BASS Sociology and Philosophy

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The unit will provide students with a detailed overview of some of the core topics in contemporary philosophy of language while also situating these issues within the wider question of why philosophers care about linguistic meaning. There are two aspects to this wider question: firstly, philosophers often argue that theories of meaning have ramifications for wider philosophical concerns in e.g. metaphysics and epistemology; secondly philosophers are often divided on the question of whether meaning should be approached as a problem within applied logic (formal semantics) or whether it so deeply embedded in the social and psychological practices of speakers that it eludes such abstraction and must be approached accordingly (via a theory of pragmatics). In practice, many philosophers of language draw on both areas of linguistic enquiry to explain puzzling linguistic phenomena as we shall see on this course. 
 

The unit aims to:

Introduce students to some core topics in contemporary philosophy of language, demonstrating the philosophical interest of linguistic questions and their applications to wider debates in philosophy.
 

Please specify

Topics to include:

• Truth-conditional semantics: The Fregean Project.

• Metaphysics of meaning: Frege’s Puzzle and the nature of content.

• Natural language quantification.

• Context and meaning: indexicality and semantic relativism.

• Pragmatics: implicature, presupposition, and speech acts.

Lectures (20 hours): delivery of content

Tutorials (10 hours): small group discussion will facilitate student engagement

Office Hours: students will have access to the course convenor through regular office hours

VLE: learning materials (reading lists, lecture slides, etc.) available online (asynchronous)

Essay Plans: students will be encouraged to submit essay plans for formative feedback
 

• demonstrate knowledge of the general landscape of philosophy of language

• demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the philosophical significance of the semantics/pragmatics interface.

• demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the role of context in meaning

• understand and respond to complex arguments

• situate complex philosophical readings in a wider context.

• formulate arguments about issues in semantics/pragmatics

• write clear and rigorous essays

• explain and develop arguments and theories

• reading complex philosophical literature

• reason logically without reliance on intuition

• present complex arguments in an accessible form

• understand complex arguments

Please specify

Speaks, Jeff, ‘Theories of Meaning’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2024 Edition), Edward N. Zalta & Uri Nodelman (eds.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2024/entries/meaning/>.