The Oxford Companion to Philosophy Part 51 pptx

and validity of prophetic, inspirational, as well as esoteric
and fantastic knowledge. h.z.
Mehdi Ha’iri Yazdi, The Principles of Epistemology in Islamic Philoso-
phy: Knowledge by Presence (Albany, NY, 1992).
Komensky´ (Comenius), Jan Amos (1592–1670). Czech
philosopher and pedagogue. Bishop and theologian of the
Unitas Fratrum (Moravian Brethren), exiled in the period
of Counter-Reformation. He found refuge in various parts
of Europe, including London, where he wrote the mystic-
ally coloured Via Lucis (1641). His principal philosophical
treatise De Rerum Humanarum Emendatione Consultatio
Catholica is based on the traditional Neoplatonic scheme
of emanations specifically modified and enriched by the
humanistic idea of restoration of humans to the divine
universal harmony by the way of universal reform
(panorthosia) and universal education (pampaedia). So con-
ceived, his philosophy aimed at a grandiose reform of peda-
gogy in the spirit of modern didactic realism. In place of
scholastic verbalism it turned to demonstrative teaching,
conceiving school as play (schola ludus) and as a workshop
of humanity (officina humanitatis). The same principles
gave birth to his philosophy of non-violence, peace, and
ecumenicity. ‘Omnia sponte fluant, absit violentia rebus’
became his device. m.p.
v.s.
J. Patocˇka, Jan Amos Komensky´: Gesammelte Schriften zur Comenius-
forschung (Bochum, 1981).
Korean philosophy. The reigning theme of Korean phil-
osophy is irenic fusionism, as evidenced by the way of the
flow of wind (poong-ryu-do) that is the substratum of
Korean philosophy. The flow of wind is invisible and yet

all-pervasive. This is also man’s vibrating, unceasing way
of communing with nature and fellow beings, thus evinc-
ing an ‘undifferentiated aesthetic continuum’ (to adopt
F. S. C. Northrop’s phrase) or Nothingness (mu).
Poong-ryu-do is the way of overcoming alienation, coun-
tenancing solidarity with fellow beings, and helping to
achieve harmony of polarities. When *Confucianism,
Buddhism, *Taoism, and other ‘foreign’ strands of
thought were introduced to Korea, it was poong-ryu-do
that helped to bring about their fusion and synthesis. I will
illustrate the theme with two notable examples.
Attuned to poong-ryu-do was the Buddhist monk
Wonhyo (617–86). If Buddhism originated in India and was
nurtured in China in Maha¯ya¯na form, it was segmented
into various sects when it reached Korea. Wonhyo suc-
ceeded in integrating the contentions of these sects by
Harmonizing of Contentions (hwajaeng): just as all rivers
are bound for the sea, so are various sects bound to return
to the Buddha mind. For Wonhyo, to attain Nirvana was
to attain one heart–mind–body (ilshimdongchae) with
humanity.
Paradoxically, for Wonhyo, to be exclusively Buddhist
was not to be Buddhist. He propounded an all-
encompassing cosmic universalism by absorbing elements
not only of Buddhism but also of Confucianism and
Taoism. Wonhyo was the embodiment of the fusion of
the three teachings (shilnaepohamsamkyo) and the way of
mysterious wondrousness (hyunmyochido). He endeav-
oured to overcome the dichotomies of being and non-
being, the true and the false, and the sacred and the

secular. For Wonhyo, Nothingness (mu) meant integra-
tion, fusion, and harmony, and getting away from dogma.
His mu was the prototype of the Zen Buddhist notion of
Absolute Negation and Nothingness.
The theme of harmony, fusion, and synthesis is again
manifest in Korean *neo-Confucianism. In dealing with
the metaphysical (i) and the physical (ki), the Chinese
philosopher Chu Hsi (1130–1200) was dualistic and said
that the Four Beginnings (commiseration, shame, defer-
ence, and discernment) of the Four Virtues (humanity,
righteousness, propriety, and wisdom) emanate from i
and the Seven Emotions ( joy, anger, sadness, fear, love,
hatred, and desire) from ki. The Korean philosopher
Hwadam (Suh Kyungduk, 1489–1546) moved to integrate
i and ki and spoke of Great Harmony (taehwa).
In the Four–Seven Debate with Ki Daesung, Toegye (Yi
Hwang, 1501–70), while being still dualistic, broke away
from Chu Hsi by espousing the reciprocal emanation (hobal)
of i and ki: with the Four, ki follows i when i becomes
emanant; with the Seven, when ki becomes emanant, i
‘rides’ ki. Though he was critical of Toegye’s idea that ki fol-
lows i as being dualistic, Yulgok (Yi I, 1536–84) nevertheless
embraced his notion that i ‘rides’ ki: only ki is emanant and
i
moves its emanation; iandkiare ‘neither two things nor one
thing’, as evidenced by ‘wondrous fusion’ (myohap). For
Yulgok, original nature (i) and physical nature (ki) coalesce
into one human nature. Toegye and Yulgok, whose
thoughts culminated in an irenic fusionism, constituted the
crowning phase of East Asian neo-Confucianism by exhibit-

