Philosophy of Language

Although Wolff’s system does not include a discipline comparable to what we call the philosophy of language, several of his works contain extensive philosophical discussions of linguistic, psycholinguistic, semiological, semantic, pragmatic, and hermeneutical subjects. Section 1 reviews his main contributions to this field, spanning from the Disquisitio philosophica de loquela of 1703 to the late treatises on practical philosophy. Section 2 reconstructs Wolff’s theory of meaning, his treatment of proper names, and his concept of a “semantic destination”. Section 3 details Wolff’s interest in syntactic structures and their different degrees of compositionality, with special focus on phrases, idioms, and artificial languages. Adopting the psychological point of view, section 4 explores the semantics of mental associations, the theory of symbolic cognition, and the view of language learning as a precondition for intellectual development. Finally, section 5 considers some problematic consequences of Wolff’s account of truth and falsity along with his commitment to bivalence.