The Philosophy of Words

Words are ubiquitous within our lives. Given this, it is unsurprising that a huge and diverse range of philosophical issues arise when we think about words. Within metaphysics, there has been a resurgence of interest in the ontology of words, asking questions about the individuation conditions for words and their ontological status. Words have also been of principle importance to the development of semantic theory in the last 150 years, investigating the notion of a word, word meaning, and the interaction between words, phrases, and sentences. There has also been extensive work in the philosophy of language on certain types of words. Studies abound on proper names, indexicals, definite articles, quantifiers, and so on. More recently, philosophers have also investigated slurs to try to understand the source of the offensive nature such words. Words are also important in the philosophy of mind, with research on the special role of language in the mind, the relationship between words and concepts, and the potential limits of non-linguistic thought. More broadly, the study of words in philosophy is inherently interdisciplinary, reflecting philosophical questions arising from empirical work on language in several scientific domains.

This range of issues and questions shows the philosophical importance of words. The primary purpose of this special issue on the philosophy of words is to be the first collection that brings together cutting-edge research on words in one place. The topics of papers fall within a number of subdisciplines in philosophy including, but not limited to, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind, as well as being of particular interest to other scientific fields including, at least, linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience.