These aren't terms from philosophy per se but from logic or linguistics. Semantics is the study of matters have to do with meaning, truth, reference, and the like. Syntax is the study of matters having to do with grammar, like that of a grammatical sentence. The two interact, of course, in complex ways. The question whether a sentence is grammatical is syntactic, but it is an open question to what extent, if any, information about the meanings of words in a sentence—that is, semantic information—is needed to make that determination. Perhaps the most obvious place where the two interact, however, is in the study of so-called "lexical" ambiguities, such as in the sentence "Fighting administrators can be distracting". There are two different things that this string of words can mean, and the now standard explanation of this fact is that there really two sentences that can be written that way, sentences that have very different grammatical structures. (To put it in traditional terms: Is ...

You've really answered your own question: The difference between the two questions you mention is demonstrated by the difference between the possible answers to them. Linguistically, wh-questions, as these are known, are derived from underlying structures that are more like declarative sentences. The wh-word then occurs in a more "natural" position. So, for example, the question "Who does John want to win?" is derived from: John wants who to win, and then the wh-word is (at least, ordinarily) moved to the front of the clause for reasons a linguist could explain. Acceptable answers result from replacing the wh-word by an appropriate sort of expression, and the character of the question is connected to the kind of expression that can appropriately replace the wh-word. The difference between the questions corresponds to the different grammatical roles the replacing expression plays (or, again, to the different grammatical roles the wh-word itself plays). For who-questions, the replacing expression...

Suppose you trying to figure out how to get from point A to point B. Do you always do so verbally? Or do you sometimes find yourself imagining going from A to B, seeing important landmarks, imagining the turns you'd take, and finding yourself getting there? Or not? There has been a good deal of research on visualization and other sorts of imagistic thought. Whether imagistic thought is, ultimately, verbal, and if so in what sense, is much debated. There may be other sorts of thought that are neither verbal nor imagistic. Think about considering how something one does or says might make someone else feel. In doing so, one might attempt to empathize with that person, and again it is not obvious that such thought is purely verbal. One is, as the saying goes, trying to put oneself in that person's shoes and feel what he or she would or might feel. Or again, are prayer and meditation forms of thought? (Note that it is irrelevant here whether one thinks there is any point to such activities.) Are...

Kripke argues in Naming and Necessity that it isn't, in general, true that every proper name is associated with some description that is used to fix its reference. He is prepared to allow that some names might, for some speakers, have their references fixed in that way. Perhaps "pi" is an example. Others, mentioned by Michael Dummett are, "Saint Anne", which was stipulatively introduced as a name for Christ's maternal grandmother, and "Deutero-Isaiah", introduced as a name for whoever wrote the second part of the book of Isaiah. (It's well-established that it wasn't the same person who wrote the first part.) And, as Gareth Evans pointed out, if there weren't any such names already, we could introduce one, which he proceeds to do: Let "Julius" denote the inventor of the zipper, whoever that may be. It's then a priori that, if some one person invented the zip, Julius did. Regarding the second question, the answer depends upon what you mean by an essence. One might reasonably suppose that...

I'm with Mitch and Peter, so far as what they've said goes. But neither of them answered your first question: Why do philosophers go in for this kind of thing in the first place? The answer is that philosophers who do go in for this kind of thing think that, if we could articulate the rules we tacitly follow in using the concept of intention, say, then that would be a way of saying what the concept of intention is , that is, of characterizing that concept. It is a much debated question whether this way of proceeding is best. Jerry Fodor, for example, has been arguing for some time that concepts simply don't have "rules" associated with them in the way Wright's project presumes. See his book Concepts for his most complete presentation of this idea.

Have you ever had a dog or a cat? Most people find that it is possible to communicate with their animals to some degree. And plausibly, language grew out of much more primitive forms of communication.

I could be wrong about this, but I believe that the original use of the term "begs the question" is the one that has lately become common and that the "technical" use of the phrase by logicians and philosophers was adapted from the original use. I take "That argument begs the question" in some sense to be short for "That argument begs the question originally at issue".

The question what the relation is between thought and language is, to my mind, one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy. That is to say, what one's view is about this matter will profoundly shape one's views on many other topics. What one's impression is of the current state of play will, however, depend upon what one has read. There are, as you say, many philosophers would suppose that thought is somehow dependent upon language. One famous example is Donald Davidson, who argues explicitly for this conclusion in "Thought and Talk". On the current scene, John McDowell is perhaps the most visible proponent of the view. Hilary Putnam has held a version of this view in the last several years, and it can be found as well in the writings of Michael Dummett. I could easily continue. On the other hand, however, there are plenty of philosophers who reject this view and hold, as you suggest, that the ability to think does not depend upon the possession of language skills. Jerry Fodor, for...

It's perhaps worth saying here that there are philosophers whose intuitions are closer to those of the questioner. Gabriel Segal, a member of this panel, has written a nice book called A Slim Book About Narrow Content defending a view not that distant from the one mentioned. That said, it's important to be clear about what the intuition is supposed to be. As Lynne said (hi, Lynne), the intuition is one about what the term "water" refers to. Or again, the intuition is supposed to be that, if Oscar says, "There's water on twin earth", he speaks falsely. One doesn't have to have that intuition. Some people don't. But before you decide whether you really do, it's worth thinking hard about the fact, mentioned by Lynne, that water is supposed to be a kind of stuff just like gold. Fool's gold isn't gold, no matter how much it looks like gold, and it wouldn't be gold even if it looked a whole lot more like gold, because fool's gold isn't the same kind of stuff that gold is. What we mean by...