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67-537: Eternity , in common parlance , is an infinite amount of time that never ends or the quality, condition or fact of being everlasting or eternal. Classical philosophy , however, defines eternity as what is timeless or exists outside time, whereas sempiternity corresponds to infinite duration. Classical philosophy defines eternity as what exists outside time, as in describing timeless supernatural beings and forces, distinguished from sempiternity which corresponds to infinite time, as described in requiem prayers for

134-418: A semantic fact (i.e., the proposition that is represented by "The horse is red"). In other words, a propositional function is like an algorithm. The meaning of "red" in this case is whatever takes the entity "the horse" and turns it into the statement, "The horse is red." Linguists have developed at least two general methods of understanding the relationship between the parts of a linguistic string and how it

201-597: A convention exactly is, and how it is studied, and second regards the extent that conventions even matter in the study of language. David Kellogg Lewis proposed a worthy reply to the first question by expounding the view that a convention is a "rationally self-perpetuating regularity in behavior". However, this view seems to compete to some extent with the Gricean view of speaker's meaning, requiring either one (or both) to be weakened if both are to be taken as true. Some have questioned whether or not conventions are relevant to

268-635: A name or term commonly used to identify a person or thing in non-specialist language, in place of another usually more formal or technical name. In the philosophy of language , "colloquial language" is ordinary natural language , as distinct from specialized forms used in logic or other areas of philosophy. In the field of logical atomism , meaning is evaluated in a different way than with more formal propositions . Colloquialisms are distinct from slang or jargon . Slang refers to words used only by specific social groups, such as demographics based on region, age, or socio-economic identity. In contrast, jargon

335-419: A range of correctness. He also argued that primitive names had a natural correctness, because each phoneme represented basic ideas or sentiments. For example, for Plato the letter l and its sound represented the idea of softness. However, by the end of Cratylus , he had admitted that some social conventions were also involved, and that there were faults in the idea that phonemes had individual meanings. Plato

402-407: A real commonality of form, he is more often considered a proponent of moderate realism . The Stoics made important contributions to the analysis of grammar, distinguishing five parts of speech: nouns, verbs, appellatives (names or epithets ), conjunctions and articles . They also developed a sophisticated doctrine of the lektón associated with each sign of a language, but distinct from both

469-522: A referent. Such a "mediated reference" view has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's view. For example, co-referential names, such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain , cause problems for a directly referential view because it is possible for someone to hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised – thus, their cognitive content seems different. Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are generally lumped together as descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism

536-430: A series of images of imaginary aliens. Whether each alien was friendly or hostile was determined by certain subtle features but participants were not told what these were. They had to guess whether each alien was friendly or hostile, and after each response they were told if they were correct or not, helping them learn the subtle cues that distinguished friend from foe. A quarter of the participants were told in advance that

603-516: A way predicted by grammatical gender . For example, when asked to describe a "key"—a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish—the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard", "heavy", "jagged", "metal", "serrated" and "useful" whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden", "intricate", "little", "lovely", "shiny" and "tiny". To describe a "bridge", which

670-451: A whole was understood to be a matter of philosophy of language. In continental philosophy , the foundational work in the field was Ferdinand de Saussure 's Cours de linguistique générale , published posthumously in 1916. The topic that has received the most attention in the philosophy of language has been the nature of meaning, to explain what "meaning" is, and what we mean when we talk about meaning. Within this area, issues include:

737-400: Is colloquial . Colloquialism or general parlance is distinct from formal speech or formal writing . It is the form of language that speakers typically use when they are relaxed and not especially self-conscious. An expression is labeled colloq. for "colloquial" in dictionaries when a different expression is preferred in formal usage, but this does not mean that the colloquial expression

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804-617: Is a barrier to communication for those people unfamiliar with the respective field. Philosophy of language Philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning , intentionality , reference , the constitution of sentences, concepts, learning , and thought . Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell were pivotal figures in analytic philosophy's " linguistic turn ". These writers were followed by Ludwig Wittgenstein ( Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus ),

871-480: Is a tradition called speculative grammar which existed from the 11th to the 13th century. Leading scholars included Martin of Dacia and Thomas of Erfurt (see Modistae ). Linguists of the Renaissance and Baroque periods such as Johannes Goropius Becanus , Athanasius Kircher and John Wilkins were infatuated with the idea of a philosophical language reversing the confusion of tongues , influenced by