ing dialectical dexterity in articulating the concepts of i and
ki, left unclarified by the Chinese.
Toegye also developed the neo-Confucianist concept
of single-mindedness (kyung), which was a manifestation
of his unequivocal humanism, as shown by his total rejec-
tion of the Mandate of Heaven (chunmyung), which still
had a hold on the Chinese, including Chu Hsi. Toegye’s
kyung synthesized the primeval Korean sense of supreme-
efforts-cum-earnest-devotion (chisung) with the Confu-
cianist notion of holding fast to mind ( jik-yung); he
advocated self-efforts for creating a meaningful life. In par-
ticular, his concept of single-mindedness had a lasting
influence on the Japanese neo-Confucianists of the Toku-
gawa period.
Every major Korean neo-Confucianist shared Toegye’s
preoccupation with single-mindedness, which signalled
new stress on praxis in the development of Korean neo-
Confucianism: the fusion of the metaphysical and the
physical is better brought about through action than specu-
lation, important as theory might be. That was the point
of Yulgok’s integration of sincerity (sung) with single-
mindedness. In this respect Korean neo-Confucianism
made a break with the Cheng-Chu school of Chinese
neo-Confucianism, which was overly speculative.
480 knowledge by presence
It is small wonder that Yulgok’s thought flowered into
Practical Learning (shilhak) in eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century Korea. Practical Learning, keener on social issues
than idle speculation, once more evinced the way of the
flow of wind in striving to achieve the synthesis of theory

and praxis. Practical Learning also helped to create an
intellectual ambience open and receptive to Western
Learning (suhak). k s.l.
*Buddhist philosophy.
W. T. de Bary and J. K. Haboush (eds.), The Rise of New-
Confucianism in Korea (New York, 1985).
International Cultural Foundation (ed.), Korean Thought (Seoul,
1982).
Korn, Alejandro (1860–1936). Latin American philosopher
born in San Vicente, Argentina. Korn’s reading of Kant and
Schopenhauer led him to move away from *positivism, the
predominant philosophy of Latin America in the late nine-
teenth century. Like the positivists, however, he main-
tained that knowledge must be based on experience. But
philosophy must not be reduced to a science of empirical
facts; it is fundamentally concerned with values. In La libertad
creadora (1920–2), he proposed a creative concept of *free-
dom according to which the goal of human actions is to
overcome the laws of necessity that govern the objective
world. Creative impulse, as manifested in self-control and
the technological conquest of nature, enable the subject to
accomplish this. In Axiología (1930), his most important
work, Korn defends a subjectivist position, where value is
understood as relative to human evaluation. e.m.
j.g.
Solomon Lipp, Three Argentine Thinkers (New York, 1969).
Korsgaard, Christine (1952– ). American philosopher,
Professor at Harvard. Korsgaard is one of the leading
interpreters of *Kant’s moral philosophy and exponents
of contemporary Kantian ethics. In her book The Sources of

Normativity she argues, first, that our reflective nature
forces us to look for reasons for our actions, and second,
that we find these reasons in our own autonomous nature.
The theory is realist, but does not involve metaphysical
commitments. Korsgaard argues that in order to act at all
we must have a conception of our own practical identity,
and that compatibility with this conception is what deter-
mines whether a consideration counts a reason. Though
Korsgaard admits that we can have many overlapping
identities (as a mother, as a philosopher, as a friend), she
argues that there is one identity that we must all have—
identity simply as a human being among other human
beings, and this is the identity that gives rise to traditional
Kantian moral reasons. e.j.m.
*constructivism.
C. Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge, 1996).
—— Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, 1996).
Kotarbin´ski, Tadeusz (1886–1981). Polish philosopher and
logician, author of a radically nominalist epistemology.
Studied in Darmstadt and Lvov, taught classical languages
in high schools, was professor at the Universities of War-
saw, Lodz, and then Warsaw again. He was President of
the Polish Academy of Science from 1957 to 1962.
He published a widely used textbook, Elements of the
Theory of Knowledge, Formal Logic and Methodology of Science
(1929, in Polish), a number of works on ethics that are
independent of religious and political premisses and of the
laws of nature (Meditations on Worthy Life (1966), in Pol-
ish), various historical studies, and studies on praxiology
or the general theory of efficient work (Treatise on Efficient

Work (1955), in Polish). His own metaphysical standpoint
he described as reism, a kind of *materialism without mat-
ter; it implies that the proper use of the verb ‘to exist’ is
reserved to individual things and that all meaningful
propositions (including those related to mathematical
objects, literary works, cognitive acts, etc.) can, in prin-
ciple, be translated into reistic language; without being
thus translatable they are meaningless. Both before and
after the Second World War Kotarbin´ski was regarded in
Poland as a moral authority, engaged in fighting for toler-
ance against clericalism and anti-Semitism. l.k.
H. Skolimowski, Polish Analytical Philosophy (London, 1967).
Kraus, Karl (1874–1936). Viennese playwright, poet, and
satirist, best known as publisher of Die Fackel (The Torch),
a fiercely independent journal of social, political, and cul-
tural criticism that created a sensation when it first
appeared in 1899. Die Fackel was admired by many, includ-
ing Wittgenstein. An uncompromising opponent of any-
thing he judged to be humbug, Kraus considered
*language an important source of truth in its own right,
and vigorously attacked any individual or institution,
most particularly the Press, that he regarded as corrupting
language and thus contributing to the hypocrisy and
moral decline of the age. Kraus’s scathing satirical attacks
on the political and cultural institutions which he took to
be responsible for the First World War culminated in an
epic drama, The Last Days of Mankind, composed largely of
quotations he allowed, characteristically, to speak for
themselves. j.heil
E. Timms, Karl Kraus: Apocalyptic Satirist (New Haven, Conn.,

