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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2016

Does linguistics need its own philosophy of language ?

Résumé

Although philosophy – as evidenced by Plato’s Cratylus or Sophist – has always been concerned about language, “philosophy of language”, as it has been called since Frege’s work (1892), specifically dealt with the issue of language from a logicist perspective (Russell 1903, Wittgenstein 1922, Carnap 1934), followed by turning to approaches that would reconcile it with the idea that natural languages were worthy of interest (Wittgenstein 1953, Austin 1962, Searle 1969, Grice 1975). But does this evolution allow “philosophy of language” to currently be considered a branch of linguistics? Given the difficulties encountered when trying to convince descriptivist linguists who are working on very diverse languages to analyze their data in terms of the concepts contained in philosophy of language, the answer seems to be clearly negative. Therefore, the question arises as to whether linguistics should not now seek to define its own philosophy of language? However, to do this, we must first establish an inventory that will clearly show the incompatibilities, misunderstandings and differences as well as the contact points, similarities and bridges that linguistics has maintained with philosophy of language up to now. This communication will deal with this issue in two phases in order to respect the different objectives contained within philosophy of language up through the first half of the twentieth century, and the period – focused on the analysis of ordinary language – which has followed. Thus, I will first identify the stumbling points and the theoretical decisions that contributed to keeping many linguists away from the logicist perspective. Then, I will counterbalance this approach by recalling the inheritance that philosophy of language has nevertheless contributed to syntax and semantics. Finally, I will draw a parallel between some proposals made by the philosophers of ordinary language and the criticisms which were addressed to them (Ochs 1976, Rosaldo 1982, …). This study, which will highlight both the methodological limitations and the (nonetheless) heuristic character of the philosophical approach, will lead us to prepare the ground for initiating an investigation into the type of philosophy of language that is needed by linguistics. References Austin, J. 1962. How to do things with words. J. O. Urmson (ed.), Oxford: Clarendom Press. Carnap, R. 1934. Die logische Syntax der Sprache. Wien: Verlag von J. Springer. Frege, G. 1892. “Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung”. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik (100). Grice, P. 1975. “Logic and conversation”. In Cole & Morgan (eds.) Syntax and Semantics, vol. III: Speech acts. New York: Academic Press. pp. 41-58. Ochs, E. 1976. “The Universality of Conversational Postulates”. Language in Society. vol. 5. n° 1. pp. 67-80. Rosaldo, M. 1982. “The Things We Do with Words: Ilongot Speech Acts and Speech Act Theory in Philosophy”. Language in Society. vol. 11. n° 2. pp. 203-237. Russell, B. 1903. Principles of mathematics. Georges Allen & Unwin. Searle, J. 1969. Speech Acts. Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. 1922. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Repr. in 1961 London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, L. 1953. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan.

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Linguistique
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hal-01323580 , version 1 (30-05-2016)

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Béatrice Godart-Wendling. Does linguistics need its own philosophy of language ?. The fifth biennial conference of the Society for the History of Linguistics in the Pacific , James mac Elvenny, Sep 2016, Potsdam, Germany. ⟨hal-01323580⟩
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