Language is what we all share and is our common concern. What is the nature of language? How is language related to the world? How is communication possible via language? What is the impact of language on our reasoning and thinking? Many people are unaware that misunderstandings and conflicts during communication occur as a result of the way we use language. This book introduces the central issues in the history of philosophical investigations about the concept of language. Topics are structured with reference to the world’s foremost philosophers of language. The book will encourage the reader to explore the depths of the concept of language and will raise an awareness of this distinctive human capacity.

This book features the full scope of Susan Petrilli's important work on signs, language, communication, and of meaning, interpretation, and understanding. Although readers are likely familiar with otherness, interpretation, identity, embodiment, ecological crisis, and ethical responsibility for the biosphere-Petrilli forges new paths where other theorists have not tread. This work of remarkable depth takes up intensely debated topics, exhibiting in their treatment of them what Petrilli admires-creativity and imagination. Petrilli presents a careful integration of divergent thinkers and diverse perspectives. While she abandons hope of attaining a final synthesis or an unqualifiedly comprehensive outlook, there remains a drive for coherence and detailed integration. The theory of identity being advocated in this book will provide the reader with an aid to appreciating the identity of the theorizing undertaken by Petrilli in her confrontation with an array of topics. Her theory differentiates itself from other offerings and, at the same time, is envisioned as a process of self-differentiation. Petrilli's contribution is at once historical and theoretical. It is historical in its recovery of major figures of language; it is theoretical in its articulation of a comprehensive framework. She expertly combines analytic precision and moral passion, theoretical imagination and political commitment.

This volume brings Cassirer’s work into the arena of contemporary debates both within and outside of philosophy. All articles offer a fresh and contemporary look at one of the most prolific and important philosophers of the 20th century. The papers are authored by a wide array of scholars working in different areas, such as epistemology, philosophy of culture, sociology, psychopathology, philosophy of science and aesthetics.

The book demonstrates that it is possible to study the language faculty with the core scientific method, i.e., by deducing definite predictions from hypotheses and obtaining and replicating experimental results precisely in accordance with the predictions. In light of the "reproducibility crisis" as extensively addressed in recent years in a number of fields, the demonstration that rigorous replication can be obtained in the study of the language faculty in terms of correlational and categorical predictions is particularly significant. While the claim has been made over the years that Chomsky’s research program is meant to be a scientific study of the language faculty, a conceptual and methodological articulation has never been made as to how we can accumulate our knowledge about the language faculty by the basic scientific method, including, most crucially, how exactly we can put our hypotheses to rigorous empirical and experimental test. The book proposes how to do that by providing a conceptual basis for the methodology for language faculty science. The book also offers empirical demonstrations of the viability of the proposed methodology. The experiments were conducted with Japanese and English speakers. Overall, the book explores new directions for the study of the mind.

In this textbook, Michael Morris offers a critical introduction to the central issues of the philosophy of language. Each chapter focusses on one or two texts which have had a seminal influence on work in the subject, and uses these as a way of approaching both the central topics and the various traditions of dealing with them. Texts include classic writings by Frege, Russell, Kripke, Quine, Davidson, Austin, Grice and Wittgenstein. Theoretical jargon is kept to a minimum and is fully explained whenever it is introduced. The range of topics covered includes sense and reference, definite descriptions, proper names, natural-kind terms, de re and de dicto necessity, propositional attitudes, truth-theoretical approaches to meaning, radical interpretation, indeterminacy of translation, speech acts, intentional theories of meaning, and scepticism about meaning. The book will be invaluable to students and to all readers who are interested in the nature of linguistic meaning.

V. N. Volosinov's important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others. Volosinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Volosinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.