Language and Philosophy

Language is treated as an ecological, not as a formal, object, as a system forming part of the natural habitat of humans. Language is a mediational system that transforms thoughts, cast into the format of the language of predicate calculus (LPC), into sounds and vice versa. Some explanation is given of why and how LPC is used in the study of language. A thought consists of a proposition p (a mental assignment of a property to one or more entity representations) plus a commitment attitude with regard to p. The transformation machinery consists of grammar, lexicon, and phonology. Lexical meanings are analyzed as the satisfaction conditions of predicates. These conditions come in two forms: the preconditions, which induce presuppositions, and the update conditions, which establish the propositional update of the context of discourse. The cognitive dependency of lexical meaning is of central concern. Reference is discussed as a central element in the philosophy of language. The main problem areas are: the identification problem, reification, nonexisting reference objects. As in the case of lexical meaning, all three require the integration of cognition into the analysis, which shows the inadequacy of purely logical approaches. The same conclusion follows from a discussion of so-called donkey anaphora.