Philosophy of Language

by Jerrold J. Katz

Genres: Philosophy

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1966

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first couple chapters provide a very instructive history of mid-20th century philosophy of language: the logical positivists were wrong to think that natural language was deficient; the ordinary language philosophers were right to think that natural language was interesting and perfectly in order as it is; but both mistakenly thought that natural language couldn't be formalized. They held that belief because they didn't have the proper linguistic technology to handle all of the details of natural language.

You get a very different account of logical positivism and ordinary language philosophy in the contextualists, unsurprisingly.