Watch Your Language

I recently heard someone affirm, as if this were common knowledge, that the essence of language is to communicate propositions. When I questioned this assumption, another person interjected that language was by definition the communication of propositions. I thought I’d entered some weird sci-fi novel in which the very notion of language had been artificially constrained for the purposes of some dystopian plot development but, alas, I was merely at an academic workshop.

There are understandable reasons why silly assumptions about the essence of language remain widespread within philosophy…