938-440: Is an important concept in many lives and religions . God or gods are often said to endure eternally, or exist for all time, forever, without beginning or end. Religious views of an afterlife may speak of it in terms of eternity or eternal life . Christian theologians may regard immutability , like the eternal Platonic forms , as essential to eternity. Eternity is often symbolized by the endless snake, swallowing its own tail,

1005-546: Is deeply counterintuitive. Hence, names are rigid designators , according to Kripke. That is, they refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. In the same work, Kripke articulated several other arguments against " Frege–Russell " descriptivism (see also Kripke's causal theory of reference ). The whole philosophical enterprise of studying reference has been critiqued by linguist Noam Chomsky in various works. It has long been known that there are different parts of speech . One part of

1072-606: Is different from them, and perceptibles are apprehended each by the one kind of organ, speech by another. Hence, since the objects of sight cannot be presented to any other organ but sight, and the different sense-organs cannot give their information to one another, similarly speech cannot give any information about perceptibles. Therefore, if anything exists and is comprehended, it is incommunicable. There are studies that prove that languages shape how people understand causality. Some of them were performed by Lera Boroditsky . For example, English speakers tend to say things like "John broke

1139-529: Is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful", "elegant", "fragile", "peaceful", "pretty" and "slender", and the Spanish speakers said "big", "dangerous", "long", "strong", "sturdy" and "towering". This was the case even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. In a series of studies conducted by Gary Lupyan, people were asked to look at

1206-423: Is most commonly used within specific occupations, industries, activities, or areas of interest. Colloquial language includes slang, along with abbreviations, contractions, idioms, turns-of-phrase, and other informal words and phrases known to most native speakers of a language or dialect. Jargon is terminology that is explicitly defined in relationship to a specific activity, profession, or group. The term refers to

1273-499: Is necessarily slang or non-standard . Some colloquial language contains a great deal of slang, but some contains no slang at all. Slang is often used in colloquial speech, but this particular register is restricted to particular in-groups, and it is not a necessary element of colloquialism. Other examples of colloquial usage in English include contractions or profanity . "Colloquial" should also be distinguished from "non-standard". The difference between standard and non-standard

1340-534: Is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed then Aristotle was any one, or all, of these descriptions. Aristotle may well have existed without doing any single one of the things for which he is known to posterity. He may have existed and not have become known to posterity at all or he may have died in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated by Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity" and (the actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then Mary's description would seem to refer to Plato. But this

1407-400: Is not necessarily connected to the difference between formal and colloquial. Formal, colloquial, and vulgar language are more a matter of stylistic variation and diction , rather than of the standard and non-standard dichotomy. The term "colloquial" is also equated with "non-standard" at times, in certain contexts and terminological conventions. A colloquial name or familiar name is

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1474-477: Is often considered a proponent of extreme realism . Aristotle interested himself with issues of logic , categories, and the creation of meaning. He separated all things into categories of species and genus . He thought that the meaning of a predicate was established through an abstraction of the similarities between various individual things. This theory later came to be called nominalism . However, since Aristotle took these similarities to be constituted by

1541-478: Is partly something originally given, partly that which develops freely. And just as the individual can never reach the point at which he becomes absolutely independent ... so too with language. The phrase " linguistic turn " was used to describe the noteworthy emphasis that contemporary philosophers put upon language. Language began to play a central role in Western philosophy in the early 20th century. One of

1608-401: Is possible to use the concept of functions to describe more than just how lexical meanings work: they can also be used to describe the meaning of a sentence. In the sentence "The horse is red", "the horse" can be considered to be the product of a propositional function . A propositional function is an operation of language that takes an entity (in this case, the horse) as an input and outputs

1675-476: Is put together: syntactic and semantic trees. Syntactic trees draw upon the words of a sentence with the grammar of the sentence in mind; semantic trees focus upon the role of the meaning of the words and how those meanings combine to provide insight onto the genesis of semantic facts. Some of the major issues at the intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind are also dealt with in modern psycholinguistics . Some important questions regard

1742-497: Is to what extent language influences thought and vice versa. There have been a number of different perspectives on this issue, each offering a number of insights and suggestions. Linguists Sapir and Whorf suggested that language limited the extent to which members of a "linguistic community" can think about certain subjects (a hypothesis paralleled in George Orwell 's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four ). In other words, language

1809-439: Is used in metaphor , metonyms and other figures of speech). A proper suppositio , in turn, can be either formal or material accordingly when it refers to its usual non-linguistic referent (as in "Charles is a man"), or to itself as a linguistic entity (as in " Charles has seven letters"). Such a classification scheme is the precursor of modern distinctions between use and mention , and between language and metalanguage. There

