An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

Citation

Morris, M. (2006). An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge Introductions to Philosophy.

Chapter Summary

After a four-page Introduction, fifteen chapters of roughly 15 to 27 pages each are built around one or two classic texts, named at the head of each chapter as its "key text" or "key texts". A glossary, a list of works cited and an index follow. The Introduction frames the whole book around John Locke: a natural-seeming view on which words get their meaning from the thoughts they express, and the decisive shift, associated with Mill and Frege, to the view that words are concerned with things in the world. Much of the book is organised around what the author calls the Basic Worry about that world-directed view.

Chapter 1: Locke and the nature of language

Key text: Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding, book III, chapters 1–2. The book opens with Locke, though analytic philosophy begins with Frege, because his view is both intuitively natural and the main target of much later work, including the theories of names and kinds in Chapters 4 and 5. The chapter extracts a set of Lockean assumptions about the function of language, communication and thought that later chapters refer back to.

Chapter 2: Frege on Sense and reference

Key text: Frege's "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892). Frege is presented as keeping what is natural in Locke, that language serves to communicate thought, while rejecting Locke's idea that the components of thought are ideas, and as offering the prospect of a systematic theory of meaning.

Chapter 3: Russell on definite descriptions

Key text: Russell's "On Denoting" (1905). The chapter sets Russell against Frege's claim that proper names and definite descriptions are singular terms, and explains how Russell's apparently minor analysis of the word "the" became part of a revolution in the philosophy of language.

Chapter 4: Kripke on proper names

Key text: Kripke's Naming and Necessity, lectures I–II. Against the shared Frege–Russell assumption that ordinary names are equivalent to descriptions, the chapter revisits Mill's view that names simply refer, and the difficulty that led Frege to introduce Sense in the first place.

Chapter 5: Natural-kind terms

Key texts: Kripke's Naming and Necessity, lecture III, and Putnam's "Meaning and Reference" (1973). The chapter covers the extension of anti-descriptivist arguments to terms such as "tiger" and "water", the claim that natural-kind terms are rigid designators, and the question of what makes a kind natural.

Chapter 6: Quine on de re and de dicto modality

Key text: Quine's "Three Grades of Modal Involvement". Quine, an advocate of extensionalism who wanted singular terms reconstrued as descriptions, appears here as the more recent target of the Kripkean revolution, through his scepticism about necessity.

Chapters 7–8: Reference and propositional attitudes; The semantics of propositional attitudes

Key texts: Quine's "Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes" (1956), then Kripke's "A Puzzle about Belief" and Davidson's "On Saying That". "That"-clauses after verbs such as "believes" are the clearest case where substituting co-referring terms seems to change truth-value; Chapter 7 treats reference in such contexts, Chapter 8 their semantics.

Chapter 9: Davidson on truth and meaning

Key text: Davidson's "Truth and Meaning". Starting from the principle that the meaning of a sentence depends on the meaning of its parts, the chapter presents Davidson's proposal to give a theory of meaning in the form of a theory of truth, drawing together the questions about compositional meaning raised in earlier chapters.

Chapters 10–11: Quine and Davidson on translation and interpretation; Quine on the indeterminacy of translation

Key texts: chapter 2 of Quine's Word and Object, Davidson's "Radical Interpretation", and Quine's 1970 paper on the reasons for indeterminacy. The focus shifts from kinds of meaning to the role of language in people's lives: radical translation and interpretation as a scientific approach to language, then Quine's sceptical thesis that translation is indeterminate, set beside his earlier attack on analyticity.

Chapter 12: Austin on speech acts

Key text: Austin's How to Do Things with Words. Austin challenges the focus on truth and on declarative sentences that runs from Frege to Davidson.

Chapter 13: Grice on meaning

Key text: Grice's "Meaning" (1957). The chapter takes up the most basic question, how marks or sounds can mean anything at all, and Grice's answer in terms of speakers' intentions.

Chapter 14: Kripke on the rule-following paradox

Key text: Kripke's Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. The sceptical claim that there is no fact about what words mean is presented with the author's caution not to stress the link with Wittgenstein too heavily, since Kripke is widely thought to misrepresent him in crucial respects.

Chapter 15: Wittgenstein on the Augustinian picture

Key text: Philosophical Investigations, part I, §§1–32. The last chapter reads a short extract from Wittgenstein's later work, acknowledging that this unsystematic, conversational text divides the philosophical community.

