Philosophy about Language

Language being the subject of many inquires, there are many approaches to the considerations of its origin and nature, its properties and uses, its defect and the ways of overcoming them.

Philosophy is only one among the disciplines or modes of inquiry that are concerned with language.

This concern on the part of philosophy may have arisen initially from difficulties encountered in the use of language for philosophical discourse; but it extends beyond that to the uses of language in ordinary discourse, in all other disciplines and for all other purposes; nor can philosophy avoid being concerned with the substitution of specially constructed languages for ordinary language as instruments of discourse.

While the philosophical interest in language would thus appear to be all-encompassing in scope, the philosophical approach to language is in fact limited to the kind of questions that it is legitimate for a philosopher to try answer.

There are many question about language that can be answer only by historical research, by the empirical methods of the social and behavioral sciences, or by one or another field of humanistic scholarship, such as philology.

It is necessary, therefore, to define the scope of a philosophy of language by staying the problems with which philosophy is competent to deal, and by drawing a line of demarcation that separates these problems from other closely related problems that are beyond philosophy’s scope and in addition, are posterior; that is cannot be adequately dealt with unless and until prior problems have been solved.
Philosophy about Language