1876-458: Is used socially. Specific interests include the topics of language learning , language creation, and speech acts . Secondly, the question of how language relates to the minds of both the speaker and the interpreter is investigated. Of specific interest is the grounds for successful translation of words and concepts into their equivalents in another language. An important problem which touches both philosophy of language and philosophy of mind

1943-517: The Age of Enlightenment drew on the classical distinction to put forward metaphysical hypotheses such as "eternity is a permanent now". Today cosmologists, philosophers, and others look towards analyses of the concept from across cultures and history. They debate, among other things, whether an absolute concept of eternity has real application for fundamental laws of physics ; compare the issue of entropy as an arrow of time . Eternity as infinite duration

2010-709: The Vienna Circle , logical positivists , and Willard Van Orman Quine . In the West, inquiry into language stretches back to the 5th century BC with Socrates , Plato , Aristotle , and the Stoics . Linguistic speculation predated systematic descriptions of grammar which emerged c.  the 5th century BC in India and c.  the 3rd century BC in Greece. In the dialogue Cratylus , Plato considered

2077-432: The ouroboros . The circle, band, or ring is also commonly used as a symbol for eternity, as is the mathematical symbol of infinity , ∞ {\displaystyle \infty } . Symbolically these are reminders that eternity has no beginning or end. Common parlance A specific instance of such language is termed a colloquialism. The most common term used in dictionaries to label such an expression

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2144-524: The principle of compositionality to explain the relationship between meaningful parts and whole sentences. The principle of compositionality asserts that a sentence can be understood on the basis of the meaning of the parts of the sentence (i.e., words, morphemes) along with an understanding of its structure (i.e., syntax, logic). Further, syntactic propositions are arranged into discourse or narrative structures, which also encode meanings through pragmatics like temporal relations and pronominals. It

2211-599: The agents of accidental events as well as did English speakers. Russian speakers, who make an extra distinction between light and dark blue in their language, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha , a tribe in Brazil , whose language has only terms like few and many instead of numerals, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. In one study German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in

2278-437: The amount of innate language, if language acquisition is a special faculty in the mind, and what the connection is between thought and language. There are three general perspectives on the issue of language learning. The first is the behaviorist perspective, which dictates that not only is the solid bulk of language learned, but it is learned via conditioning. The second is the hypothesis testing perspective , which understands

2345-435: The brain when it comes to language. Connectionist models emphasize the idea that a person's lexicon and their thoughts operate in a kind of distributed, associative network. Nativist models assert that there are specialized devices in the brain that are dedicated to language acquisition. Computation models emphasize the notion of a representational language of thought and the logic-like, computational processing that

2412-400: The central figures involved in this development was the German philosopher Gottlob Frege , whose work on philosophical logic and the philosophy of language in the late 19th century influenced the work of 20th-century analytic philosophers Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein . The philosophy of language became so pervasive that for a time, in analytic philosophy circles, philosophy as

2479-401: The child's learning of syntactic rules and meanings to involve the postulation and testing of hypotheses, through the use of the general faculty of intelligence. The final candidate for explanation is the innatist perspective, which states that at least some of the syntactic settings are innate and hardwired, based on certain modules of the mind. There are varying notions of the structure of

2546-433: The common sentence is the lexical word , which is composed of nouns , verbs, and adjectives. A major question in the field – perhaps the single most important question for formalist and structuralist thinkers – is how the meaning of a sentence emerges from its parts. Many aspects of the problem of the composition of sentences are addressed in the field of linguistics of syntax . Philosophical semantics tends to focus on

2613-515: The dead. Some thinkers, such as Aristotle , suggest the eternity of the natural cosmos in regard to both past and future eternal duration. Boethius defined eternity as "simultaneously full and perfect possession of interminable life". Thomas Aquinas believed that God's eternity does not cease, as it is without either a beginning or an end; the concept of eternity is of divine simplicity , thus incapable of being defined or fully understood by humankind. Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and many others in

2680-628: The early 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard insisted that language ought to play a larger role in Western philosophy . He argued that philosophy has not sufficiently focused on the role language plays in cognition and that future philosophy ought to proceed with a conscious focus on language: If the claim of philosophers to be unbiased were all it pretends to be, it would also have to take account of language and its whole significance in relation to speculative philosophy ... Language

