Platonism in Philosophy of Linguistics

Robert Stainton (University of Western Ontario), Christopher Viger (University of Western Ontario), Arthur Sullivan (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

The Analytic Philosophy Department, University of Warsaw invites you to a talk by Robert Stainton (Western University), Chris Viger (Western University) and Arthur Sullivan (Memorial University of Newfoundland) entitled "Platonism in Philosophy of Linguistics". The talk is on Thursday, JANUARY 19 at 15:00 CET (online), and is part of the department's biweekly seminar. Below you can find the abstract of the talk. The meeting will take place on Zoom.

All welcome!

ABSTRACT:

The main aim of this paper is to introduce Platonism in philosophy of linguistics. We first explain what Platonism says. In a nutshell, that is that languages and their parts (words, rules, etc.) are abstract objects, as opposed to being concrete material things or things inside the mind. A language or a word is more like the square root of two than like a rock or a sensation of a tickle. We then present some illustrative arguments in favour of Platonism, which aim to show that it is conceptually, methodologically and empirically superior to more familiar ontologies for languages. We continue to introduce the view by surveying rebuttals to these arguments and some objections to Platonism. Our own tentative stance, which emerges throughout the paper, is that Platonism has important lessons to teach us, but that it likely isn't the correct metaphysics for natural languages such as English and Polish.