1986).
Kreisel, Georg (1923– ). Austrian and cosmopolitan logi-
cian. As a mathematician he has chiefly studied proof and
computation. Though not the founder of a school, he has
had a wide influence in philosophy of mathematics
through his many commentaries. Recurring themes in his
writings are that ‘the data of foundations consist of the
mathematical experience of the working mathematician’;
that foundational slogans (particularly formalist ones) can
usually be proved wrong by careful attention to straight-
forward facts; that classical and constructivist mathemat-
ics each use the appropriate methods to describe different
parts of the same world (respectively, mathematical
objects and mathematical evidence); that the proof of a
theorem may give extra information which is important
Kreisel, Georg 481
for understanding the role of the theorem; and that in
mathematics one should cultivate a sense of when to be
surprised. w.a.h.
*constructivism; formalism.
Georg Kreisel, ‘Mathematical Logic: What has it Done for the
Philosophy of Mathematics?’, in R. Schoenman (ed.), Bertrand
Russell: Philosopher of the Century (London, 1967).
Kripke, Saul (1940– ). American logician and philosopher
of language noted for his work in *modal logic but also for
his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views on meaning.
Exploiting the terminology of *possible worlds, Kripke
argues against descriptivist theories of proper *names,
holding instead that proper names are *rigid designators,
that is, expressions which (unlike most definite descrip-

tions) retain the same reference in every world in
which they refer to anything at all. He repudiates Frege’s
theory that proper names possess senses determining
which objects they refer to, arguing instead that names
are initially assigned their references by procedures such
as ostension and are then passed on from speaker to
speaker in a causal chain, each speaker receiving the name
with an intention to use it to refer to the same object as
that to which the speaker from which he received it
referred.
Kripke appeals to the rigidity of names to defend the
metaphysical theses of the necessity of identity and of ori-
gin, the latter implying that a composite object could not
have been originally composed of parts very different in
identity or kind from those from which it was in fact made.
His defence of these theses leads him to reject the trad-
itional association between *necessity and the *a priori and
to hold that some necessary truths can be a posteriori and
some contingent ones a priori. For instance, that water is
H
2
O is a true identity statement whose truth was dis-
covered only empirically and yet one which is, if Kripke is
right, necessary. As a putative example of a contingent a
priori truth he cites the statement that the standard metre
bar is one metre in length. Kripke’s stance on such issues has
far-reaching metaphysical implications, as is demonstrated
by his appeal to the necessity of identity to challenge the
coherence of mind–brain *identity theories. e.j.l.
C. Hughes, Kripke: Names, Necessity, and Identity (Oxford, 2004).

S. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford, 1980).
—— Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Oxford, 1982).
Kristeva, Julia (1941– ). French theorist, linguist, literary
critic, and philosopher, currently a psychoanalyst. Born in
Bulgaria but based in Paris since the mid-1960s, she
brought Marxist theory and Russian formalism together
with *structuralism and *psychoanalysis to produce an
eclectic interdisciplinary approach to questions concern-
ing subjectivity. This approach has distinguished all her
subsequent work. Initially working with Derrida and
others in the intellectual group Tel Quel, her theoretical
exploration of literary texts, creativity, and language
acquisition has broadened to include relevant political,
sexual, philosophical, and linguistic issues. Some of her
work has been in *feminist philosophy, some in aesthetics,
cultural studies, and psychoanalysis. a.c.a.
Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader (Oxford, 1986).
Kropotkin, Peter (1842–1921). After Bakunin’s death in
1876, Kropotkin was the most influential theorist of *anarch-
ism for several decades. Early in his life he rejected his
aristocratic background and stubbornly maintained his
confidence in the supreme goodness of human nature and
attributed any evidence to the contrary to the insidious
influence of state authority and exploitative capitalism.
For Kropotkin, any external authority was corrupt by def-
inition and thus he never attempted to describe the organ-
izational principles of an anarchist movement or society,
believing that it was up to the oppressed masses to arrange
the system under which they lived. In his attempt to
imbue the whole of society with ethical principles,

Kropotkin did produce many practical plans for the
improvement of agricultural and industrial communities.
And his biting criticisms of the terrible power of the state
to disrupt and destroy what he considered natural com-
munities remain impressive. d.m
cl.
C. Cahm, Kropotkin and the Rise of Revolutionary Anarchism
1872–1886 (Cambridge, 1989).
M. Miller, Kropotkin (Chicago, 1976).
Kuhn, Thomas (1922–96). In The Structure of Scientific Revo-
lutions, the most influential book in modern *philosophy
of science, Kuhn argues that scientists work within and
against the background of an unquestioned theory or set
of beliefs, something he characterizes as a ‘paradigm’.
Sometimes, however, a paradigm seems to come unstuck,
and it is necessary that a new one be provided. What
makes Kuhn’s position stimulating and controversial is
the central claim that there can be no strictly logical reason
for the change of a paradigm. As in political revolutions,
partisans argue in a circular fashion from within their own
camps. Expectedly, this claim was anathema to old-
fashioned rationalists like Karl Popper, for whom science
is the apotheosis of sound and logical defensible thought.
Paradoxically, however, Kuhn and Popper are both
evolutionary epistemologists, seeing essential analogies
between their (very different) views of scientific change
and the evolution of organisms. m.r.
*evolutionary epistemology; reductionism; revolu-
tions, scientific.
G. Gutting, Paradigms and Revolutions (Notre Dame, Ind., 1980).

