what constitutes an adequate theory of meaning for ordinary language? This question, which is central to the philosophy of language, will be the focus of the course. In answering it, we will confront many additional questions, including: what view of meaning allows for the construction of such a theory? What is the relation between what a sentence means and what a speaker means? What is the connection between linguistic form and linguistic meaning? While we will explore classic philosophical answers to these questions, we will also investigate recent work in which the emerging insights of formal linguistics are used to shed new light on these old problems. The course will involve a significant amount of reading, and several paper assignments. While this is an introduction to the philosophy of language, it is not an introduction to philosophy. Students enrolling in this course should have taken at least one philosophy course in which they read from the philosophy literature and were required to write at least one paper. Students interested in the course who lack this background may request permission from the instructors to enroll.
