Phil 253 Final Review Flashcards

Question

For a given language, L, what is required in order for a person to speak L, according to Lewis?

Answer 1

Truthfulness: “To be truthful in £ is to act in a certain way: to try never to utter any sentences of £ that are not true in £. Thus it is to avoid uttering any sentence of £ unless one believes it to be true in £.” (7) Trust: “To be trusting in £ is to form beliefs in a certain way: to impute truthfulness in £ to others, and thus to tend to respond to another’s utterance of any sentence of £ by coming to believe that the uttered sentence is true in £.”

Answer 2

- What about lying? - What about languages spoken only by one person?

Answer 3

All natural languages are infinite. All natural languages have recursive syntactic rules; i.e. rules for composing sentences that can be reapplied to the output of a previous instance of the rule’s application. eg. "I am very hungry" and "I am very, very hungry".

Answer 4

Borges is a linguistic optimist. Thinks language will endure: "I suspect that the human species— the only species— teeters at the verge of extinction, yet that the Library— enlightened, solitary, infinite, perfectly unmoving, armed with precious volumes, pointless, incorruptible, and secret— will endure” The knowledge that we most want, that would enable us to alleviate disease, resource scarcity, and other forms of material suffering, not to mention find personal peace and enlightenment, already exists as a string in the Library of Babel– that is, it already exists within language. eg: “there was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind—the origin of the Library and of time– might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required. For four centuries, men have been scouring the hexagons... That unbridled hopefulness was succeeded, naturally enough by a similarly disproportionate depression. the certainty that some bookshelf in some hexagon contained precious books, yet that those precious books were forever out of reach, was almost unbearable.

Answer 5

“...words, in their primary or immediate signification, stand for nothing but the ideas in the mind of him that uses them" Objections: ▶ Locke’s view gets truth conditions wrong ▶ Locke’s view gets apparent disagreement wrong

Answer 6

That then which general words signify is a sort of things; and each of them does that, by being the sign of an abstract idea in the mind.” Not particular entities. Also not collections of particular entities: “it is as evident they do not signify a plurality: for man and men would then signify the same thing.”

Answer 7

When Mill talks about names, he includes noun phrases (“John”, “the tall tree”) as well as adjectives (“tall”, “round”; “I shan’t hesitate to call adjectives names” (10)) He doesn’t include adverbs, or prepositions, or at least some pronouns. The distinctions that are of most interest to us: Universal and Singular Names Connotative and Non-Connotative Names

Answer 8

A term denotes whatever thing in the world it picks out/ refers to. A term is connotative if it denotes a subject and implies an attribute. A term is non-connotative if it merely denotes a subject or an attribute but does not imply anything about its attributes.

Answer 9

Proper nouns are non-connotative eg. Navya Common nouns are connotative eg. man

Answer 10

The Principle of Compositionality: The meaning of a sentence (or sub-sentential string) is determined by the meanings of its terms together with their order.

Answer 11

1. some terms denote functions 2. when the denotations of individual words compose to create the denotations of sentences, they do this by applying the function that is the denotation of one term to whatever is the denotation of the other term. Verb: a function from concrete entities (like Lisa!) to a further function, one from possible worlds to truth values, < e, < w , t >>

Answer 12

To know what the word “bread” means knowing the difference between the meaning of bread and that of “cake”, “flour”, “rock”. The meaning of the word bread is defined by the ways in which it’s different from these things. "Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others, as in this diagram” - would a sentence make sense in Saussure's view if the values of each term started being identical?

Answer 13

Locke: Locke (and Mill?) seem to “assume that ready-made ideas exist before words” (65) whereas in fact “our thought— apart from its expression in words— is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.” Saussure: Our thoughts do not exist without language. Therefore, Locke seems to think thought shapes language, while Saussure seems to think language shapes thought.

Answer 14

§2: “That philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions. But one can also say that it is the idea of a language more primitive than ours” §3: “Augustine, we might say, does describe a system of communication; only not everything that we call language is this system...” OR: - Not all words are associated with objects - Even with those that are, that association takes many forms

Answer 15

▶ Describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements. Constructing an object from a description (a drawing) ▶ Reporting an event ▶ Speculating about an event ▶ Forming and testing a hypothesis ▶ Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams ▶ Making up a story; and reading it ▶ Play-acting ▶ Singing catches ▶ Guessing riddles

Answer 16

The heptapods, we learn, are not even using language to communicate. Their language game is very different from ours. “If the heptapods already knew everything they would ever say or hear, what was the point of their using language at all? A reasonable question. But language wasn’t only for communication: it was also a form of action... Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize.” (137-138)

Answer 17

There’s nothing that all language games have in common

Answer 18

The thesis that the language we habitually speak strictly determines and constrains how we think. (same thing as linguistic determinism)

Answer 19

According to Whorf, the Hopi language contains “no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call ’time,’ or to past, present, or future.” A Hopi speaker thus ”has no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate Proven wrong: pu’ antsa pay qavongvaqw pay su’its talavay kuyvansat, paasatham pu’ pam piw maanat taatayna Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then, he woke up the girl again. (Ekkehart Malotki, Hopi Field Notes, 1980)

Answer 20

- Do ignorant folk who have never heard of ‘Schadenfreude’ find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? - Conversely, do Germans, whose language uses one and the same word for ‘when’ and ‘if’ (wenn), fail to understand the logical difference between what might happen under certain conditions and what will happen regardless?

