ABSTRACT
Grayling (1982, pp. 173-5) distinguishes between the linguistic philosophers, whose interest is in solving complex philosophical problems by examining the use of certain terms in the language, and philosophers of language, whose interest is in the connection between the linguistic and the non-linguistic-between language and the world. This connection is held by philosphers of language to be crucial to the development of a theory of meaning, and this is their central concern. The philosophy of language is also known as philosophical semantics (compare SEMANTICS). To a philosopher of language, this entry will seem oversimplistic; but my aim is to make accessible to linguists some of the concepts and issues which have been central in the development of the discipline and which have influenced linguistics in more or less direct ways, or which linguistics could usefully draw on, but which are often ignored because they seem wrapped in complexities which are difficult to take on board by non-philosophers.
