What is the difference between philosophy of language and linguistics?

Question

What is the difference between philosophy of language and linguistics?

Is philosophy of language closer to philosophy or linguistics?

Answer 1

The two fields carry out different, but sometimes related research programs. For example:

Is the notion of meaning metaphysically coherent? if so, is it a primitive or does it reduce to some other fundamental notion such as mind? How about names : do we need causal history to invoke reference? If not why?

Versus

To what degree is language acquisition innate? Are humans unique in their use of language primarily due to a capacity that no other species has or do we simply have more of them than any other species? How much of a piece of literature can we say is original to its purported author? How much is due to pre-existing oral or written sources?

In one, the tools we use appear to be primarily empirical. For the other, it seems like empirical tools would never suffice to settle the matter.

Here is the SEP on their intersection :

There are also topics that fall on the borderline between philosophy of language and philosophy of linguistics: of “linguistic relativity” (see the supplement on the linguistic relativity hypothesis in the Summer 2015 archived version of the entry on relativism), language vs. idiolect, speech acts (including the distinction between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary acts), the language of thought, implicature, and the semantics of mental states (see the entries on analysis, semantic compositionality, mental representation, pragmatics, and defaults in semantics and pragmatics). In these cases it is often the kind of answer given and not the inherent nature of the topic itself that determines the classification.

(SEP Phil Lingustics)

Answer 2

Linguistics is the study of the structural features of language: syntax, semantics, similarities and differences between world languages, etc. Mainly it tries to figure out how language functions as mode of communication. It is a science that studies the material productions of language.

Philosophy of Language tries to understand how language relates to humans and human society: what the source of it is, how it structures and influences our thinking, how we use it to control and interact with each other and the world. It is a philosophy that investigates the nature of human beings through the lens of language.