Research subject Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of language studies the nature of language, its use in communication, its relation to thought and the world. Investigations range widely: from foundational questions concerning the constitution of linguistic meaning, the development of formal semantics for artificial or natural languages, the pragmatics of language use and its social significance.

The department has a strong tradition in philosophy of language. We have strong interests in foundational semantics and meaning theory as well as in formal semantics for natural language, compositionality, vagueness, the theory of communication, assertion, and pragmatics. We study the semantics and pragmatics of a wide variety of expressions, including proper names, natural kind terms, definite descriptions, attitude and speech reports, slurs and slang. We are interested in context-sensitivity and the debates concerning relativism, contextualism, and expressivism. Other topics of our research include the normativity of meaning and skepticism about meaning and content.