Philosophy of Language

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) is the “father of analytic philosophy” and modern logic. His central question: how can mathematical statements (“2+2=4”) be necessarily true and not accidental? The answer required developing formal logic and a theory of meaning.

Frege introduced the distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) of an expression. The reference is the object to which the expression refers. The sense is the way in which this object is presented. “The Morning Star” and “The Evening Star” have the same reference (the planet Venus...

This distinction solves many philosophical puzzles: how can statements about non-existent objects be true? (“The present king of France is bald”—this sentence has sense, but no reference). How do proper names work in reports of opinions? (“She thinks that Hesperus is a star”—replacing Hesperus wi...

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in “On Denoting” (1905) proposed a revolutionary solution to the problem of names and descriptions—one of the most elegant ideas in analytic philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is an exceedingly rare case in the history of philosophy: a thinker who revolutionized the field twice. The "Tractatus" (1921) established one direction—the picture theory, logical atomism. "Philosophical Investigations" (published posthumously in 1953) destroyed it.

The later Wittgenstein rejects the idea that language has a single function ("to describe facts") and a single form (logical). Real language is infinitely diverse: we don’t just describe, but also ask questions, command, thank, warn, perform rituals, joke, swear oaths. Each of these uses of langu...

Language game (Sprachspiel) is the practice of using language, inseparable from a "form of life" (Lebensform). Words acquire meaning through their use in specific practices, not by corresponding to objects. Meaning is not an object pointed to by a word; meaning is "the use of the word in language."

A famous example: "What is pain?" One might say: pain is a definite sensation—a "private object" in the internal world. But Wittgenstein demonstrates: the word "pain" itself gains meaning via public practices—pain behavior (cry, grimace), teaching, comforting. There is no "private language" about...

Definitions

Locutionary act

— utterance of a meaningful sentence. "Close the window" is a meaningful request/command in Russian.

Illocutionary act

— the action performed by uttering. Request, order, assertion, question, warning, promise—these are illocutionary forces. The same sentence can have different illocutionary force depending on context.

Perlocutionary act

— the effect produced on the listener. Persuasion, frightening, joy, irritation—these are perlocutionary effects. They are not guaranteed: the same warning can scare one listener and amuse another.

John Austin, in his lectures "How to Do Things with Words" (published posthumously, 1962), questioned the standard assumption of the philosophy of language: that the task of language is to describe facts.

Austin begins with performative utterances: "I swear," "I name this ship 'Queen Elizabeth'," "I promise," "I pronounce you husband and wife." These are not descriptions—they are actions. Saying them in the right context, the speaker does what they say. They are not true or false—they are "success...

A performative utterance "does not work" when the conditions of success are violated: a judge announcing a verdict must have authority; a witness under oath must give testimony voluntarily; baptism must take place in the correct ritual context.

Austin developed a more general theory: any utterance simultaneously performs three acts:

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) never published his key theory himself. The "Course in General Linguistics" (1916) was compiled posthumously by his students based on lecture notes—yet it became one of the most influential books of the 20th century.

Saussure put linguistics on a scientific foundation, defining its subject matter and key distinctions. The most important distinction is between langue (language as a system, code, structure) and parole (speech, the individual act of language use). The science of language studies langue—the syste...

Saussure’s key thesis: the linguistic sign is arbitrary. A sign consists of the signifier (the acoustic image, the sound pattern) and the signified (the concept, the content). The connection between them is not natural, not motivated, but conventional, arbitrary.

Proof: the same concept is denoted by different sound complexes in different languages. "Дерево" — tree — Baum — arbre — شجرة. There is no natural link between the sound and the concept. (Exception: the few onomatopoeias—cuckoo, buzz—but these too are conventional: "cuckoo" sounds differently in ...

Definitions

Color

— in languages with different numbers of basic color terms (from 2 in Pirahã to 11 in Russian), speakers show varying accuracy in distinguishing borderline colors. Russians distinguish light blue (голубой) and dark blue better because Russian uses s...

Space

— in the Guugu Yimithirr language (Australia), there is no “left” and “right”—only absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west). Speakers constantly orient themselves using cardinal directions with striking precision—and conceptualize spa...

