荀子의 言語觀

Abstract

Even though he was a Confucian philosopher, Sun-Ja also took a great interest in linguistics and literature. Later Confucian philosophers often underestimated his works because the strong point of Sun-Ja's philosophy was deeply related to philosophy of language. His philosophy of language is named here as 'the view on language' and is discussed under the topics of the understanding of language and speech acts. Sun-Ja's understanding of language is basically based on the Confucian philosophy, but since the social situation and the political philosophy of his times were different from the past, his understanding of language was very different from that of Confucius and Mencius. First of all, he tried to realize Confucian political philosophy using language based on the language-centered thought instead of the existing passive view on language. As a practical way to accomplish the goal, he tried to use the right naming to correct the wrong naming and to use the right logic to correct the sophistry. Furthermore, Sun-Ja presented his practical method under the name of 'principles of language'. Based on Sun-Ja's main idea pointed out in this paper, we could make a base for re-discovering our traditional methodology for linguistics and the study on language education.