Conclusion
We have traveled in this chapter along some of the main highways of the philosophy of language. Starting with Hobbes' Cartesian theory of language—which I showed was open to Wittgenstein's criticism of private languages—we moved on to Frege's theory of meaning.
Using some of Frege's ideas, we were then able to explore some of the basic questions of semantics, and we were able to connect these questions with the ideas of recent possible-world semantics. This led us to a consideration of some of the basic ideas of formal logic. Finally, I looked at the way Grice had suggested we could connect the ideas of semantic theory with the use of language in practical communication. Along the way I have introduced and explained many of the central ideas that are distinctive of philosophical discussion in the English-speaking world in the twentieth century. As I have already said, many of these ideas will continue to be useful as we discuss other questions.The last two chapters dealt with questions that arise because there are conscious beings in the universe, reflecting on their own situation, creatures with minds seeking to know the world they live in. They are questions that could be asked about any creatures whose minds were sufficiently complex, though of course there is no reason to suppose that they would be asked by every such creature. But the concerns of this chapter have focused on what is (so far as we know) a specifically human institution—language—even though there is nothing in principle that rules out the use of languages by other animals. In a sense, we have been focusing on questions that are more and more narrowly about our own cultural situation. Without minds, no knowledge; without knowledge (of meaning), no language. In the next chapter we shall consider an institution that is even more specific than language, one that occurs only in the modern era and only in certain cultures: science.
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