Philosophical Approaches to Language and Communication

The two parts to this book are not strictly divided by theme, but it may be said that the first volume focuses largely on fundamental topics in the field, and the second contains more detailed studies of particular issues exercising researchers today. These studies, in contrast to the more theoretical work in the first volume, often employ the experimental approaches which are of increasing importance across the field of philosophy. In this way, the collection as a whole covers not only the broad area of study into language, but also a full range of methodologies by which it may be conducted.

The first volume commences with a consideration of some fundamental issues, such as how we acquire languages, what single languages are, and how language is related to reality. These opening chapters are followed by a series of discussions of broad areas of research in the philosophy of language, such as ordinary language philosophy, Continental philosophy, and hermeneutics. Further chapters discuss the relationship between the philosophy of language and adjacent fields, including argumentation theory, pragmatics, and translation. The volume closes with two contributions discussing the role of literature and the value of literary texts in understanding the essential nature of language.

In ‘Thought and Talk about Iterated Attitudes,’ Brian Ball begins by looking at some fundamental question in the metaphysics of meaning, including the compatibility of intentionalism and interpretationism. He then also makes use of empirical evidence while investigating the relationship between thought and language, and in particular the possibility of entertaining thoughts about attitudes independently of language. Lwenn Bussière-Caraes, in ‘Communicating with Colourings,’ discusses the ways in which thoughts, with the same truth conditions, can be expressed differently in language by the use of colourings. The author considers the issue of how these colourings relate to Gricean implicatures and argues that even apparently non-communicative colourings do trigger inferences, which are, thus, communicated by the speaker. Investigation into phenomena of communication is continued by José V. Hernández-Conde’s ‘An Expectation-Based View of Human Communication.’ This chapter considers the notion of successful communication within a contextualist view of meanings and concepts. The contextualist account is defended against some of the problems it faces via a proposal of a conception of human communication based on information unquestionably available to the speaker. This leads to a weak definition of communicative success whereby that success is determined by the end point of the conversational exchange, rather than any form of speaker/hearer agreement.

The importance of the nature of experimental methods used in contemporary philosophy is highlighted by Izabela Duraj-Nowosielska in the chapter ‘What if Armchairs Really Got Burnt? Experimental Philosophy Research and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction.’ She questions some assumptions behind ‘x-phi’ and raises in particular the lack of distinction between semantic and pragmatic language phenomena and the problems this may lead to. By focussing on several examples and the interpretation of their results, support is offered for the conclusion that experimental philosophers should engage in some ‘armchair’ reflection on the semantic characteristics of the key expressions used in the experiments, as well as on some general mechanisms of speech, as a background to their empirical work.

The final two chapters of the volume are linked by the theme of normativity. In ‘On Some Objections to The Normativity of Meaning,’ Mindaugas Gilaitis reflects on some of the presuppositions and seemingly irresolvable dialectical points of disagreement in the debate on the normativity of meaning. By examining ideas put forward by normativists and engaging with objections raised by anti-normativists, the author aims to provide a clearer representation of some of the arguments and concepts that guide the debate, while providing some support for the normativist cause. Finally, Miklós Márton and Tibor Bárány discuss Jennifer Saul’s account of the alleged conflict between the Gricean notions of ‘what is said’ and ‘what is implicated’ and the Speaker-Meaning Exhaustiveness Thesis (SMET) in their chapter ‘Exhaustiveness, Normativity, and Communicative Responsibilities.’ That account, they suggest, partly misconstrues the relation between Grice’s theory of speaker-meaning and his normative account of conversational implicature. The authors then put forward and argue for an alternative, speaker-oriented normative interpretation of Grice’s account of conversational implicatures.