Language Assignment

ToK Language Assignment

Read pp. 64-73 of Man is the Measure and do the following:

Remember from our discussion of propositional knowledge in chapter 2 that a proposition is a statement that can be shown to be either true or false; a proposition must be statable and hence must use language of some type. More to the point the statement must have MEANING. On pages 64 and 65 a list of eight different meanings of "meaning" are given. Provide a your own example for each type.
This list of meanings does not actually help in determining if a statement has meaning or not. It is more a list of grammatical relationship and one can create examples that appear to have meaning as in the examples from the text, but actually do not. Noam Chomsky, perhaps the premier linguist of the twentieth century offers the example "colorless, green, dreams sleep furiously" as an example of a statement that has a clear grammatical meaning, but is patently meaningless. Create your own example of such a statement. (The text gives some more examples on page 65.)
On pages 65 and 66 of the text you will find a list of the ten possible ways in which one can attribute a property to something. Provide your own examples for each of them.
In the section on "Names and Descriptions" the statement is made : "Nothing stands between a thing and its name. That linkage is logically primitive." What is meant by this?
From the same section: Explain the difference between "sense" and "reference." Give an example displaying this difference. Think like a SAT analogy question for awhile: Just as sense is to reference, so is ________ to _________. Do two of these using the following words: extension, denotation, intension and connotation
The section "Problems of Naming and Meaning" is a tough one. It starts with the realtively easy problem about naming that not all names refer to only one thing (called ambiguity, for example, the name "Jethro Tull" is that of a 1970s rock band and a famous British agriculturalist of the 1700s. ) and some things have more than one name (called redundancy, for example, in the Beatles song "Rocky Racoon" we find the line "her name was McGill, she called herself Lil, but everyone knew her as Nancy."). Give examples of each of these.
The section then goes on to another problem: names are sometimes all but equal to their sense. The book refers to the examples of Homer and "the Master of the 'Adoration' at Avignon." This one is a bit trickier, but can you find examples that are similar?
On pages 69 and 70 you will find a discussion of referential opacity. Try your hand at an example of your own.
From page 71: Provide some examples of symbols not discussed in the text.
The chapter ends with a discussion of "Contemporary Theories of Meaning." In part it discusses Moritz Schlick's proposal that statements that have meaning must be verifiable. The text gives some examples of statements that are meaningful but unverifiable as a counter to such a proposal. I would add another one: There are an even number of stars in the universe. This is a wholly meaningful statement that is also unverifiable. Come up with an example of your own.