Grammatical gender

— in German, “bridge” (Brücke) is feminine; in Spanish (puente) it is masculine. German speakers describe bridges with adjectives associated with feminine qualities (elegant, beautiful); Spanish speakers—with masculine qualities (strong, long).

Argument is war

— “attacked my position,” “destroyed my argument,” “defended my point of view,” “won the discussion.” One can imagine a culture where “argument is joint construction”—and language, behavior, relationships would be different.

Time is money

— “spend time,” “save time,” “invest time,” “lose time.” In cultures without the idea of time as a resource, this is incomprehensible.

Good is up

— “lift one’s mood,” “low spirits,” “high status,” “be on top.” This is rooted in bodily experience: upright posture is associated with strength and health.

Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) proposed one of the most controversial hypotheses of the 20th century: the language we speak shapes (or even determines) the way we think. Different languages create different “realities” for their speakers.

Strong version (linguistic determinism): language determines thought. Without the necessary word, you cannot have the necessary thought. Whorf studied the Hopi language (Native Americans of the American Southwest) and claimed: the Hopi have a fundamentally different concept of time (the language ...

Weak version (linguistic relativism): language influences (but does not determine) thought. Different languages make certain things “more convenient” for thinking, emphasizing various aspects of reality.

Whorf’s research was criticized: his analysis of Hopi was found to be inaccurate; there is no “timeless” Hopi language. Later studies showed that basic cognitive processes (perception, categorization) are largely universal—people speaking fundamentally different languages perceive colors, shapes,...

Michel Foucault rethought the concept of “discourse”: discourse is not just conversation or text, but a practice that produces the objects about which it speaks. The discourse on madness produces the mad as an object of knowledge and practice. The discourse on sexuality produces the notions of “p...

Key connection: power-knowledge. There is no knowledge without power; no power without knowledge. The one who has the right to “speak the truth” about madness (the psychiatrist) possesses power over the mad. Classifications (normal/abnormal, healthy/sick, lawful/unlawful) are not neutral descript...

In “Discipline and Punish” (1975), Foucault analyzes how the discourse of correction and normalization creates new subjectivities. The Panopticon (Bentham's prison project, where prisoners are always visible to the guard but do not know when they are being watched) is the model of “panoptic” powe...

Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) developed the method of deconstruction—an analysis of texts that uncovers their internal contradictions, semantic hierarchies, and assumptions that the text seeks to conceal.

Paul Grice (1975) proposed the theory of conversational implicatures. Communication is successful because the speaker and the listener follow unspoken maxims:

When these maxims are violated intentionally—an implicature arises: an implicit meaning that the listener infers. “How do you like the cake?” — “The cake is made from natural ingredients.” — Here, the quality maxim is observed, but the relation maxim is violated. The listener infers: the cake was...

Irony, metaphor, polite refusals—all of these are a play with the maxims. Understanding this mechanism is critically important for negotiations, diplomacy, and any complex communication.

Definitions

Positive face

— the desire to be accepted, approved of, understood. “You are really knowledgeable about this topic” is an example of supporting positive face.

Negative face

— the desire for autonomy, freedom from imposition. “Could you please...” instead of “do it”—this shows respect for negative face.

Erving Goffman introduced the concept of “face”—the public image a person projects in social interactions. Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) developed a theory of politeness through the notion of “face”:

Positive face: the desire to be accepted, approved of, understood. “You are really knowledgeable about this topic” is an example of supporting positive face.

Negative face: the desire for autonomy, freedom from imposition. “Could you please...” instead of “do it”—this shows respect for negative face.

Criticism, disagreement, requests, commands—these are “face-threatening acts.” Politeness strategies mitigate these threats. The choice of strategy depends on: social distance, power, and the “weight” of the request.

George Lakoff demonstrated: political debates are won at the level of frames, not facts. A frame is a structure of interpretation. When Republicans called the repeal of the inheritance tax the "death tax," they won the debate before it even began: now any objection to it sounded like a defense of...