T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962).
Ku¯ kai (774–835). Posthumous name, Ko¯bo¯ Daishi.
Founder of the Shingon school of esoteric *Buddhism,
Ku¯kai was Japan’s first philosophical thinker. He was an
accomplished poet and expert calligrapher, an ascetic
saint, nature mystic, and influential cultural leader, as well
as a prolific writer on religion, philosophy, literature,
482 Kreisel, Georg
philosophy at the end of the twentieth century
thomas kuhn’s 1962 monograph on The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions swiftly established itself as the most important work
of the century in the philosophy of science. The influence of its
new vision of how theories come and go was felt throughout
the academic world.
bernard williams, impatient with the restricted scope and
imagination of academic philosophers, led them to broader
conceptions of ethics and the self, and sought to bring philo-
sophy into closer engagement with real life and with the histo-
ry of Western intellectual culture. Meanwhile his work on
government committees helped Britons to address some prob-
lems of the self, specifically in connection with sex, drugs, and
gambling.
david k. lewis granted existence to a plethora of possible
worlds in order to answer a wide range of philosophical ques-
tions. His systematic worldview was as hard to refute as it was
to believe in.
richard rorty, who himself once worked in the mainstream
of analytic philosophy, became its scourge, and the contempor-
ary philosopher most admired in other disciplines, where his
ironic turn seemed a fitting response to doubts about truth and

progress.
484 Ku¯ kai
history, art, architecture, linguistics, and education. Ku¯kai
argued that every human being is in principle capable of
‘attaining enlightenment in this very existence’, on the
grounds of a sophisticated synthesis of ideas from the four
major schools of Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism that had been
transmitted to Japan. He held that through practice of the
‘three mysteries’ of meditation, mantra (shingon, ‘true
word’), and mudra (hand gesture), one can proceed
through the ‘ten stages’ to the ultimate realization of one’s
identity with Maha¯vairocana ( Japanese, Dainichi Nyorai),
primary embodiment of the cosmic Buddha. g.r.p.
Ku¯kai: Major Works, tr. with an account of his life and a study of
his thought by Yoshito S. Hakeda (New York, 1972).
Lacan, Jacques (1901–81). French psychoanalyst whose
riddling style and heterodox (though, as he would have it,
scrupulously faithful) reading of Freud have generated
numerous controversies and splits within the analytic
movement over the past thirty years. Lacan’s chief
claim—drawing on the linguistics of Saussure and Jakob-
son—is that the unconscious is literally ‘structured like a
language’, so that Freud’s somewhat vague terminology
of (e.g.) psychic ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’ can be
rendered more precise by translation into the equivalent
rhetorical terms, ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’. In which
case reason is no longer master in its own house but sub-
ject to all the lures and slippages of a language caught up in
the toils of desire, or the endless ‘defiles of the signifier’.
Thus for Descartes’s formula *Cogito, ergo sum Lacan sub-

stitutes his own rendition: ‘cogito, ergo sum’ ubi cogito, ibi
non sum, or ‘Where I think “I think, therefore I am”, that is
where I am not’. c.n.
J. Lacan, Écrits, tr. A. Sheridan (London, 1977).
Lakatos, Imre (1922–74). Born in Hungary. His doctoral
study in Cambridge produced Proofs and Refutations, a
multilogue embodying a fallibilist epistemology for math-
ematics in which mathematical proofs—and what they
prove—are negotiated. After appointment at the London
School of Economics, debates with Popper, Feyerabend,
and Kuhn helped to forge his Methodology of Scientific
Research Programmes (MSRP). According to Lakatos,
Popper’s naïve falsificationism fails on two counts: the
logical Duhem problem, and the mismatch between falsi-
ficationist prescription and the history of science. As the
chief criterion of scientific success and the neutral judge
among competing methodological principles, Lakatos
substituted, in the place of truth or truth-likeness, a
historically characterized notion of progress. n.c.
t.chi.
r.f.h.
*fallibilism; methodology.
I. Lakatos, Proofs and Refutations (Cambridge, 1976).
—— Collected Papers, i and ii, ed. J. Worrall and G. Currie
(Cambridge, 1978).
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste, chevalier de (1744–1829).
French biologist and evolutionary theorist, now
principally remembered for his belief that the organs and
habits of animals can be altered or newly produced in law-
like ways by pressure from the environment, and that

organs and habits thus acquired by individuals are then
transmitted to their offspring by hereditary means. The
contrary Darwinian belief, that characteristics acquired by
environmental pressure cannot be genetically transmit-
ted, is now generally accepted by biologists. Nevertheless,
well before Darwin Lamarck had taken the step of seeing
the evolution of species as being governed by lawlike
processes, even if—again unlike Darwin—he saw the law
of *evolution as having a natural drive towards perfec-
tion. Nevertheless, human *culture, opposed to biological
development, can be seen in broadly Lamarckian terms,
as involving the transmission through tradition and edu-
cation of what has been learned in the experience of earlier
generations. a.o’h.
*determinism; perfectionism.
H. G. Cannon, Lamarck and Modern Genetics (New York, 1960).
La Mettrie, Julien Offray de (1709–51). French physician
and materialist philosopher, reviled in his own time for his
professed *atheism, *determinism, and *hedonism, but an
important figure in the history of *materialism. He fol-
lowed the mechanical approach to medicine of his teacher
Boerhaave, and developed a purely naturalistic, empiricist
approach to living organisms, including human beings.
He regarded his position as an extension of the worth-
while mechanistic aspect of Descartes’s philosophy, while
abandoning Cartesian *dualism and *rationalism. He first
suggested the physiological character of mental processes
in Histoire naturelle de l’âme (1745) and developed the doc-
trine in an even more resolutely mechanistic-materialist
framework in his most famous work, L’Homme machine

