Philosophy Stack Exchange
Philosophy Stack Exchange

Questions tagged [language]

228 questions
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Since words are defined in terms of other words in dictionaries, leading to infinite loops, does it mean natural languages are meaningless?

Since words are defined in terms of other words in dictionaries, leading to infinite loops, does it mean natural languages are meaningless? Are infinitely recursive definitions valid? If we visualize the relationship graph of a dictionary, where…
xwb
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Does the success of AI (Large Language Models) support Wittgenstein's position that "meaning is use"?

By 'success' we think of current AI/LLMs capacity of producing text that is regarded as coherent, informative, even convincing, by human readers [see for instance Spitale et al. and Salvi et al.] Wittgenstein's position is For a large class of…
acb1516
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If God is good, why does "Acts of God" refer to bad things?

I've often wondered about the phrase "Acts of God", which is used in legal and insurance writing to mean disasters like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires... What are we thinking with a God that routinely does such things when the usual idea…
Scott Rowe
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Is there a name for the argumentative tactic where you play dumb and ask for extreme simplification?

My day job is research in economics. In economics seminar culture, a common way to demolish the speaker is to play dumb and say "I don't understand what you are saying", implying that the speaker should try to explain in simple terms what they are…
kmf
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Is there a point to arguing about the meaning of words?

Firstly, I should mention that I am not sure, whether this the right place to ask such a question, but I am trying it anyway. Furthermore, one could say I come from a mathematics background and I am not familiar with common terminology in philosophy…
Stefan Perko
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Does languange somehow filter what we can know?

I've read a proposition somewhere: That our languange acts as a filter, allowing us to know certain things while making it impossible to know the rest(1). It seems that mathematics has some things like this, certain phenomena could only be explained…
Red Banana
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Is mathematics a language?

Galileo gave the metaphor that the natural world is written in the language of mathematics, but is mathematics even a language?
Geremia
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If "the limits of my language are the limits of my world", then how can it be that "what can be shown, cannot be said"?

I'm trying to understand Wittgenstein, but two of his most oft quoted statements seem to me to be implying contradicting things. I understand that later Wittgenstein did refute a lot of his earlier ideas, but these statements both come from the…
Dylan
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Asking a genie for more wishes

I just saw this SMBC comic. The second picture looked really promising, but as far as I see it, this attorney screwed up. With his second wish it doesn't matter whether you say wish or splork, so effectively the genie was forbidding to splork for…
Jack
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Is music just another language?

In this video (starting around 00:28:30) the interviewer, Bryan Magee, and Noam Chomsky discuss musical composition as a form of thinking without language. But it seems trivial to me that music is a language like any other: a set of sound symbols…
Alexander S King
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Why are conditionals with false antecedents considered true?

I don't understand what conceptual sense this scenario makes, or what the motivation behind the decision to make conditionals with a false antecedent true was. Can anyone help me understand this? Also, I have a related but ultimately separate…
IgnorantCuriosity
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Why are languages commonly structured as trees?

I could define a language as a collection of symbols or elements, with rules for putting them together. When I say "putting them together", it sounds like there is only one way to do that. In other words, we don't have multiple kinds of…
Julius Hamilton
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What do they call philosophers in China?

The English word "philosopher" comes from the Greek, and literally means "lover of wisdom." But what is the literal translation of the analogous term in Chinese? (There's more to this question than idle curiosity --I'm interested in how other…
Chris Sunami
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What is the difference between the "is" of predication and the "is" of identity?

What is the difference between these, the "is" of predication and the "is" of identity? For example, when I say, "my pet is a cat", am I using "is" as an identity or as a predicate?
Antonios Sarikas
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Could a programming language be considered as a language?

This question might seem like it answers itself, but I urge you to consider the possibilities and the impact this could have on society. As a systems engineer, programming is more common to me than my "native" language - English. My understanding is…
Kraang Prime
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