Philosophy Of Language

In this accessible survey Alex Miller shows that philosophy of language is at the centre of the energetic philosophical activity of this century. By interweaving the historical development of the subject with a thematic overview of radically different approaches to theories of meaning he gives readers the tools necessary to understand contemporary analytic philosophy.

Starting with Gottlob Frege's foundational theories of sense and reference, Miller provides a useful introduction to the formal logic used all subsequent philosophy of language. He communicates a sense of active philosophical debate by confronting the views of the early theorists concerned with building systematic theories -- such as Frege, Bertrand Russell, and the logical positivists -- with the attacks mounted by sceptics -- such as W.O. Quine, Saul Kripke, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. This leads to important excursions into related areas of metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science that present the more recent attempts to save the notions of sense and meaning by philosophers such as Paul Grice, John Searle, Jerry Fodor, Colin McGinn, and Crispin Wright. Miller then returns to the systematic program by examining the formal theories of Donald Davidson, concluding with a chapter surveying the relevance of philosophy of language to the broader metaphysical debates between realists and anti-realists.