Plato wondered whether a pious name suits an impious man
In Plato's Cratylus, a man called Theophilus, meaning god-beloved, poses a puzzle: if names were pure convention, no name could ever be wrong, yet calling an irreligious man god-beloved feels mistaken. That ancient argument about whether words fit things by nature opened a debate philosophers are still having.
Plato went further, suggesting that basic word sounds carry built-in meaning; the Greek letter lambda, he thought, evoked smoothness. By the end of the dialogue he concedes that social convention plays a part and that sound symbolism has flaws. Aristotle took a different route, sorting things into species and genus and arguing that predicates get their meaning from shared features of real forms. The Stoics identified five parts of speech and proposed the lekton, a sense distinct from both the word and the object it names, the ancestor of what we now call a proposition.
India built a parallel tradition. Mīmāṃsā thinkers argued over whether meaning comes from words combined or only from words within a whole sentence, while the fifth-century grammarian Bhartṛhari held that sentences, grasped by intuition, are the true units of meaning. Medieval Latin scholars, pushed by the work of translating Greek, dissected vagueness, ambiguity and little words such as and, not and every; William of Ockham even sketched a codified mental language.
Renaissance scholars such as Athanasius Kircher dreamed of a philosophical language to undo the confusion of tongues, inspired partly by Chinese characters and Egyptian hieroglyphs. In the nineteenth century Kierkegaard complained that philosophy neglected language's role in thought. The twentieth century answered with the linguistic turn: Gottlob Frege's logic shaped Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ferdinand de Saussure's lectures, published after his death in 1916, founded the continental approach. For a time many analytic philosophers treated all philosophy as philosophy of language.
The biggest question remains what meaning is. John Locke tied it to ideas in the mind; Frege, Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson to the conditions under which a sentence is true; the later Wittgenstein to how communities use words. Saul Kripke defended direct reference for proper names, and Hilary Putnam argued that meaning depends partly on the environment rather than the head alone.
Source: Philosophy of language
