Language plays a central role in human life: much that we do depends on it. We would like to know how it can perform these tasks. What is it that we know, when we know a language? What is communication? What is meaning? Can animals have a language, in the same way humans do? What are the essential properties of a language? What is the relationship between the language ability and languages?

The six general topics we will discuss are: Reference and Meaning, Speech and Action, Meaning and Truth, Knowledge of Language, Meanings and How they Combine, and Non-Literal Meaning.

A history of "middle-aged" analytic philosophy. This is the period after Wittgenstein's Tractatus up to the senility of analytic philosophy (mid-1960s). Some have even said analytic philosophy died at this time. We'll investigate why people have said that. Readings will include works by Russell, by some of the logical positivists, by some of the ordinary-language philosophers, and by some critics of ordinary-language philosophy. The course will focus on the philosophy of language, the metaphysics, the epistemology, of the movements, and the meta-philosophical topics of what is the purpose of philosophy and how should it be pursued.

This is an in-depth study of two related topics in the philosophy of language: generics and mass terms. There are a number of very puzzling semantic-pragmatic issues that have prevented researchers from giving an adequate description of the semantics for these topics. These issues range from the philosophical (what sort of entities should we admit into our ontology?) to the logical (how can we maintain the truth of a generic statement while simultaneously acknowledging exceptions? How can we reason about stuff as opposed to things?) to the psychological (how do people reason using prototypical information? What makes people think of things rather than the stuff of which they are made?).