(Machine Man (1747)). However, he saw matter as essen-
tially active and sensitive, rather than inert. Once
neglected, La Mettrie can now be seen as a pioneer of
scientific psychology. a.bel.
Julien Offray de La Mettrie, Machine Man and Other Writings
(Cambridge, 1996).
Kathleen Wellman, La Mettrie: Medicine, Philosophy, and Enlighten-
ment (Durham, NC, 1992).
L
language. What do we share when we share a language?
Just as we count species by asking whether two candidates
for the same species can interbreed, so we count lan-
guages by asking whether bringing speakers of them
together breeds communication. By such a measure the
world contains at least 4,500 natural languages, or lan-
guages naturally learned and spoken. Africa contains
between 700 and 3,000; New Guinea languages alone
number around 1,100, divided into some sixty families (it
is the task of anthropological linguistics to bring a theor-
etical taxonomy into the superficial chaos). The imprecision
of counting reflects phonetic, grammatical, and semantic
lapses from perfect identity.
It is not surprising that our ability to speak together
breaks down when we think of exotic and alien ways of liv-
ing, perhaps involving different categories and different
understanding of what is salient and what is unimportant.
But if your experience and your reactions to the world,
and your system of beliefs, is different from mine, as it will
be, to what extent does superficial sameness of language
mask difference of meaning? Exposure to a different gen-

eration or gender can be enough to make me ask if you can
read my words as I intend them. But is not the way I intend
them itself a function of something I already share with
you, namely an identical linguistic inheritance? It is not as
though my intentions are fixed points for me, independ-
ently of the linguistic expression I find it natural to give
them. We ought not to think of sharing a language as a
kind of accidental coincidence of idiolects (privately
owned and defined languages). But how many factors
must we take into account before declaring that we know
what someone else means—and, for that matter, is it any
easier to know what we ourselves mean, or meant a little
while ago?
Recoiling from linguistic solipsism we may hope for
uniformities: a God’s-eye point of view from which all lan-
guages are means to one end. It would be nice if one’s
home tongue—twenty-first-century English, say—con-
tained the resources to say everything that can be said in
any language; indeed, some philosophers have argued
that if we cannot interpret or translate a candidate back
into our own tongue, then we can dismiss its claims to be
a language at all. This is best diagnosed as a quaint misuse
of the *verification principle (for there is after all the rather
less colonial alternative of going out and learning the new
language, rather than learning to translate it back into
one’s home terms).
The conceptual difficulties in thinking about language
become vivid when we consider marginal and unusual
candidates. Are the signalling systems of animals properly
regarded as languages? If a chimpanzee can associate

sounds with things, and put sounds together in simple
ways, is this acquiring the essence of linguistic behaviour?
Is a computer language a kind of language? Does it make
sense to posit a *‘language of thought’ or background lan-
guage, like the machine code of a computer, whereby
human beings process their first natural language? And is
there a language of music, or art, or clothes? These
questions are not so much troublesome in themselves,
since we might just posit a criterion that marginal cases do
or do not meet. The problem is that we cannot discern a
principle. We are not sure what status any definition or
criterion of linguistic behaviour could deserve. And quite
apart from difficult cases other problems make them-
selves felt. Is it an essential aspect of language that it is used
to communicate? If so, how do we explain soliloquy and
solitary verbal play, and can we rule out a priori the possi-
bility of a Robinson Crusoe from birth, who yet manages
to symbolize things to himself? But if not, what other
explanation can there be for such a specialized adaptation
as linguistic competence? s.w.b.
*discourse; meaning.
G. Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories
Reveal about the Mind (Chicago, 1987).
W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960).
language, artificial: see artificial language.
language, formal: see formal language.
language, history of the philosophy of. The history of
philosophical thinking about *language is not easily separ-
ated from the history of logic, nor indeed from the entire
history of philosophy. There is no division between

thought about the major philosophical categories—
knowledge, truth, meaning, reason—and thought about
the language used to express those categories. Further-
more, many problems can be phrased either metaphysi-
cally (Are species real or conventional? Is the number five
an object?) or as problems in the philosophy of language
(Are words for species controlled by distinctions in nature
or by conventions? Does the numeral ‘five’ function like a
name?). There is therefore no major philosopher or school
that has not had some doctrine about the relationship
between mind and language, and language and the world.
In surveying such a history it is possible to concentrate
upon the detailed grain and textures separating the prob-
lems of one period from those of another, but only at the
cost of staying blind to the permanence of the great prob-
lems, and the ways in which modern doctrines and
approaches are anticipated indefinitely earlier. In this brief
survey I concentrate on the continuities rather than the
differences.
It is possible that Parmenides attached to his meta-
physical *monism the doctrine that nothing false can be said
or thought, on the grounds that sentences serve as names
of states of affairs; names with no bearers are meaningless;
but a false sentence fails to name anything; hence no false
sentence has meaning. If the argument raises more aston-
ishment than conviction, it also suggests the problems
that prove permanently difficult: What is the relationship
between a sentence and the state of affairs that it reports or
that would make it true? How is a sentence for which
there is no such state of affairs different from a name

