, and B agrees with A, B may simply repeat the sentence uttered. Treating the repetition of what somebody else uttered as constituting their endorsement would, however, end in failure with most indexicals.

Conceptual Semantics is a thoroughly mentalist theory of meaning, language, and thought (Miller and Johnson-Laird, 1976; Jackendoff, 1983, 1987a, 1990, 2002, 2012; Pustejovsky, 1995; Pinker, 2007; plus closely related work broadly in the Cognitive Grammar tradition by Lakoff, 1987; Langacker, 1987; Talmy, 2000; and many others). The theory represents a fundamental break from traditional formal semantics, and it has consequences not only for philosophy of language, but also for philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and possibly even ethics. The present chapter sketches a few of the many issues treated within this theoretical worldview, in the hope of capturing the spirit of the enterprise.

Meta-level discussions can concern different basic-level objects: the meta- prefix (Greek for ‘after’, ‘behind’, ‘among’, ‘higher’, ‘beyond’, ‘above’, ‘transcending’, ‘with’) combines comfortably not only in the well-acknowledged “metaphysics,” but in our times with metamathematics, metahistory, metaethics, metalanguage, metacommunication, metasemiotics, metapragmatics, metasemantics, metasyntax, metaknowledge, metaculture, metadata, metacognition, metaexistence, and so forth, enjoying formidable productivity. The compounds display somewhat less consistent compositionality in that the meta-level, arguably always metaphorically (no pun intended) “higher” in some sense than the basic/object level, is sometimes just a level of discourse or description pertaining to “meta-x about an x,” while at other times, more precisely, “meta-x providing the foundations, including methods and justification, for x.”

“In the history of formal semantics, the period from the late 1960s into the early 1980s was marked by intensive collaboration among linguists and philosophers … starting in the 1980s, formal semantics became more and more a subdiscipline of linguistics,” Partee (2018: 185) states, summarizing changes of the place assigned to semantics in the research area covered by linguistics and philosophy. Recent developments of the minimalist program (Chomsky, 1995b and subsequent work), putting emphasis on explanatory depth with regard to evolutionary and developmental issues, present semantics with significant challenges on the way to its proper integration as “a subdiscipline of linguistics,” the latter understood along the lines of the biolinguistic strand of research.

How do negation and denial relate? Is one of them prior to or more basic than the other? Can we, for instance, explain denial in terms of negation; or negation in terms of denial? There is at least a prima facie connection between them, since one way in which we can deny something is to say that it is not the case. We can also use cognate terms such as no, to express a flat rejection, or various prefixes and suffixes for predicates, such as when we say that something is inflexible, unknown, imperfect, nonstandard, or flawless. Negation can be understood in a broad sense linguistically to include these cognates, whereas in formal logic it is understood in a strict and univocal way, where if it is true that P, then it is false that not-P and if it is true that not-P, then it is false that P. Here negation is used as a function from truth-values to truth-values, whereas denial seems to fall into the category of speech act. Even if negation and denial belong to different categories, however, it is plausible that some relation holds between them.