How to Understand Language: A Philosophical Inquiry

Why are philosophers - as opposed to, say, linguists and psychologists - puzzled by language? How should we attempt to shed philosophical light on the phenomenon of language? How to Understand Language frames its discussion of the philosophy of language with these two central questions. Bernhard Weiss first explores the reasons why language is so hard to understand from a philosophical point of view and then begins the search for a productive approach to the philosophical task of understanding language. After finding fault with approaches based on philosophical analysis or translation, Weiss undertakes an extended investigation of the programme of constructing a theory of meaning. Weiss endorses Donald Davidson's advocacy of that approach, which is pivotal to the discussion, but he argues strongly against the roles of both truth theory and radical interpretation. In doing so, he offers novel arguments for a number of distinctive claims about some key issues in philosophy of language, centrally, those of the normativity and publicity of meaning. How to Understand Language presents a fresh approach to many issues of abiding interest in the philosophy of language.