Probability in Philosophy of Language

Philosophers of language investigate foundational questions about the nature of linguistic communication. Much language that uses probabilistic vocabulary—in particular, what I’ll call the language of subjective uncertainty—bears on these questions in important and distinctive ways. Better understanding how the language of subjective uncertainty works will help us get a better picture of the general features of communication and of the vehicles of communication. Early analytic philosophers of language like Frege, Russell, and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus were principally interested in mathematical language, where there is little need for probabilistic expressions. But in the middle of the twentieth century many philosophers of language began to pay attention to a wider variety of language uses. J. L. Austin, for example, opines that “It was for too long the assumption of philosophers that the business of a ‘statement’ can only be to ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact’, which it must do either truly or falsely” (, ). On many recent views, when we communicate from a position of signi cant subjective uncertainty, we sometimes use language in a way that doesn’t describe how the world is. e language of subjective uncertainty is, on such views, like the later Wittgenstein’s primitive ‘slab language’ at least in that both are used to communicate without being used to describe. Here is an example. Suppose Alice is curious about whether Bob won a deterministic raffle. I know that the raffle was fair, and that Bob purchased four of the hundred tickets that were sold. I might say