12. Conclusion

Philosophy of language provides a comprehensive, meticulous survey of twentieth-century and contemporary philosophical theory and meaning. What called definitions or concepts of them are actually just given viewpoint of them from certain angles. Throughout this chapter, all attempts have been made to deal with, examine, and analyze as well as discuss in great detail the major concepts and universal principles of philosophy of language, and especially of the close relationship between them. The principal notions have been fairly given and discussed in detail from the viewpoint of linguistics. The chapter has gone through eleven major sections excluding the conclusion.

The first section has taken an attempt to generally discussed surveys a pool of general information about meanings and some major concerns relevant to the present work. The second section seeks to briefly present a general on philosophy in which two answers are frequently given to the question “What is philosophy?” that philosophy is an activity rather than a subject -in other words, you ‘do’ philosophy rather than learn about it in the one hand; that philosophy is largely a matter of conceptual analysis -it is thinking about thinking in the other. The philosophical questions and three mains areas of philosophy are also dealt with and fairly discussed. The third section has focused on discussing on language and its concerns. At first, the essential definitions on language were defined by well-known linguists, philosophers, psychologists, and so on, and emerging among of them is Chomsky’s view that ‘When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man.” Next, this section has made an attempt to delineate the subsection title language as a unique human behavior in which sixteen design futures proposed and listed by Hockett (1963), specially five major design features of human language have been discussed and illustrated as a proof for the differences between human language and communication systems of other species. The two remarkable theories the la langue and la parole by Ferdinand De Saussue, and the competence and performance Noam Chomsky have been dealt with and discussed, respectively. These two theories ultimately resemble each other in part despite the fact that Saussure’s la langue and la parole emphasize on the social character of language systems, whereas Chomsky’s competence and performance focus on the tacit knowledge of language for the former, the use of the language in concrete situations for the later. On the basis of such theories, levels of language are exposed clearly with a diagram for illustrating the levels of linguistics analysis. The fourth section has mentioned the major premise for the theory of language faculty at which the work has been in turn exposed in four headings. The first one brings out briefly the picture of an interesting continuous dispute throughout the centuries between two positions contrasted as empiricism and rationalism. The next is about Chomsky’s criticism of behaviourists’ theory of language directly with the American psychologist Skinner. These two parts have been presented as grounding for the third heading which presents the primary questions of the section: Language Faculty.

The major questions concerning language faculty such as Innateness and LAD, human language faculty as an organ, Universal Grammar, and so on, have been in order presented. The last, some arguments in support and criticism of such Chomsky’s theories have been also presented as a part of the section. In section five, the language comprehension which is defined by Prideaux (1985) language comprehension as a dynamic active process, not a passive act, in which the hearer is engaged as he/she constructs a systematic representation in his/her mind has been dealt with and discussed. Strikingly, this means processes of language are all deeply attached together in a chain from production to perception and then to comprehension. In such a chain, the hearer is always engaged in many processes with complexity of mind. The sixth section has dealt with and discussed the language production which shows that in the spoken process the match between what the speaker wishes to say and what he actually does is rarely a perfect one. It is because during speaking the speaker might produce some errors such as pauses, hesitation, repeats or replacements of the word and so on, as he seeks to encode his ideas into speech. And this section has also drawn out the diagram to display the types of slips of the tongue. Section seven has taken a general discussion on mind which considers all mental phenomena that are features of human beings such as sensation, perception, thought, belief, desire, intention, memory, emotion, imagination, and purposeful action. Shortly, mind is defined as thinks and experiences. The eighth sections has sought to discuss the truth and meaning which has been seen as the core notion in the study of meaning and representation, and the truth-conditional theses as “A sentence in use shows how things stand if it is true, and says that they stand for” or “Sentence s has as its use to say that p -or s means that p -just if whether s is true or not depends specifically upon whether or not p.”

Section nine has presented and discussed the logical form, a key issue in neutralizing the philosophy of language, as remarkably noted by Russell that:

“Some kind of knowledge of logical forms, though with most people it is not explicit, it involved in all understanding of discourse. It is the business of philosophical logic to extract this knowledge from its concrete integuments, and to render it explicit and pure.”

This section has further taken the propositions of P and Q as diagrams to illustrate. And the famous argument All H are M, All S are H, All S are M has also been discussed. The tenth section has specially discussed the semantics and truth with a truth-table drawn out. This section has also taken a definition on semantic value that “The semantic value of any expression is that the feature of it which determines whether sentences in which it occurs are true or false” for supporting the truth-table. Finally, the section eleven has dealt with and discussed the sense and reference which are the relation between names or signs of objects. We could view identity in sense as corresponding to the intuitive notion of synonymy: two expressions have the same sense if and only if they are synonymous as “The morning star is the evening star.” And when we are talking about reference, we actually need the context as pointed out by Frege “Never to ask for the reference of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.”

In sum, language, as the use of Chomsky (1968), is the ‘mirror of mind’ and as other side of a coin, it is also what mind achieves. This idea will become more clearer-cut when brought in the light of context. And the philosophy of language is motivated in large part by a desire to say something systematic about our intuitive notion of meaning. The task of the next chapter, the chapter three, is to apply these theories to study the Five Nikāyas. In the third one, “Language and Meaning as Reflected in the Five Nikāyas,” the detailed account about the Five Nikāyas and their emerging contexts regarding to language and meaning would has been studied in great detail.