The article presents Charles Taylor's critical philosophy of language and it reviews his recent book on the human linguistic capacity.Critical philosophy of language is understood here as a broad (philosophical, social and political) perspective on language characterized by multifaceted concern with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in language use.The paper discusses Taylor's interest in language and philosophy of language, and focuses on his seminal distinction between the 'designative-instrumental' and 'constitutive-expressive' theories of language.In the former theory language is understood within the confi nes of Cartesian representational epistemology, whereas in the latter language constitutes meaning and shapes human experience (one of the features important for defi ning the critical approach to philosophy of language).

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie podstawowych zagadnień współczesnej filozofii języka (zwłaszcza w ujęciu analitycznym) oraz filozofii językoznawstwa i filozofii lingwistycznej, a także relacji między poszczególnymi dyscyplinami. Dla potrzeb niniejszej dyskusji językoznawstwo można określić jako systemowe badanie języka naturalnego, a filozofię języka jako systemowe badanie podstawowych pojęć związanych z naturą i właściwościami języka (zarówno języka naturalnego, jak i języków formalnych). Filozofia językoznawstwa, jako gałąź filozofii nauki, ma za swój przedmiot systemową refleksję nad teoriami językoznawczymi i metodami badań językoznawczych, natomiast filozofia lingwistyczna jest metodą lub techniką badania języka, również języka potocznego. W artykule dokonano również przeglądu zawartości wybranych encyklopedycznych i podręcznikowych pozycji poświęconych filozofii języka.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxvi1.01 This special issue of Semiotic Studies is devoted to proper names, and continues to some extent the line of research discussed in the contributions to the special issue of Organon F, 28(1), on names and fictions. Modes of existence of proper names pose interesting challenges and research problems for semiotics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of literature. Contributions to this issue concentrate mainly on fictional names, fictional discourse, and narrative fiction, but also on empty names, descriptive names, and names of institutions. The authors employ and compare different theoretical approaches, and the discussion may have important consequences for theories of meaning and reference, and for ontology.

This book highlights the legacy of the Lvov-Warsaw School in broadly understood contemporary philosophy of language. Fundamental methodological issues, important topics in syntax, semantics and pragmatics (such as modern Categorial Grammar, theories of truth, game-theoretical semantics, and argumentation theory) are tracked down to their origins in the Lvov-Warsaw School, and – the other way round – modern renderings of the ideas expressed by Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, Tadeusz Kotarbiński, Stanisław Leśniewski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Alfred Tarski, Kazimierz Twardowski, and other members of the School are presented. Among contributors there are philosophers, logicians, formal linguists and other specialists from France, Italy, Poland, and Spain.

Of the various disciplines which investigate different aspects of human language, this Handbook concentrates predominantly on philosophy of language (with some additional discussion of linguistic philosophy and philosophy of linguistics) and, to some necessary degree, also on linguistics. Linguistics, the scientific study of language, is concerned with theoretical and applied analyses of human natural language and with constructing appropriate levels of linguistic representation. Philosophy of language, on the other hand, provides philosophical investigations into the phenomenon of language in general, concentrating especially on the problems of meaning, reference, truth, and understanding. Linguistic philosophy is a philosophical method, an approach to philosophy.

The following text is a review of Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language , edited by Sebastian Sunday Grève and Jakub Mácha (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. ISBN 978-1-137-47253-3. xxi + 314 pages). Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language is a collection of eleven essays investigating the creative potential of language within Wittgensteinian philosophy language. The essays are grouped into five sections, and cover a whole range of issues including language creativity, conceptions of art, ethics, metaphysics, but also Wittgenstein’s comments on Gödel’s proof, and Alfred Loos’s influence on Wittgenstein.

This article discusses the notion of paradigms and its applicability in linguistics. After reviewing relevant literature, the article assumes a broad understanding of the term, influenced by the work of Kuhn and classical approach to paradigms, Goodman on ways of worldmaking, Chalmers on argumentation and progress in philosophy, and Santana on ontologies of language. The author postulates the existence of three possible paradigms in the study of language: the formal paradigm (where language is considered to be a formal object), the mentalist paradigm (language as an instrument of thought), and the communicative paradigm (language as an instrument of communication). The article concentrates on generative grammar, developed over the years by Noam Chomsky, and demonstrates how generativism changed in its approach to language and grammar, exemplifying both the formal paradigm (early generative grammar, culminating with Syntactic Structures), and the mentalist paradigm (manifest already in Aspects of the Theory of Syntax and Cartesian Linguistics), with its recent focus on biolinguistics.

The article presents Charles Taylor’s critical philosophy of language and it reviews his recent book on the human linguistic capacity. Critical philosophy of language is understood here as a broad (philosophical, social and political) perspective on language characterized by multifaceted concern with the linguistic and cognitive mechanisms involved in language use. The paper discusses Taylor’s interest in language and philosophy of language, and focuses on his seminal distinction between the ‘designative-instrumental’ and ‘constitutive-expressive’ theories of language. In the former theory language is understood within the confi nes of Cartesian representational epistemology, whereas in the latter language constitutes meaning and shapes human experience (one of the features important for defi ning the critical approach to philosophy of language).

This is a review article of a recently published guide to the philosophy of language, Przewodnik po filozofii jezyka (J. Odrowąz-Sypniewska (ed.), Wydawnictwo WAM, Krakow 2016). The article presents this publication against a background of other monographs and guides devoted to the topic of the contemporary philosophy of language which have been published in English. It aims at highlighting the main issues discussed by this philosophy, as well as its relation to linguistics.

Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was a prominent Italian Marxist philosopher and politician, co-founder of the Italian Communist Party, an influential thinker and critic of contemporary politics, society and culture. The 21st century has seen a strong revival of interest in his work, especially in the use of Gramscian concepts in a wide variety of disciplines (from literary and cultural studies, translation theory, social studies, and international relations theory to political philosophy, history of Marxism);12 at the same time important introductory companions and guides to his work and achievement have been published. This review is concerned with two such introductory publications: George Hoare and Nathan Sperber’s An Introduction to Antonio Gramsci. His Life, Thought