Review of Lycan's Introduction to the Philosophy of Language

Philosophy of Language: A Contemporary Introduction by William G. Lycan is a pretty good book if you want to get the basic idea of what is going on in contemporary philosophy of language. Contemporary philosophy of language started a little over 100 years ago, and has completely dominated the field of philosophy in the English speaking world. The offshoots are Philosophy of Logic, mind, mathematics, and science.

Lycan gives us the basics that we would need to really have a good idea of where the fiels stands, and what issues the practitioners take to be important. The classic questions of reference and meaning are taken up. The questions of reference is basically what is the relationship that our words have to the world that they talk about. How does the word "cat" come to relate to a cat? The question of meaning is: What does it mean for a word to have a meaning (as opposed to being meaningless), and what is our standing for ascribing meaning to some word.

The book takes up questions of pragmatics as well. It also refers to "the dark side" of philosophy of philosophy of language and takes up questions of metaphor. He really does sort of gloss over it perhaps unfairly, but then again, so does every other philosopher of language. (A friend of mine happens to study this, and I wish metaphor were not as maligned as it is.)

Overall I thought it was a pretty good book if you just want a basic outline of the theories and standard objections to the basic problems in the philosophy of language.

My only real criticisms are that it seems that the arguments are not presented comprehensively enough, which is understandable if you want to produce a good book in under 250 pages. But what annoyed me about the book is the style. Lycan obviously tries. He makes real attempts to be a cute, but erudite writer. He is not cute, and his erudition appears phony. His examples are not funny, despite the fact that he is obviously trying very hard, and frankly I do not think the book would have been less interesting if the examples were more vanilla and less obscure. The fact that he knows the first woman who won some Irish prize or other does not impress me. The fact that I have to sit and think about this while I am trying to keep a long chain of reasoning in my head annoys me. Few people can pull off what people like Hofstadter and Pinker do so well. Lycan does not. It is a shame that it marred this book.