Philosophy of Language
What, if anything, can philosophy teach us about language? It is a feature of English that its adjectives come before its nouns, as in green table. This syntactic fact distinguishes English from French. In English there is a difference in sound between words that begin with a b and ones that begin with a p. This phonological fact distinguishes English from other languages. Some Arabic languages, for example, have trill sounds. This phonetic feature distinguishes these Arabic languages from English. Are any of these linguistic features philosophically interesting?
It is doubtful whether any philosopher seriously believes that, qua philosopher, they have anything interesting to say about the syntactic, phonetic, and phonological features of languages in general or of English in particular. Why, then, should it be any different for all of the other features of language? For example, that in English a relative pronoun proceeds the noun phrase it modifies or that English declarative sentences are of the subject-verb-object variety, are interesting facts about English syntax, but why should any of this be of philosophical interest?
Many theorists claim that philosophers of language are interested in answering questions of the sort: What need someone know in order to understand his or her language? Do they need to know the sorts of facts just mentioned? In some sense of know, they must.
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