without a bearer? Are these always meaningless?
The *Sophists, who began the process of grammatical
486 language
categorization, were centrally concerned with ‘the cor-
rectness of words’, or the relationship that words need to
bear to things to become instruments of knowledge. They
were also concerned with understanding: thus Gorgias is
presented as having raised the sceptical trouble that when
I give you a word that is all that I do: there is no transfer of
one and the same idea from my mind to yours and, even if
there were, there is a gap between my idea and the fea-
tures and qualities of things it may seem to represent. Ver-
sions of this problem reappear in the twentieth century in
concerns of the later work of Wittgenstein, in the prob-
lems with translation emphasized by W. V. Quine, and in
the general scepticism about determinate *meaning char-
acteristic of *post-modernism.
Plato’s dialogue Cratylus (c.390 bc) is the first general
discussion of the role of convention in language. Socrates
sees clearly that even if it is arbitrary or conventional
whether we use one word or another for horses (one soci-
ety may call them ‘hippos’ and another ‘equus’ with equal
propriety) there is something else that it would be possible
to be right or wrong about. It is not arbitrary or conven-
tional that this particular animal is a horse, or that it is cor-
rect to call it a horse, nor is it conventional that there exists
a similarity or form that horses share but cows, for
example, do not. The distinction here may be between a
word, whose association with anything is a matter of human
usage and convention, and a concept or kind, whose appli-

cation to things is not conventional but a matter of truth
or falsity. Plato embodies this in the concept of an ‘ideal
name’, which in more modern terms may be thought of as
a correctly framed concept, conforming to the nature of
things in the way that classifying substances as liquid or
solid does, whereas classifying a substance as phlogiston,
or classifying a complex phenomenon as brotherly love or
freedom may not. Plato is dealing here with the fact that
only an ‘adequate’ or correctly formed and stocked lan-
guage can be a vehicle for framing and communicating
knowledge. The demand is for a correspondence whereby
thought reflects the nature of its objects. The ideal this
represents surfaces throughout the subsequent history of
philosophy, for example in the goal of finding an ideal lan-
guage, found in Leibniz, Russell, and *Logical Positivism.
In Indian philosophy the Mı¯ma¯m
.
sa¯ school celebrates the
sacred correctness of Sanskrit, as opposed to the Buddhist
emphasis on the conventional and possibly misleading
role of language in knowledge. Especially in the Sophist
Plato also gave extended discussions of the possibility of
intelligible talk about the non-existent, and showed some
recognition of the difference between stating something
and naming something, the crucial distinction overlooked
(or perhaps mishandled) in the Parmenidean argument
against falsity.
Among the many problems bequeathed by Plato was
that of *universals (forms), or unchanging abstractions
which make up the proper objects of human knowledge:

partly the forms are an answer to the problem that,
according to Aristotle, reduced the Sophist Cratylus to
wagging his finger, which was that capturing the
ever-changing flux in words seemed like attempting to
map a cloud. Aristotle saw (as, in some passages, Plato did)
that the Forms are at best a stopgap, for it must be a mis-
take to try to explain what different things have in com-
mon by postulating a further thing to which they bear
some relation. His naturalistic response to Plato’s other
world of unchanging Forms was to locate the universal in
things, or in other words to identify it with the shared
common properties lying in particulars. However, the
suggestion opens the road to a more thoroughgoing nom-
inalism, according to which everything that exists is par-
ticular: the problem is to reconcile this sensible,
hard-headed view with the need for general terms if
thought is to take place at all. Aristotle’s vast contribution
to logic and grammar should not conceal another funda-
mental idea that he brought to the philosophy of lan-
guage. This is that words work by being symptoms or
signs of mental states of the user (he also thought that
written words are similarly only symbols of spoken
words: the earliest example of the ‘phonocentric’ tradition
railed against in *deconstructionism). Aristotle distin-
guished names from predicates, and he saw that only a
complex sentence was capable of truth and falsity. How-
ever, his account of the way in which a sequence of terms
comes to be true or false remains unclear, partly because
the basis of the difference between names and predicates
remains insecure. In the syllogistic logic that descends

from Aristotle through medieval philosophy the terms are
common nouns (man, horse) that are thought of as
referring to men or horses, but the idea breaks down when
we ask which men or horses are referred to in phrases such
as ‘some men’, or ‘no horses’, or in sentences such as
‘Henry is not a horse’.
It was left to the *Stoics to distinguish clearly the neces-
sary concept of a lekton or proposition, as well as that of the
sentence (the Stoics also recognized different kinds of
lekta, corresponding to questions, commands, promises,
and so on, so they may be said to have anticipated the the-
ory of *illocutionary force). However, propositions or
lekta enjoy an uneasy relationship with other things. They
are distinguished from the sequences of words, or sen-
tences, that express them, but also from the sensations or
images that loom up in conscious life, and from the states
of affairs whose existence makes them true and whose
non-existence makes them false. Their shadowy nature
made them easy targets for both *Epicureans and ancient
*Sceptics. Sextus Empiricus, for example, uses the
standard modern anti-Platonist argument that abstract
entities are not capable of having causal consequences; in
which case they can neither ‘indicate nor make evident’
things, for to do this entails having effects on the person
apprehending them; hence they are theoretically useless
and should play no part in a naturalistic science of the
mind. The argument applies to both Platonic and Aris-
totelian universals. There are only words and things, or
even perhaps only words and sensations. The main prob-
lem such sensationalism faces is that in such a world noth-

