Course summary

The BSc in Language, Logic, and Communication enables you to develop a rigorous, scientific understanding of how language and communication work. It is an interdisciplinary programme taught by the Departments of Philosophy and Linguistics. Through philosophy, you’ll investigate fundamental questions about language, thought, and reality. Using critical thinking, precise argumentation, and creativity, you’ll explore and evaluate potential solutions to deep and difficult problems. Through linguistics, you’ll explore the nature and workings of language, focusing on theoretical, experimental and data science approaches to analysing the human language ability. By studying philosophy and linguistics in conjunction at York, you’ll be in a position to bring both unique but complementary sets of tools together to enhance your understanding of both disciplines, guided by world leaders from each field. Linguistics will help you to uncover logical structures and distinctions that will feed into your philosophical evaluations of arguments and analysis of concepts; and philosophical exploration of the relationships between language, our minds, and the world will enhance your understanding of language. This programme will equip you with a powerful range of skills and abilities, putting you in a position to think in a systematic way about new problems and to communicate your ideas clearly and forcefully. You will learn to deal with controversial theories and proposals, weigh evidence, assess the quality of arguments, and confidently express your own conclusions. You will acquire skills in quantitative data analysis and basic computational theory, and emerge with advanced skills in writing, argumentation, and analysis. The intellectual and digital tools you will master in our programme will accompany you for the rest of your life in any academic or professional career path you choose, from marketing to teaching, publishing to software development, and will fundamentally change the way you view and engage with the world we live in.