Language in Philosophy

One of the ideas that was mentioned during class lecture was the role language plays in the field of philosophy. Since I don't think the idea received enough attention during class, I would like to reflect further upon its implications.

As I understand it, the founding philosophers originally set out not to identify what reality is, leaving that task to science, but rather (as Professor DeVitto might say) to "clarify" reality. That is to say that while science employs mathematics as its language to quantify natural phenomenon (for more info see my previous post), the early philosophers sought to determine a language with which to describe reality. Hence the descriptions of reality progressing from water to fire to air; all were attempts to confine the concept of reality to one term. Of course, these multiple attempts were made because they wanted the best possible comparison when deciding emerging terminology.

Now I'm sure some readers at this point are wondering "why go through all this effort just to create a terminology?" When creating a language, sounds are arbitrarily assigned to a concept (let's say b-oo-k is meant to represent a stack of paper with writing bound by a spine and a cover), and the assignment is generally recognized by the language's speakers (most people have this image upon hearing the word "book"). But early philosophers didn't want to arbitrarily name reality, they wanted to describe it using existing words (which of course represent other ideas). And why go through all that trouble, one might ask? As far as I can tell, establishing a terminology to describe reality allows people to use words with universally understood meanings for discussion of ideas. In other words, the philosophers wanted to "clarify" how reality should best be described before discussing other philosophical dilemmas that require an understanding of the nature of reality to be appreciated (of which I'm sure we too will discuss in future lectures-- using of course the language we learn to accurately describe reality).

I apologize if I'm not making any sense. After all, these are only my impressions. Would anyone like to verify, disagree, add to, or comment?