ing seems to represent anything else: meaning is
language, history of the philosophy of 487
demystified only by being removed altogether. Although
both Epicureans and Stoics made moves to fend off the
catastrophe, the dilemma that the philosophy of language
either makes use of mysterious, abstract, universal objects
of thought or descends to the natural and the empirical
but loses meaning altogether continues to dominate con-
temporary approaches to language.
Platonism about universals has an other-worldly
flavour congenial to Christian thinkers such as St Augus-
tine, but medieval thought tended either to Aristotelian-
ism (centrally in St Thomas Aquinas) or to the nominalism
of fourteenth-century thinkers influenced by William of
Ockham. In particular Aquinas’s moderate suggestion
that a thing might be singular or universal according to dif-
ferent ways of taking it is mercilessly attacked by Ockham:
anything whatsoever is one, single thing. But the
medieval emphasis on the links between grammar and
logic on the one hand and logic and reason on the other
make nominalism particularly hard to stomach: utter-
ances considered as physical particulars are not the subject
of reason or logic. However, the medieval period saw the
first major work in logic since Aristotle, with close atten-
tion paid to such problems as those of intensionality and
the semantic paradoxes.
The seventeenth-century turn away from scholastic
logic saw a surprising unanimity, stretching from Francis
Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and above all John Locke in
Britain to Arnauld and the Port Royal Logic in France, that

Aristotle was right in supposing that words were the
*signs of ideas, and ideas the signs of things. Equally char-
acteristic of the period was the belief that while language
was a dangerous medium, apt to distort and obscure ideas
as much as to transmit them, it could be refined or
reinvented in a form free from these dangers. Partly this
was the result of recognizing that the developing sciences
needed to find languages and notations adequate to their
different tasks. This concern is later echoed in the nine-
teenth-century recognition of the intimate connection
between an apparently notational advance (e.g. finding
arabic numerals or Leibniz’s notation for the calculus) and
a major conceptual advance (learning the importance of
the number zero, being able to differentiate). Book iii of
Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding is the most
thoroughgoing late seventeenth-century attack on the
problem. Words become substitutes for ideas, and in
order to avoid the danger of being taken in by empty
sounds without meaning, we must form the habit of sub-
stituting ideas, the real substance of thought, for words
whenever possible. Locke’s immense influence halted
serious philosophy of language, arguably until Kant,
although a small rearguard action was fought by Berkeley.
For while Berkeley often subscribes to the conventional
view that words without ideas give us only ‘the husk of sci-
ence rather than the thing’ he does acknowledge ‘that
there may be another use of words, besides that of mark-
ing and suggesting distinct ideas, to wit, the influencing
our conduct and actions; which may be done either by
forming rules for us to act by, or by raising certain

passions, dispositions, and emotions in our minds’
(Alciphron, bk. vii). Berkeley had here the ingredients for the
later ‘use’-based or pragmatist account of meaning, but
can scarcely be said to have freed himself from the Lock-
ean or Aristotelian model. A similar struggle to retain the
meaning of words whilst realizing that there are no ideas
associated with them can be seen in Hume’s explorations
of causation, identity, and the self. Berkeley’s other quar-
rel with Locke is his rejection of any abstraction in favour
of particular ideas standing for other particular things.
Here he is later echoed by Bentham, who considered all
abstractions as fictions, with meaningful talk confined to
reference to concrete situations (too concrete, however,
and we end up back with Cratylus, reduced to silence).
It was left to Kant to make the substantial break with
the empiricist equation between understanding and the
passive possession of mental phantasms. Kant not only
repudiated the Lockean theory of ideas, but reintroduced
the needed concentration on the nature of judgement,
with its own forms and categories, presuppositions, and
claims to objectivity. He also provided the terms within
which much later philosophy of language became framed:
*analytic versus synthetic, *a priori versus a posteriori,
*rules versus descriptions. But above all it is Kant’s sover-
eign concern with the question how judgement of such-
and-such a sort is possible that marks a reconnection to
pre-seventeenth-century priorities, and a heralding of
later ones.
Nevertheless, the Kantian judgement might still serve
as Aristotle’s intermediary, represented by words and

itself representing things. Indeed, the other elements in
Kant that led to the triumph of German *idealism also pro-
vided an historical matrix within which Kantian judge-
ments functioned, rather like the Empiricists’ ideas, as
fairly self-standing elements of consciousness compared
with which everything else was problematic. Nineteenth-
century idealism severs any connection between language
and the world, at least if the world is conceived of as dis-
tinct from thought. Language and thought became
entirely self-contained in a kind of solipsistic unity (as they
arguably do in the deconstructionist view that nothing lies
outside the text, since any attempt to correlate a text with
anything else merely produces more text). On such views
the main apparent casualty is truth, which stops being a
correspondence between language and the world, but
becomes either the unity and completeness of the whole
structure of judgements (the *coherence theory of truth),
or the use words have in directing effective action (the
*pragmatic theory of truth).
It was Frege who reconnected language with truth
without an intermediary psychology. Frege’s revolution
in logic is not the issue here (*logic; *quantifier; *variable)
but the associated belief that nothing ‘psychologistic’
gives us anything essential to meaning, which resides
rather in the way a term or more fundamentally a sen-
tence is employed in the world: the way it presents things
as being. The connection that electrifies sentences is not
one between them and ideas or even judgements, but one
488 language, history of the philosophy of
between them and their ‘truth-conditions’. The task of a

