Fennie pray a cost in the news

and there's to all of physical

and bless you all of physical.

He bless you, Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings

College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www history of philosophy.net.

Today's episode, Let me count the ways, speculative grammar. Some ideas

seem so appealing, so obvious, that they appear again and again throughout the history of philosophy.

One of them is that language corresponds to the world.

From Permanities who banned non-being from his metaphysics because it cannot be spoken,

to Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-philosophicus proposes that propositions are like pictures that show reality, it seems that philosophers have never stopped trying to understand how this correspondence might work.

And for good reason.

A true sentence is one that describes things as they really are.

Thus, if we want to understand reality and we're philosophers, so of course we want to do that,

an obvious way to make progress would be to analyze

language. The fact that language accurately represents the world suggests that

the parts and structures of language somehow mirror the parts and structures of reality.

Consider a sentence like The Giraffe Roller Skates.

It seems irresistible to think that the world is arranged in much the way the sentence is.

You have a concrete entity, the medieval's would say a substance, which is the giraffe,

and you have the action the giraffe is performing, namely roller skating.

The grammatical contrast between subject and verb parallels the metaphysical contrast between the substance and the action.

On the other hand, there also seem to be features of language that don't hook up with reality

...