“Philosophy of Language in the Medieval Arabic Tradition”

This chapter presents, through vivid retelling and reconstruction of a debate between a tenth-century Arabic logician and a traditional Arabic grammarian, the site of encounter, conflict, and resolution between two traditions. Although they seem on the surface to hold two different theories of linguistic content (a bipartite theory from grammar, a tripartite theory from Aristotelian logic), the chapter shows that at root the two traditions are not in such conflict. Apart from criticizing the foreignness of logic, the grammarian’s deeper criticism was that, by prioritizing the mental over the verbal, the logical analysis of language was unprepared to deal with problems of polysemy and synonymy. This chapter tracks the details of this debate, and explains that in the end Avicenna brought the two traditions together by presenting a genuinely Arabic logic.