Think about a word, for example, ‘Obama'. That word, in English, refers to or is about or represents a certain individual, namely the 44th president of the united states. How does it do this? What makes it the case that when I use the word, here and now, I somehow manage to talk about Obama, in Washington D.C., rather than someone else or nothing at all? Relatedly, how does this referential fact about ‘Obama' relate to the meaning of the word? Does a word have a meaning over and above what it refers to? For that matter, what is it for a word to mean something in the first place? Do there actually exist things called meanings that somehow "attach" to words? How do words get their meanings? And how does the meaning of a sentence like ‘Obama is tall' relate to our thought that Obama is tall? Is one in some sense more fundamental? Which? Language or thought? And what is it for such a sentence to be true?
These are all foundational questions in the philosophy of language. The philosophy of language is intimately related to virtually every other area of contemporary theoretical philosophy: metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, philosophy of logic, meta-ethics, and so on.
In this course we will survey a number of topics and questions, such as those above, that have occupied 20th-century and contemporary analytic philosophers. Topics to be covered include: the nature of reference, linguistic meaning, and truth; synonymy and translation; propositional attitude reports; and the relationship between language, thought, and world.