Philosophy of Language and Mind

Author's name: François Recanati

This book represents an introduction to contemporary philosophy of language. I have added the parentheses in connection with the additional title "And the Mind" because the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind form an indistinguishable whole, sometimes called "content theory" [or content theory], which aims to clarify the nature of the relations that representations, linguistic or mental, establish with non-linguistic or non-mental reality.

It has become a reality that, over the past quarter century, we have begun to observe a massive shift from the philosophy of language toward the philosophy of mind. As Martin Davis recently wrote in a journal with the telling title (Mind and Language), “Philosophers of language who existed in the 1960s became philosophers of mind in the 1980s and 1990s.” This shift is far from incomprehensible. Language and thought have so many commonalities that some of the results obtained through the study of language can be exploited from a psychological rather than a linguistic perspective, as was the case before. The idea that thought is very much like language is itself a central theme in the philosophy of mind.

* François Recanati