What is, and to what end does one study, phenomenology of language?

Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne)

Most philosophy of language in the English-speaking philosophical world is theory-driven in the dual sense of being based on broadly Fregean theoretical assumptions about the primacy of propositions and of aspiring to a systematic theory of meaning. Drawing on some of the main ideas in my forthcoming book (Disclosing the World), the aim of this talk is to introduce an alternative, phenomenological approach to philosophy of language, guided principally by the requirement to describe language accurately from the perspective of speakers’ lived experience. Based on my reading of the early Heidegger I suggest that such a conception of language should be characterized by an overall picture of the role of language as ‘language-in-the-world’ and by a specific view of linguistic signs as conjoining presentational with pragmatic functions. I go on to indicate how the work of Merleau-Ponty and the late Wittgenstein can be used to enrich Heidegger’s overall picture and to explicate these two functions of linguistic signs. Finally, I consider how such a phenomenological approach might be expected to contribute to philosophical understanding of language more broadly, in particular how it challenges today’s dominant theory-driven approach.

Andrew Inkpin is a lecturer  in contemporary European philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His research centres on phenomenological approaches to meaning, particularly with regard to language, practice, pictures and the visual arts more generally (including connections between phenomenology and recent embodied-embedded cognitive science). His book Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language is forthcoming in MIT Press.