Should questions about "thought"—about intentionality, beliefs, and concept possession, for example—be approached directly or, instead, indirectly via the philosophy of "language"? There are two slightly different ways in which questions about language and meaning might seem to offer illumination of issues concerning thought. One way relates to language that is explicitly about thoughts, as when someone says, "Bruce believes that boomerangs seldom come back." The idea that a philosophical investigation of thought should proceed via a study of the logical properties of language that is about thoughts is a particular case of a more general view that philosophy of language enjoys a certain priority over metaphysics.

The other way relates to the use of language to express thoughts, and this provides the topic for the present entry. Suppose that Bruce believes that boomerangs seldom come back, and expresses this thought in the...