Lakoff advised Democrats: "do not use the opponent's words." Activating a frame through its language strengthens it, even if you are negating it. "Don’t think of a white elephant"—you are already thinking about it.

In advertising, politics, change management—framing is critical. "Restructuring" vs "layoffs"; "investments" vs "expenses"; "flexible labor market" vs "precarization"—these are not just words, they are worldviews.

Sensitivity to framing is an essential skill of critical thinking: to notice in what frame a question is posed, and to be able to change it.

For a long time, it was believed that having two languages in one's mind created "interference" and slowed down processing. Modern research has overturned this view. Bilinguals constantly manage two linguistic systems—this trains executive control, working memory, cognitive flexibility. Research ...

Switching between languages is not just a linguistic act, but also a cognitive and cultural one. People who speak multiple languages often note that in different languages they are "slightly different people"—a different tone, different habitual patterns of thinking.

Language policy is one of the most acute political issues. Which language is official? Mandatory in education? In court? These are questions of power, identity, inclusion and exclusion.

Out of ~7,000 languages in the world, it is predicted that by the end of the 21st century, between 50% and 90% will disappear. Every two weeks, the last speaker of some language dies. This is not simply a “cultural loss” — it is the loss of ways of seeing the world.

Pirahã (Brazilian Amazon) — a language without recursion, without numerals higher than “a few”, without a concept of the distant past or future. Speakers of this language literally cannot think in certain categories — or perhaps our language does not allow us to understand how they think without ...

Arguments for linguistic diversity: every language encodes unique knowledge about the local ecosystem, medical practices, modes of social organization. Ethnobotany: most medicinal plants are known to science thanks to the knowledge of indigenous cultures, encoded in their languages.

GPT, Claude, Gemini — these are "large language models" (LLM), trained on vast corpora of texts. They generate the statistically probable next token. They do not "understand" language in the sense that a human does — but what does it mean to "understand"?

John Searle proposed the thought experiment "the Chinese room" (1980): a person in a room manipulates symbols according to rules, producing replies in Chinese without knowing Chinese. This is a metaphor for syntax without semantics — manipulation of signs without meaning. Is an LLM a "Chinese room"?

If an LLM can generate meaningful text without understanding, this challenges theories of meaning based on intentionality and experience. Or does it show that "understanding" is a functional property that can be realized in different substrates?

This is not an academic question: the answer depends on how we regulate AI, how we evaluate its output, how we build interaction with it.

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s–40s formulated an idea that became one of the most discussed in linguistics and cognitive science: the language we speak influences—or even determines—how we think and perceive the world.

The strong version (linguistic determinism): language determines thought. Without a word for a concept, thought about it is impossible. Whorf claimed: Hopi (a Native American language) lacks the concept of linear time—and Hopi speakers think about time differently. This strong version is largely ...

The weak version (linguistic relativism): language influences thought and perception, making some thoughts more accessible. This is confirmed experimentally.

Studies on color are classic tests. The Russian language has two words for blue (“siniy” and “goluboy”), English has only one (“blue”). Irina Winawer (2007): Russian speakers distinguish shades of blue faster than English speakers. Language influences perception.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (“Metaphors We Live By”, 1980) made a revolution in the understanding of metaphor. The traditional view: metaphor is a poetic embellishment, a rhetorical device. Lakoff and Johnson: metaphor is a fundamental mechanism of thought. We understand abstract concepts thro...

“Argument is war”: He attacked each of my arguments. His position is invulnerable. He won the argument. This metaphor structures our understanding of argument: there is a winner and a loser, positions attack and defend. It would be possible to understand argument differently: “Argument is buildin...

Different metaphors create different consequences and different possibilities for action.

Orientational metaphors: “good is up, bad is down.” “Mood dropped” (depression — movement downward). “Stocks went up” (growth — upward). “He is at the peak of success.” These spatial metaphors are so rooted that they seem “literal.” But they are metaphors: good is not literally “higher.”

John Austin ("How to Do Things with Words", 1962) posed the question: what happens when we speak? Traditional semantics: a sentence describes a fact (true or false). But many sentences do not describe—they act.

