Philosophy of Language

Harvard FAS

This course is an introduction to the philosophy of language. We’ll cover major topics that have shaped the philosophical study of language into the present and that have also become key resources in philosophy more generally: compositionality, meaning, pragmatics, context-sensitivity, speech acts, and reference. If you don’t know what any of these words mean, don’t worry, that’s what the course is for. So let me describe the course in a different way. It’s a central fact about language that…