BAEcon Economics

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.

One two-hour lecture and one one-hour tutorial per week.

Students should be able to:

• Identify and explain key aspects of the general landscape of philosophy of language;
• Analyse and evaluate the philosophical significance of the semantics/pragmatics interface;
• Analyse and evaluate the role of context in meaning.

Students should be able to:

• Read, interpret and respond to complex arguments;
• Situate complex philosophical readings in a wider context;
• Formulate arguments about issues in semantics/pragmatics.

Students should be able to:

• Use research tools and technology to gather information and create well-organised written assignments in the philosophy of language.

Essay (2000 words) 33%

Online Exam (6 hours) 67%

The School of Social Sciences (SoSS) is committed to providing timely and appropriate feedback to students on their academic progress and achievement, thereby enabling students to reflect on their progress and plan their academic and skills development effectively. Students are reminded that feedback is necessarily responsive: only when a student has done a certain amount of work and approaches us with it at the appropriate time is it possible for us to feed back on the student's work. The main forms of feedback on this course are written feedback responses to assessed essays and exam answers.

We also draw your attention to the variety of generic forms of feedback available to you on this as on all SoSS courses. These include: meeting the lecturer/tutor during their office hours; e-mailing questions to the lecturer/tutor; asking questions from the lecturer (before and after lecture); presenting a question on the discussion board on Canvas; and obtaining feedback from your peers during tutorials.

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/>.