"I promise to come"—this is not a description of a promise, it is the promise itself. "I pronounce you husband and wife"—this is not a description of a marriage, it is the act of marrying. Austin called such utterances "performatives": they perform an action in the very act of utterance.

Three dimensions of a speech act. Locutionary act: the utterance of words with their literal meaning. Illocutionary act: the speaker's intention (to order, to request, to promise, to warn). Perlocutionary act: the effect on the listener (he did what he was asked to do).

Paul Grice formulated the "cooperative principle": the speaker makes his contribution as required at the moment for the purpose of the conversation. This is not a description of what happens—it is a norm upon which we interpret utterances.

Michel Foucault used the concept of "discourse" in a specific sense: not simply “speech” or “text,” but a system of rules determining what can be said, how it can be said, who has the right to speak, and what is considered “truth” in a given epoch.

Discourse is power structuring knowledge. The medical discourse of the 19th century created the “patient” as an object of study, the “mentally ill” as a category for control, the “doctor” as the bearer of legitimate knowledge about bodies. Before the emergence of this discourse, “madness” was und...

“Psychiatric power” (Foucault): psychiatry does not simply treat diseases—it creates norms, defines the “normal” and the “pathological,” and exercises social control through medical language.

Foucault: power is not the property of a class or the state. It is a relation permeating all levels of society. Where there is power, there is resistance. Resistance also operates through language and discourse.

Pierre Bourdieu ("What Speaking Means", 1982) applied the concept of "capital" to language. Linguistic capital is not simply knowledge of a language, but mastery of the legitimate language: a prestigious accent, correct grammar, academic discourse. This is a form of symbolic capital, convertible ...

A Parisian bourgeois and a worker from Marseilles both speak French, but their "French" is not equivalent on the "linguistic market". The Parisian accent is legitimate, the Marseilles accent is marked. This is not a natural fact, but a social construct that reproduces class hierarchy.

Academic language is an extreme case of linguistic capital. The university produces and demands a certain type of speech, which is predominantly possessed by those who grew up in corresponding families. This reproduces class inequality through language.

Each social field (academic, economic, artistic, political) has its own rules of the game, its own "taste", its own legitimate language. Entering a field, an agent must master its language—otherwise they are "out of place".

Feminist linguistics (Robin Lakoff, "Language and Woman's Place", 1975) raised the question: does a "women's language" exist? Lakoff described features of women's speech: evasiveness (tag questions — "it's true, isn't it?"), apologetic tone, understatement of confidence, more frequent use of "pol...

Critique: these features are characteristic not of women, but of subordinate positions. Men in subordinate positions speak in the same way. This is not "women's language" — this is "language of power vs. language without power".

Sexism in language: the generic "he" to designate people in general (the English "he" as neutral), words with a masculine suffix as the basic form (president vs. "female president"). Feminist linguistics showed: these conventions are not neutral — they make women the "exception", not the norm.

Language reforms — and debates about them. In English, "they" as a gender-neutral singular pronoun (already approved by the AP Stylebook). In German — the gender asterisk (Leser*innen). In Russian — a discussion about feminine forms (avtorka, rezhissorka, psikhologinya).

Walter Benjamin ("The Task of the Translator," 1923) posed the question radically: the goal of translation is not to convey the meaning of the original (this is impossible), but to reveal the "pure language"—that which every language strives to express, yet is never fully able to. Translation is ...

This sounds mystical—but it points to a real problem. Every language has concepts that are untranslatable directly. "Schadenfreude" (Ger.)—pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. "Saudade" (Port.)—a melancholic longing for something loved and lost. "Toska" (Rus.)—Nabokov: "no other language h...

Barbara Cassin's project "Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon"—a dictionary of untranslatable philosophical concepts. Untranslatability is not a drawback, but a richness: different languages perceive different aspects of reality.

Eugene Nida—"dynamic equivalence": translation should produce the same effect on the reader as the original does on its reader, even if by different means. "Formal equivalence" (word-for-word) vs. "dynamic" (effect-for-effect).

Today there are about 7,000 languages in the world. By the end of the 21st century, 50–90% of them will disappear — according to most estimates. Every two weeks, one language dies: the last speaker passes away, taking with them a unique way of seeing the world.

