This blog consists of my notes about the history, philosophy, and theory of linguistics.  I make these notes public with three hopes:

1. That people will email me with their own notes so that they can be added to the blog, and, if those emails keep coming, those people will be welcomed to become permanent contributors;
2. That people in all disciplines will feel comfortable offering notes on texts that may be outside their discipline, understanding that all perspectives are helpful;
3. That the notes here might be usable by computational linguists and computer scientists who need to know the best that has been written and thought about language in order to better undertake their work.

Who am I?  Not a linguist, but a professor of 18th-century British literature who is very interested in Enlightenment philosophy especially concerning language.  I worry because we seem to return to the same mistakes in understanding language.  We need to outstrip these mistakes in order to inaugurate a truly “post” postmodernity, but outstripping them is somehow not so easy as just knowing something new or more:

A picture held us captive.  And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, sec. 115).

Laura Mandell, 4 July 2008