ABSTRACT
Analysis of language has been a major endeavor of analytic philosophers. Philosophers, however, have not been the only investigators who have tried to analyze language and so, to set the framework for discussing philosophy of language, it is useful to indicate how philosophical analyses of language differ from those advanced in other cognitive science disciplines. Psychologists have been principally interested in the processes internal to the mind that make language use possible. In contrast, philosophers have viewed language as an object to be analyzed in its own right, without raising questions about internal psychological processes. In this respect, philosophy of language is closer to linguistics. But philosophical analyses also differ from those of linguists. Linguists have been principally interested in developing abstract characterizations of either the syntax or semantics of a language, and often have produced generative accounts that try to predict the infinite set of sentences that can arise in a language from a finite number of principles. Philosophers, on the other hand, have attempted to provide general accounts of what constitutes the meaning of linguistic expressions without trying to develop detailed theories to account for the types of útterances that appear in actual languages. Although the aims of philosophers, psychologists, and linguists are distinct, the endeavors are clearly related so that contributions in one discipline have been employed in the others.
