Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the Leverham Trust, online at

W.W. History of Philosophy. net. Today's episode

What's in a name, Plato's Cradilous? In these podcasts I've made a big deal of saying that Plato dealt with nearly all the topics philosophers have thought about ever since.

I suppose even sympathetic listeners will have the suspicion though that there are some significant issues in contemporary philosophy that don't arise in Plato.

So what might these be?

Well, here's an obvious thought.

Since the work of the great logician and philosopher Gottlob Frege in the 19th century, philosophers

in the analytic tradition have been extremely interested in language. This seems in fact to be a distinctive

feature of 20th century philosophy in general, a fascination with language and problems about language.

So how about philosophy of language then? Is this an area where Plato has little to tell us or just yet

another area where Plato is a pioneering genius? You may not be surprised to hear that it's

the latter. Plato may have been the first person to do philosophy of language, and he certainly authored the earliest work on the topic, a dialogue called the Cradilis. Of course, this dialogue doesn't tackle all or even most of the problems dealt with in contemporary philosophy of language, but it does tackle one of the most central problems. How do words have meaning? Maybe I'd better explain what the problem is before looking at how

Plato deals with it. If I utter a random string of syllables like Gibbledog Tankfurter, that doesn't mean anything. In some sense I haven't even said anything. I haven't produced a piece of language, so I haven't managed to communicate.

But if I say a word like Phrege or philosophy, then I do communicate, at least to people who know what these words mean.

So what exactly is the difference?

How do some strings of noises or symbols in the case of written language come to have meaning while others don't?

To answer this question is to explain how words get their power to communicate and thus to establish something fundamental about what language is.

Nowadays, one popular theory about how words come to have meaning is that someone has to stipulate that a given sound or set of symbols will from now on represent some particular item.

The most obvious example is naming.

When a baby is on the way, the parents confer with one another, and after overcoming bitter disagreement of the sort which makes each of them wonder if their partner is going to be mature enough to raise a child, an agreement is reached.

The baby gets a name.

Mama and Papa Frege dubbed their child Gotlob, maybe they should have thought about that one

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