This chapter will outline how the development of two new academic fields in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely, the philosophy of language and semiology, shifted focus away from theories that hold that specific words, ‘nouns’, simply name the objects of the world. What is of interest is the manner in which such moves were made and the avenues of analysis to which these arguments led. As will be seen, the view that language somehow immediately captures the world was one of the first casualties of the battle to establish the logical or scientific basis of language. This chapter traces the ways in which a range of authors brought the analysis of language to the fore and, correspondingly, how questions regarding the status or role of the world moved into the background. Only once these are established and understood will it be possible to recognise the force of the problems involved and to develop alternative routes that can think language and the world together.

Nouns and Names

The idea that there is a certain class of words that names the things of the world is a powerful and enduring one. However, developing a theory that explains or justifies such an approach is not as straightforward as it first appears. One major problem is the question of whether ordinary nouns (such as ‘book’ or ‘lion’) pick out or denote the things of the world in the same way that proper names, such as Barack Obama or Donald Trump, appear to pick out or denote real human individuals in the world. This is a question with a long history.

In the book of Genesis (2:19–20), it is reported that God gathered together all the animals of the world and, as the New King James version puts it, ‘brought them to Adam to see what he would call them. And whatever Adam called each living creature, that was its name. So Adam gave names to all cattle, to the birds of the air, and to every beast of the field.’ There are (at least) two ways of reading this. It is clear that Adam names the animals, but the status of these names is unclear. Are they arbitrary?