PHI3023F - Logic And Language

Course Outline:

The philosophical investigation of linguistic meaning came to occupy a pivotal role in philosophy a little over a hundred years ago. The investigation became pivotal because the notion seems deeply perplexing — what sort of relation does a linguistic sign bear to what it represents? how do we form the ability to understand a potential infinity of sentences? — and because, more controversially, it came to seem that we could pursue many other questions in philosophy by looking at how language works. The philosophical focus on language was facilitated by developments in logical theory. The course begins by equipping the student with the technical basis in logic and then builds on this to explore the workings of language.