systematic theory of meaning of a language (a semantic
theory) is that of categorizing the expressions it contains,
and describing in a systematic fashion the way in which
the truth-conditions of sentences are built from the contri-
butions of their components. Frege’s description of this
goal, and his brilliant application of the ideas to the lan-
guage of mathematics, was the dominating impulse
behind modern analytical philosophy, and the concern
with the syntax and semantics of the languages of science
that characterized Logical Positivism. However, on the
topic of the human user of the language Frege is less forth-
coming. He puts in place the idea of sentences as having
objective senses, expressing thoughts that are grasped by
those using them. But the story is entirely schematic, rem-
iniscent of the Stoic doctrine of lekta, and Frege tells us
nothing of the nature of this grasp, nor how to answer the
old objections to the use of such abstract entities in the
theory of language.
It is usually said that twentieth-century philosophy of
language began with the eclipse of Hegelian idealism, and
the triumph of *realism. This is a half-truth that ignores
the large place that both idealism and *pragmatism played
throughout the period. Pragmatism in particular
promises to circumvent the old opposition between the
idealist stasis of ideas-staying-in-the-head and the
unargued realist correspondence between elements of
language and elements of the world. The ingredient it
adds is that of words answering a purpose, or playing a
role in a practice or technique (ideas present in Berkeley,
as was seen above, and reintroduced in the later work of

Wittgenstein). James saw the correspondence between
true judgement and reality not in terms of an abstract cor-
respondence but as a dynamic control: true judgements
are those that work, truths are what we must take account
of if we are to survive. One might see some of James’s con-
cern with practice as foreshadowed too by Nietzsche’s
understanding of the political dimension of language use:
by naming and categorizing we do not do something prac-
tically neutral, but privilege social attitudes and struc-
tures. Dictating thought is also dictating action. In turn
there is a connection back to Kant’s emphasis on the pri-
macy of practical judgement, and the political turn that
this idea is given in Hegel and Marx.
In the twentieth century the political and other prac-
tical dimensions of meaning were frequently regarded as a
slightly disreputable secondary element, outside the pure
theory of representation. For, going entirely the other
way, Russell and Wittgenstein looked for an abstract cor-
respondence between language and the world, and
developed the application of Frege’s logic to problems of
language in terms of a structural resemblance between a
sentence and that of which it is a picture (the *truth-
condition). Their work culminated in Wittgenstein’s Trac-
tatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which the curiously disembod-
ied atomic constituents of language stand in relations that
mirror the structure of the facts that make up the world.
Wittgenstein’s rejection of any association between
psychology and the philosophy of language went beyond
anything to which the more traditional Russell could sub-
scribe. Russell’s own version of *logical atomism located

the atoms to which basic terms corresponded in an uneasy
space between the objective world and the subjective rep-
resentation of it. Atomism was, however, always a fragile
flower, and amongst the hostile winds blowing over it was
the work on language done by Ferdinand de Saussure,
showing that the phonemes out of which spoken language
is made could not be considered as individual, physically
definable pulses, but exist only in a system of ‘differences’;
the same point applied to semantics quickly suggests that
no sentence maintains its own private relationship with
reality, but that the system as a whole must take priority
(as, indeed, the idealists had always maintained). Never-
theless, and in spite of the short-lived adherence of its
author, the Tractatus in turn gave birth to the fundamental
positivist belief that the logic or syntax of language dic-
tates the solution to all other epistemological or meta-
physical concerns with it. Either a philosophical problem
was solved by essentially Fregean semantics, or it was
shown to be a pseudo-problem. Problems in the philoso-
phy of language thus collapse into internal problems
about the syntax and semantics of language, thought of as
a pre-existent structure. But the foundations of this opti-
mism crumbled on three ancient rocks. Firstly, it went
along with no coherent story connecting language with
experience. Secondly, it had no description of the status of
logic and reason itself: the Fregean advance within logic
had not produced a parallel advance in the question of the
status of logic. And thirdly, it could produce no theory of
the proper domain of the use of reason and experience
together, certifying even the simplest movements of sci-

entific thought. The need to reintroduce the excluded
issues of experience, understanding, and the place of lan-
guage use in the context of a set of practical questions was
constantly urged against the Frege–Russell tradition by
writers such as R. G. Collingwood. Although the possibil-
ity of external theory of this kind has been doubted, the
authority given to the criticism by the later Wittgenstein
means that contemporary works in the philosophy of lan-
guage may bear as much resemblance to the idealist H. H.
Joachim’s The Nature of Truth (1906) or to the pragmatist
William James’s The Meaning of Truth (1909) as they do to
the founding works of analytical philosophy. s.w.b.
There is no single specialist work on the history of the philosophy
of language. But as well as general histories of philosophy,
readers may wish to consult:
A. J. P. Kenny, Medieval Philosophy (Oxford, 2000), ch. 3.
W. and M. Kneale, The Development of Logic (Oxford, 1960).
W. Künne, Conceptions of Truth (Oxford, 2003).
B. Mates, Stoic Logic (Berkeley, Calif., 1953).
language, knowledge of. Competent use of a language
depends on knowing a language, and the nature of this
knowledge has been the subject of dispute amongst
philosophers. Some conceive knowledge of language as a
practical skill, a matter of know-how, like riding a bicycle
language, knowledge of 489