Language

Key terms

What language is

Where it comes from

Its art and its faults

Beyond common speech

Words as signs

How does a sound come to mean anything? A word is a sound or mark that stands for a thought or a thing, and these readings ask whether it does so by nature or by agreement. They also ask how children come to use words at all.

4 readings

The Cratylus is Plato’s dialogue on the “correctness of names”, and in this opening exchange Hermogenes puts to Socrates the view that names rest on “convention and agreement”. The dialogue sets Hermogenes against Cratylus, who holds that names belong to things by nature. The passage sits under this term as the conventional side of that dispute.

Chapter 1 of Aristotle’s On Interpretation (De Interpretatione), the second treatise of the logical works, opens with “spoken words” as “symbols of mental experience” and “written words” as symbols of spoken words. The scholastics took the passage as the starting point for their doctrine of signs, and Aquinas cites it in the Summa Theologica. It sits under this term for the order it gives to speech, writing and thought.

In Book I of the Confessions, Augustine looks back on infancy and describes how he “learned to speak”, by cries, “motions of my limbs” and the “signs” of his elders’ wills. The Confessions, written in the last years of the fourth century, is addressed to God throughout. Wittgenstein later opened his Investigations with a quotation from this book. The passage sits under this term as a first account of how speech is acquired.

In Part I, chapter 4 of Leviathan, “Of Speech”, Hobbes gives “the generall use of Speech” as the transfer of “Mentall Discourse” into “Verbal”, and counts four uses. The chapter belongs to his account of man in the first part of the work, published in 1651. It sits under this term for its list of what speech is for.