2747-400: The effects of gendered language. It can also be used to study linguistic transparency (or speaking in an accessible manner), as well as performative utterances and the various tasks that language can perform (called "speech acts"). It also has applications to the study and interpretation of law, and helps give insight to the logical concept of the domain of discourse . Literary theory is

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2814-613: The first serious proposals for codifying a mental language. The scholastics of the high medieval period, such as Ockham and John Duns Scotus , considered logic to be a scientia sermocinalis (science of language). The result of their studies was the elaboration of linguistic-philosophical notions whose complexity and subtlety has only recently come to be appreciated. Many of the most interesting problems of modern philosophy of language were anticipated by medieval thinkers. The phenomena of vagueness and ambiguity were analyzed intensely, and this led to an increasing interest in problems related to

2881-409: The friendly aliens were called "leebish" and the hostile ones "grecious", while another quarter were told the opposite. For the rest, the aliens remained nameless. It was found that participants who were given names for the aliens learned to categorize the aliens far more quickly, reaching 80 per cent accuracy in less than half the time taken by those not told the names. By the end of the test, those told

2948-497: The gradual discovery of Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs ( Hieroglyphica ). This thought parallels the idea that there might be a universal language of music. European scholarship began to absorb the Indian linguistic tradition only from the mid-18th century, pioneered by Jean François Pons and Henry Thomas Colebrooke (the editio princeps of Varadarāja , a 17th-century Sanskrit grammarian, dating to 1849). In

3015-419: The language used by people who work in a particular area or who have a common interest. Similar to slang, it is shorthand used to express ideas, people, and things that are frequently discussed between members of a group. Unlike slang, it is often developed deliberately. While a standard term may be given a more precise or unique usage amongst practitioners of relevant disciplines, it is often reported that jargon

3082-462: The meanings of mental contents and states directly. Another tradition of philosophers has attempted to show that language and thought are coextensive – that there is no way of explaining one without the other. Donald Davidson, in his essay "Thought and Talk", argued that the notion of belief could only arise as a product of public linguistic interaction. Daniel Dennett holds a similar interpretationist view of propositional attitudes . To an extent,

3149-424: The mind performs over them. Emergentist models focus on the notion that natural faculties are a complex system that emerge from simpler biological parts. Reductionist models attempt to explain higher-level mental processes in terms of the basic low-level neurophysiological activity. Firstly, this field of study seeks to better understand what speakers and listeners do with language in communication , and how it

3216-619: The mind. The main argument in favor of such a view is that the structure of thoughts and the structure of language seem to share a compositional, systematic character. Another argument is that it is difficult to explain how signs and symbols on paper can represent anything meaningful unless some sort of meaning is infused into them by the contents of the mind. One of the main arguments against is that such levels of language can lead to an infinite regress. In any case, many philosophers of mind and language, such as Ruth Millikan , Fred Dretske and Fodor, have recently turned their attention to explaining

3283-401: The names could correctly categorize 88 per cent of aliens, compared to just 80 per cent for the rest. It was concluded that naming objects helps us categorize and memorize them. In another series of experiments, a group of people was asked to view furniture from an IKEA catalog. Half the time they were asked to label the object – whether it was a chair or lamp, for example – while the rest of

3350-479: The nature of synonymy , the origins of meaning itself, our apprehension of meaning, and the nature of composition (the question of how meaningful units of language are composed of smaller meaningful parts, and how the meaning of the whole is derived from the meaning of its parts). There have been several distinctive explanations of what a linguistic "meaning" is. Each has been associated with its own body of literature. Investigations into how language interacts with

3417-655: The only directly referential expressions are what he called "logically proper names". Logically proper names are such terms as I , now , here and other indexicals . He viewed proper names of the sort described above as "abbreviated definite descriptions " (see Theory of descriptions ). Hence Joseph R. Biden may be an abbreviation for "the current President of the United States and husband of Jill Biden". Definite descriptions are denoting phrases (see " On Denoting ") which are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructions. Such phrases denote in

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3484-400: The particular words that people use to achieve the proper emotional and rational effect in the listener, be it to persuade, provoke, endear, or teach. Some relevant applications of the field include the examination of propaganda and didacticism , the examination of the purposes of swearing and pejoratives (especially how it influences the behaviors of others, and defines relationships), or

3551-407: The philosopher of language. For instance, one of the major fields of sociology, symbolic interactionism , is based on the insight that human social organization is based almost entirely on the use of meanings. In consequence, any explanation of a social structure (like an institution ) would need to account for the shared meanings which create and sustain the structure. Rhetoric is the study of

