Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to introduce some of the main figures in modern philosophy of language, start with Gottlob Frege's seminal papers from the early 1890s in which modern – post-Aristotelian – logic is for the first time brought to bear on the study of language. A direct connection between the philosophy of truth and the philosophy of language is forged by Frege's influential idea that the sense of a sentence is its truth-condition, and that since understanding a sentence is a matter of knowing its sense, understanding a sentence is a matter of knowing its truth-conditions. The book considers the arguments of one of the twentieth century's great sceptics about the notion of meaning, Willard van Orman Quine. It looks at sceptical arguments about rule-following and meaning developed in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, at least as seen through eyes of Saul Kripke.