Key Concepts

Introduction and Chapters 1–3: Locke, Frege, Russell

• The Basic Worry: the author's name for the difficulty facing the view that meaning concerns things in the world, notably that co-referring words seem to differ in meaning.
• Sense and reference: Frege's distinction between what an expression refers to and the way in which that object is given.
• Theory of descriptions: Russell's analysis on which definite descriptions are not singular terms.

Chapters 4–8: Names, kinds, modality and attitudes

• Millian view of names: there is no more to a name's meaning than its referring to its bearer.
• Rigid designator: an expression that picks out the same thing in every possible situation; Kripke applies the idea to natural-kind terms.
• Extensionality: the principle that substituting co-referring terms, co-extensive predicates or sentences with the same truth-value preserves truth-value.
• Propositional attitude: a state of mind, such as belief, characterised by a sentence in a "that"-clause.

Chapters 9–11: Truth, interpretation, indeterminacy

• Truth-theoretic semantics: Davidson's proposal that a theory of truth can serve as a theory of meaning.
• Radical interpretation: interpreting a speaker from scratch, with no prior knowledge of the language.
• Indeterminacy of translation: Quine's thesis that there may be no fact deciding between rival translations.

Chapters 12–15: Use, intention, rules

• Speech act: an utterance considered as an action, such as promising or warning, rather than only as true or false.
• Speaker meaning: Grice's account of meaning in terms of a speaker's intentions toward an audience.
• Rule-following paradox: Kripke's sceptical argument that nothing fixes what a word means.

Critical Analysis

Strengths

• Primary texts at the centre. Each chapter is anchored in named classic texts, so students learn the field through the arguments of Frege, Russell, Kripke, Quine, Davidson, Austin, Grice and Wittgenstein rather than through summaries alone. The publisher notes that jargon is kept to a minimum and explained when introduced.
• A connecting thread. The Introduction's framing, with Locke as the reference point and the Basic Worry as a recurring problem, links chapters that could otherwise read as separate essays; later chapters explicitly refer back to Locke's assumptions and Frege's claims.
• Breadth. Beyond reference and truth-conditional semantics, there are chapters on speech acts, intention-based meaning, scepticism about meaning and the later Wittgenstein.
• Recognised as a course text. The book won a Choice Outstanding Academic Title award for 2007. Robert Harnish, reviewing it in Philosophy in Review, judged it the right size for a fifteen-week semester at a chapter a week, and placed it in difficulty somewhere between Lycan's textbook and Taylor's 1998 introduction.

Limitations

• Selective by design. Because each chapter follows one or two texts, topics that have no single classic paper in the book's selection (for example indexicals and demonstratives) receive no chapter of their own.
• The author's interpretations shape the story. The Lockean framing and the Basic Worry are the author's organising devices; they help coherence, but students should be aware that other introductions organise the field differently.
• Published in 2006. Later developments in the field are outside its scope.

Where It Fits in the Course

Morris sits between the two kinds of book on this list. Colin McGinn's Philosophy of Language: The Classics Explained is also built on classic texts but explains each one step by step in a more informal style, and includes indexicals and Tarski, which Morris does not treat in separate chapters; Morris adds Locke, Quine, Austin, Kripke on rule-following and Wittgenstein. Students who find Morris hard going can use McGinn as a gentler companion for the overlapping chapters (Frege, Russell, Kripke, Davidson, Grice).

For a topic-by-topic survey, William Lycan's Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction organises the field around reference, theories of meaning, pragmatics and figurative language, and is the better choice for students who want problems rather than texts as the organising principle. Alexander Miller's Philosophy of Language reconstructs the arguments from Frege to later debates in more detail and is a natural next step. The Martinich and Sosa anthology of classic and contemporary papers is the natural source for primary texts to read alongside Morris, and Davidson's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation contains the essays behind Chapters 8–10.

How to Use This Book

The book suits undergraduates with some introductory philosophy; basic logic helps with the chapters on descriptions, modality and propositional attitudes, though the publisher states that technical terms are explained when introduced.

• One chapter a week: with fifteen chapters, the book maps directly onto a semester, as Harnish observed.
• Read the key text first, then the chapter: each chapter names its key text, and many of these papers are widely anthologised.
• Core sequence: the Introduction and Chapters 1–5 (Locke to natural-kind terms) form a tightly connected run on reference; Chapters 9–11 on Davidson and Quine form a second unit.
• Flexible blocks: Chapters 6–8 on modality and attitudes can be shortened for an introductory course; Chapters 12–15 work as a final unit on use, intention and scepticism about meaning.

Keep a running list of the Lockean assumptions from Chapter 1 and of Frege's claims from Chapter 2, since later chapters refer back to them by number.