Common sense idea of language (around these parts): it’s about (describes, refers to) the world out there, or at any rate the world as it appears to us. Hence attempts to ‘map’ sentences on to the world (e.g. correspondence theory of truth, logical atomism, Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus).
Problems:
- Even in that context, our language is often shaping/constructing the world out there rather than being an objective description of it.
- Our use of language, even when appearing to communicate information about the world, is usually doing far more than that – especially playing a social game, trying to impress others etc.
- The descriptive use, even when trying not to be subjective or to play a game, is based on the assumption that the world consists of physical objects (entities, things, substances) which have properties and do things in a certain way (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs). But those categories are often inappropriate to what we want to communicate: a noun often does not refer to any ‘thing’ at all. As LW would put it, we mix up our language games and end up talking nonsense, or asking nonsensical questions.
“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language” (Philosophical Investigations 109)