Over at Scholardarity I've posted Part 1 of my notes on the Philosophy of language, the first contribution to Scholardarity Student’s subsection Open Source Study Notes. This part deals with the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Here's an excerpt:
~ Prelude ~
Why philosophers study language–
1) Philosophers have been accused of “making mistakes” based on language. Consider the sentences:
i) “Santa Claus does not exist.”
ii) “Santa Claus wears a red suit.”
a) “How can
one talk about something”, philosophers sometimes ask, “and say
something true or false about it, if it isn’t real or doesn’t ‘have
being’ in some sense? In order for statements like (i) or (ii) to be true, they have to be about something—Santa Claus, in this case. Granted, in light of the fact that (i) is true, Santa Claus doesn’t exist, but nevertheless he is some kind of being and has properties—including the properties of being non-existent and wearing a red suit.”
However, at least since Bertrand Russell published his famous article
“On Denoting” in 1905, most philosophers think that arguments like this
are based on linguistic confusions. It can be true that Santa Claus does
not exist without Santa Clause being real in any sense.
b) From
time to time philosophers also ask: Is there such a thing as “goodness”,
or something like Plato’s “Form of the Good”? Able philosophers have
thought so, but others–emotivists, in particular, such as A. J. Ayer, C.
L. Stevenson, Richard Hare—have held that to call something good or
bad, or to say that an action is right or wrong, is not to say that it
objectively has some moral feature—“goodness”, “wrongness”, etc.—but to
express how the speaker feels about the thing or action in question.
For example, on this view a sentence like “Lying is wrong” is neither
true nor false; nor, when properly understood, is it purported to be. It
merely evinces that the speaker who uttered the sentence disapproves of
lying. It does not even say that the speaker disapproves of lying—that
would be a sentence that is apt to be true or false; true if the
speaker disapproves of lying and false if they do not. On the
emotivists’ view, to say that lying is wrong is more like saying “Boo
lying!”, “Screw lying!”, “Down with lying!”, or something of the sort.
(Personal
note: Words like ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, may have an
expressive function, but it doesn’t follow that they only have
an expressive function. Sentences involving ‘good’ and ‘bad’ might
sometimes attribute objective goodness or badness to some entity, and it
may be that it is in virtue of one’s belief that the entity in question is objectively good
that one can use the term ‘good’ or ‘goodness’ to express how one feels
about it. For it may be that if one had no belief concerning the
entity’s moral value, one might not have any feelings about it, whether positive or negative.)
2) What are
the limits of human knowledge? What can we conceive? The “early” Ludwig
Wittgenstein, for example, thought there was a connection between the
limits of conception and the limits of what can be expressed in
language:
The book
will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking,
but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to
thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we
should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).
The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.—Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, p. 3
3) Language is inherently interesting.
