The Carnegie Pulse: Pulse Scheduler: 80-181 Language and Thought

80-181 Language and Thought

Units: 9.0
Department: Philosophy
Related URLs: http://www.hss.cmu.edu/philosophy

The course addresses issues related to the connections between thought and language, particularly the ways in which we express thoughts and attitudes through language. Is language necessary for thought? What are the referents of linguistic expressions: cognitive or mental entities of some sort, or things out there in the world? Does the meaning of sentences come before their truth conditions, or the truth conditions of an expression are sufficient to determine its meaning? What kind of knowledge makes it possible for speakers of a language to communicate with one another? Is the meaning of expressions determined by norms and social conventions? What is a metaphor? What exactly serves as the context of an utterance in discourse? Do speakers of different languages perceive the world differently because of their language differences? The first part of the course addresses classical philosophical issues concerning the relation of truth and meaning, as well as issues related to the meaning of verbs of propositional attitude and pragmatics. The second part of the course focuses on more recent proposals in cognitive semantics, particularly theories that utilize conceptual spaces as the main framework to represent semantic information. We will also consider 'hybrid theories that describe the form-meaning relation as an idealized account of the process whereby the recipient of an utterance comes to grasp the thoughts that the utterance contains. A basic course in logic is recommended but not required.

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