3618-423: The question of whether the names of things were determined by convention or by nature. He criticized conventionalism because it led to the bizarre consequence that anything can be conventionally denominated by any name. Hence, it cannot account for the correct or incorrect application of a name. He claimed that there was a natural correctness to names. To do this, he pointed out that compound words and phrases have

3685-404: The sense that there is an object that satisfies the description. However, such objects are not to be considered meaningful on their own, but have meaning only in the proposition expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, they are not directly referential in the same way as logically proper names, for Russell. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a sense as well as

3752-504: The sign itself and the thing to which it refers. This lektón was the meaning or sense of every term. The complete lektón of a sentence is what we would now call its proposition . Only propositions were considered truth-bearing —meaning they could be considered true or false—while sentences were simply their vehicles of expression. Different lektá could also express things besides propositions, such as commands, questions and exclamations. Medieval philosophers were greatly interested in

3819-519: The social conditions that give rise to, or are associated with, meanings and languages. Etymology (the study of the origins of words) and stylistics (philosophical argumentation over what makes "good grammar", relative to a particular language) are two other examples of fields that are taken to be metasemantic. Many separate (but related) fields have investigated the topic of linguistic convention within their own research paradigms. The presumptions that prop up each theoretical view are of interest to

3886-584: The study of meaning at all. Noam Chomsky proposed that the study of language could be done in terms of the I-Language, or internal language of persons. If this is so, then it undermines the pursuit of explanations in terms of conventions, and relegates such explanations to the domain of metasemantics . Metasemantics is a term used by philosopher of language Robert Stainton to describe all those fields that attempt to explain how semantic facts arise. One fruitful source of research involves investigation into

3953-428: The subtleties of language and its usage. For many scholastics , this interest was provoked by the necessity of translating Greek texts into Latin . There were several noteworthy philosophers of language in the medieval period. According to Peter J. King, (although this has been disputed), Peter Abelard anticipated the modern theories of reference . Also, William of Ockham 's Summa Logicae brought forward one of

4020-493: The theoretical underpinnings to cognitive semantics (including the notion of semantic framing ) suggest the influence of language upon thought. However, the same tradition views meaning and grammar as a function of conceptualization, making it difficult to assess in any straightforward way. Some thinkers, like the ancient sophist Gorgias , have questioned whether or not language was capable of capturing thought at all. ...speech can never exactly represent perceptibles, since it

4087-571: The thought that its embedding sentence expresses. Senses determine reference and are also the modes of presentation of the objects to which expressions refer. Referents are the objects in the world that words pick out. The senses of sentences are thoughts, while their referents are truth values (true or false). The referents of sentences embedded in propositional attitude ascriptions and other opaque contexts are their usual senses. Bertrand Russell , in his later writings and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology , held that

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4154-507: The time they had to say whether or not they liked it. It was found that when asked to label items, people were later less likely to recall the specific details of products, such as whether a chair had arms or not. It was concluded that labeling objects helps our minds build a prototype of the typical object in the group at the expense of individual features. A common claim is that language is governed by social conventions. Questions inevitably arise on surrounding topics. One question regards what

4221-418: The use of syncategorematic words such as and , or , not , if , and every . The study of categorematic words (or terms ) and their properties was also developed greatly. One of the major developments of the scholastics in this area was the doctrine of the suppositio . The suppositio of a term is the interpretation that is given of it in a specific context. It can be proper or improper (as when it

4288-516: The vase" even for accidents. However, Spanish or Japanese speakers would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself". In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford University speakers of English, Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone was asked whether they could remember who did what. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not remember

4355-418: The world are called theories of reference . Gottlob Frege was an advocate of a mediated reference theory . Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: sense and reference . The sense of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The sense of any sub-sentential expression consists in its contribution to

4422-636: Was analytically prior to thought. Philosopher Michael Dummett is also a proponent of the "language-first" viewpoint. The stark opposite to the Sapir–Whorf position is the notion that thought (or, more broadly, mental content) has priority over language. The "knowledge-first" position can be found, for instance, in the work of Paul Grice . Further, this view is closely associated with Jerry Fodor and his language of thought hypothesis. According to his argument, spoken and written language derive their intentionality and meaning from an internal language encoded in

4489-475: Was criticized in Saul Kripke 's Naming and Necessity . Kripke put forth what has come to be known as "the modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions "the greatest student of Plato", "the founder of logic" and "the teacher of Alexander". Aristotle obviously satisfies all of the descriptions (and many of the others we commonly associate with him), but it

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