Who should I study if I'm interested in the role of language and 'meaning'?
Posted Oct 17, 2015, 1:34 AM UTC
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Oh jeez, there's a ton of stuff going on in philosophy of language, and there are numerous different approaches to meaning. The best thing to do would be to check out the SEP and IEP citation sections.
If you're looking for a few names to start with, I'd recommend you start with Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and then move onto Austin and Grice.
A lot of philosophy of language developed intimately with the rest of analytic philosophy, so most of the big figures in later 20th-century analytic philosophy in general are very important to philosophy of language -- Quine, Lewis, Putnam, Kripke, etc.
3
I agree with you on these names, but not with your starting point. I do think it's ideal to study the big guys chronologically, but if this person is reading phil of language on his/her own (i.e. not taking a class in it), I wouldn't recommend starting out with them. I would recommend beginning with Quine, Grice, Putnam, or a specialized topic like metaphor.
I think it's just too easy to get turned away by the tedium and technical nature of the older articles that were establishing the field.
I can't speak from my own experience (I ate it all up when I was a student, and it was taught to me chronologically), but as a teacher now of an intro class with students who are only moderately interested in the language portion (and with academic peers who despise phil language), I think there's some value in the articles that will more easily hold a reader's attention. And I think someone who's getting into phil langauge on his/her own would do well to start with at least one or two of the more attention-grabby ones. It's just too easy [for people who aren't phil of language buffs] to lose interest in those first couple readings. Best to read them after one has a more fully developed interest in this area of philosophy.
1
Derrida's ideas are all based around an exploration of meaning in language. "Of Grammatology" and "Writing and Differance" deal with language at length and are two of my all time favorite philosophical works.
3
I can only second the recommendation of Austin's How To Do Things With Words. If you want to get an overview on these topics I'd recommend reading William Lycan's Philosophy of Language - A Contemporary Introduction
2
That's a massive topic--one that dominated 20th Century philosophy. Many made careers out of exploring small parts of that topic.
A classic text in the analytic tradition would be A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth, and Logic.
A classic text from the Continental tradition would be Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (skip the stuff on phonology).
If you are interested in what sentences do rather than only what they mean, you might check our J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (short, not too difficult to read).
Do you have some more specific interests or a particular question in mind? That might help people to narrow things down a bit.
Seconding that text by Austin. What a little beast of a book.
and three ways to spill ink