The topic of the philosophical significance of language change is very interesting, yet it has not received much philosophical attention. There are distinct ways, however, in which one might understand the topic, which need to be distinguished in order to isolate distinctively philosophical aspects of the question. One might be interested in the evolution of particular languages, the way in which, for example, English developed over time (Latin is, I believe, the source of the greatest percentage of English words): this topic, however, is a subject for the investigation of the historical linguist and is therefore an empirical subject. (Such investigations may have philosophical implications, but I'm not inclined to see them as intrinsically philosophical investigations.) Such an investigation, which could focus not only on the entrance of particular words into a language, but also on the evolution of the meanings of particular words over time, does closely neighbor a fascinating philosophical topic,...

In Reason, Truth, and History , Hilary Putnam imagines a similar scenario, supposing that an ant's movements through the sand produce marks that have the form of English words: Putnam asks, as you do, whether those marks should be taken to be words. I'm inclined to answer--as Putnam does--that the marks are not words and, hence, do not signify anything and are not an instance of language. There are various routes that one might take to this conclusion. Here's one. One might argue that in order for marks (or phonemes) to have a meaning, the producer of the marks (or phonemes) must intend for those marks (phonemes) to be understood. Neither the ant nor the computer program (presumably) can have such intentions, hence the marks (phonemes) are not significant. While these marks (phonemes) may, of course, be interpreted as significant by some competent language user, but they do not count as significant because they have not been produced by a competent language user. In the absence of such...

This is a great, and, in light of the fact that same-sex marriage will be legal in New York state in three days, on Sunday, July 24th, a very timely question!! Although some opponents of same-sex marriage maintain that marriage is 'by definition' between a man and a woman, and buttress this claim with an appeal to the Bible, and although both positions have been argued for, perhaps by now even almost ad nauseam , I myself think that what's really at issue here is not the meaning of the word 'marriage', but rather the concept of marriage. What's at stake is whether marriage is a civil contract, in which case it is up to the state to determine what parties may legally contract in this way, or a religious sacrament, in which case it is up to the church--whatever denomination that church may be--to determine who can be joined in this way. I myself am inclined to think that marriage may be seen both as a civil contract and as a religious sacrament, but also think that in a truly secular...

The best way to approach questions about the meanings of words is to look in a good dictionary. (This isn't meant to be a smart-alecky response: J. L. Austin, perhaps the foremost practitioner of 'ordinary language philosophy' recommended the dictionary as a starting point for ordinary language investigations.) Insofar as most, if not all, words are to be found in a good dictionary, this is a generalized approach. The reason it may be a useful starting points for the kinds of question in which you seem to be interested is that dictionaries, as Austin noted, reflect the range of meanings, and hence of concepts, that speakers of the language have found useful. The reason that I think that the kind of question you're interested in is more related to ordinary language philosophy than more recent philosophy of language is because I would think that you would find the most illumination in attending to the kind of variation of which terms admit--as manifest in the question concerning different meanings of ...

To the best of my knowledge and on the basis of what I know about linguistics, since the grammar--or, to use a technical term, 'syntax'--of a language is largely a matter of tacit or unconscious knowledge shared by all competent speakers of a language, who obviously may differ greatly in intelligence (whatever metric one uses to measure intelligence), it doesn't seem to me that it makes much sense to claim that the mere fact of knowing a more 'complicated' language reflects on the intelligence of the one who knows that language.

If by 'feeling sorry' for an action, it is meant that the action is regretted, then it seems to me that one may sincerely regret an action and nevertheless for some reason commit a similar action. (That an agent repeats an action that s/he sincerely regretted may reveal something deep about the agent's character--for example, that s/he is unreflective--but I don't think that the fact of such a repetition undermines the sincerity of the agent's regret. After all, s/he certainly did feel regret, assuming that s/he correctly reported her feelings, and so the fact of her feeling regret cannot be called into question unless one is willing to attribute a very deep lack of self-knowledge to the agent.) I think that some of the philosophical significance of this question arises from its connection with the nature of apology, a topic that has received some attention from philosophers, albeit less than one might think the topic merits, given its deep and pervasive importance to human relations. At...