Language

Will somebody please enlarge on the difference between Linguistics and Philosophy of Language? Many thanks, Jordanne.

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The general distinction between the two fields is, I think, the same as the relationship between many subjects and the philosophy of those subjects (e.g. science and the philosophy of science), which is that while the subject itself is directly concerned with collating empirical findings and seeking an explanatory framework for those findings, the philosophy of the topic takes a step back and asks about the wider theoretical framework and the support for positing one kind of explanatory framework over another. It asks questions about the nature of the theoretical entities employed and the way in which empirical data is supposed to support or undermine a given account.

In the case of linguistics and philosophy of language, I think this difference in outlook can be seen most clearly in the parts of each discipline which have the most distance from one another. So it's unlikely that many courses on philosophy of language will cover the kind of material on phonetics, intonation, corpus studies, morphology, and sociolinguistics that you'd find in an average lingusitics course. While on the other hand, linguistics courses won't cover the very abstract questions, like 'what is meaning?', which you'll find in philosophy of language, nor will they have much to say about the work of philosophers like Wittgenstein who have had a massive impact on the philosophy of language.

That said, though, there is of course a large area of overlap between the two disciplines. This is especially the case since Chomsky revolutionised the study of syntax in linguistics. Chomsky suggested treating the individual human mind, and the knowledge it unconsciously possessed, as the object of linguistic study, and many philosophers have found Chomsky's overall outlook to be appealing. What this means is that there is a lively area of study at the interface of linguistics and philosophy of language (and philosophy of mind and cognitive science) which deals with the nature of meaning, the divide between semantics and pragmatics, and the nature of communication, and in these debates it can be difficult (and is probably pointless) to try to hold on to too firm a distinction between the disciplines which contribute to the discussion.

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