Why is this important? Daniel Everett and the Pirahã language (Amazonian): Pirahã has no recursion (embedded clauses), has no numerals except “few-many”, has no concepts of past and future in our sense. This language challenges Chomsky’s “universal grammar” and demonstrates an alternative way of ...

The disappearance of a language is the disappearance of ecological knowledge, medical practices, narrative traditions, conceptual worlds. Linguists compare this to the extinction of biological species: an irretrievable loss of diversity.

The Welsh language in the United Kingdom is an excellent example of successful revitalization: from 70,000 speakers in the 1970s to 900,000 today. Mandatory education in Welsh, Welsh television, government documents in both languages. This is a political decision.

Linguistics traditionally studies what is said. But silence is also a form of communication, and in some cultures and situations, it is even more significant than words.

Japanese culture of silence: "ma" (間) — emptiness, pause as a significant element of communication. A pause in conversation is not awkwardness, but a space for reflection. American culture fills pauses — "small talk" as a way to combat silence. Finnish culture of silence: being silent with a frie...

Edward Hall — "high-context and low-context cultures". Low context (USA, Germany): everything must be said explicitly; silence is a problem. High context (Japan, China, the Arab world): a significant part of meaning is conveyed through context, nonverbally, through silence.

Organizations contain a huge amount of the "unspoken": norms that no one articulates, but everyone follows. "We don't talk about politics." "We don't criticize the boss in meetings." "Admitting mistakes is dangerous." These are silences that structure organizational life.

Every new medium creates new linguistic genres. The telegraph created brevity and “period” as the designation for the end. The telephone created norms for the “beginning” and “end” of a call. The Internet has created hundreds of new genres over 30 years: email, forum post, tweet, Instagram post, ...

Each genre has its own norms: length, tone, degree of formality, permissible topics. Email is a hybrid of a letter and a conversation: more formal than a messenger, less formal than a business letter. A tweet is radically brief, public, performative.

David Crystal (“Language and the Internet”, 2001; “txtng: the gr8 db8”, 2008): the Internet and SMS do not destroy language (this fear repeats with every new medium). These are new genres with new norms—not degeneration, but diversification.

Emoji began as Japanese pictograms in mobile messages (1999). Today—3,600+ symbols, used in 10 billion messages daily. This is the first global “script”—though not a full-fledged language.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a branch of AI focused on the understanding and generation of human language. The history: from early symbolic systems (rules plus dictionary) through statistical methods (machine translation based on frequencies) to neural networks and transformers.

Early machine translation (1950s–60s): rules and dictionaries. Failure: language is too complex for rules. Georgetown-IBM experiment (1954): enthusiasts promised to solve the problem within 5 years. After 10 years — ALPAC report (1966): machine translation is unattainable and unnecessary. The fir...

Statistical turn (1980s–90s): instead of rules — statistics of large corpora. "Every time a linguist gets fired, translation quality improves" — IBM researchers' semi-joke. IBM Candide, Google Translate — corpus-based approach.

Deep learning (2012–): neural networks on massive data. Word2Vec — vector representation of words: "king — man + woman ≈ queen". BERT (Google, 2018) — bidirectional transformers, pretraining on gigantic corpora. GPT — generative variant.

The global linguistic landscape is undergoing radical change. English is the dominant language of global communication, science, and business. Chinese is the largest by number of speakers. Spanish is second by number of speakers in the Western Hemisphere. Arabic is the language of 420 million peo...

The internet was initially predominantly English-speaking — today, over 50% of content is not in English. This gives voices to previously invisible language communities — and creates new problems of “linguistic digital divides.”

The lingua franca of the 21st century: in reality, the use of English as a “vehicular language” in international contexts. But this is “English as a Lingua Franca” (ELF) — not native English. ELF research (Jennifer Jenkins): “non-native” speakers have their own norms, which should not be judged a...

Google Translate — 133 languages. But quality is uneven: German–English — excellent, Swahili–Ukrainian — significantly worse. Languages with less data receive poorer translation quality — exacerbating “digital colonialism.”