Answer 21

Franz Boas: language “determines those aspects of each experience that must be expressed.” (qtd p. 151) Roman Jakobsen: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” (qtd p. 151) What must be expressed/conveyed?

Answer 22

- In English, the word neighbor is not marked with a gender; in many other languages (e.g. French, German, Russian) it is. So those languages force you to express your neighbor’s gender if you talk about them. - In Chinese, verbs don’t need to be marked with the time the action took place, whereas in English they do. So English forces us to express temporal location of events when we talk about them. Matses forces speakers to be even more specific about temporal location.

Answer 23

“a system trained only on form has...no way to learn meaning” Large language models are exposed to extremely large volumes of written language. Their training process allows them to get better and better at predicting how a string of text they are prompted with should be completed based on matching complex patterns that they’ve discovered in their training data.

Answer 24

What determines reference is what the relevant experts say.

Answer 25

- first person singular present indicative active: “I warn you

Answer 26

“I promised to give them quilts to Maggie, for when she marries John Thomas” (p. 57) No: this reports the act of promising but does not perform it. Austin would say that this is because it’s in the past tense, and performatives have to be in the present tense. Austin's view is that the act of promising is about committing oneself to a future action, not about making a truth claim about one's intentions.

Answer 27

Infelicities: Misfires and abuses Misfire: Act is not fully performed, no legitimate procedures fully completed or is completed under incorrect circumstance Abuses: Act performed when inappropriate

Answer 28

Some observations: ▶ not just anyone can name someone/ something; you have to have a certain status or authority to do so ▶ we care deeply about which names are chosen

Answer 29

Performatives will be utterances of first-person present indicative active sentences such that the utterance of a sentence that is the same except for switching out one of those grammatical features yields a statement that seems to do something really different.

Answer 30

- Verdictives: deliver judgments, make estimates and appraisals - Commissives: give undertakings or commitments - Exercitives: exercise rights and powers.

Answer 31

Material that depicts women’s dehumanization, enjoyment of pain, rape etc.

Answer 32

▶ locutionary act: the act of uttering a sentence/ producing a signal with a certain meaning ▶ illocutionary act: the act performed in producing the signal ▶ perlocutionary act: the act performed by producing the signal

Answer 33

Ex: I say to the person across the table “Can you pass the salt?” ▶ locutionary act: saying the words “Can you pass the salt?” ▶ illocutionary act: requesting the salt ▶ perlocutionary act: getting the other person to pass me the salt

Answer 34

Pornography constitutes the acts of subordinating and silencing. It silences and subordinates as a matter of its illocutionary force.

Answer 35

Langton argues that power influences the effectiveness and reach of these speech acts. Powerful individuals can: Perform more illocutionary acts: Their words are more likely to be taken seriously and acted upon. For example, a powerful person saying "I promise" is more likely to be trusted and believed. Achieve more perlocutionary effects: Their words can have a greater impact, such as persuading or commanding others more effectively.

Answer 36

▶ Stop their locution: “...stop the powerless from speaking at all. Gag them, threaten them, condemn them to solitary confinement.” ▶ Stop their perlocution: frustrate attempts to achieve certain ends by making the speech acts one does (e.g. eliminate the possibility for protest to have any effect) ▶ Stop their illocution: “Let them say whatever they like to whomever they like, but stop that speech from counting as an action. More precisely, stop it counting as the action it was intended to be.”

Answer 37

- Sexual refusal The claim: pornography establishes saying “no” etc. as a sort of ritual act of foreplay rather than an act of refusal. As a result, when a woman actually tries to perform the speech act of sexual refusal, she is unable to secure uptake (i.e. recognition of what kind of act she is trying to perform) and, where uptake is a felicity condition on this speech act, she therefore cannot perform the act at all. - Protest against sexual violence Ex: Linda Lovelace/ Linda Marchiano’s book Ordeal about the ways that she was abused while making the pornographic film Deep Throat shows up in an “adult reading” catalogue next to titles clearly meant to titillate. (321-322) “[Marchiano] intends to protest. But her speech misfires. Something about who she is, something about the role she occupies, prevents her from satisfying protest’s felicity conditions, at least here.”

Answer 38

Code model: The signaler modifies the environment by uttering some words which correspond with her thoughts. The receiver, perceiving this modification of the environment, uses their knowledge of the language to form their own copy of the thoughts corresponding to those words. Ostensive-inferential communication: Has an informative and communicative intention. Informative Intention: Speaker intends for the receiver to come to have some cognitive attitude to some piece of information. Receiver has the intended cognitive attitude toward the intended piece of information. Communicative Intention: Speaker intends for the receiver to recognize that they, the signaler, have the above Informative Intention. Receiver recognizes that the signaler intended them to form this attitude toward this piece of information.

Answer 39

By uttering x, A meant something is true just in case, for some audience B, A uttered x with: The Informative Intention (II): intending for B to have some particular response, r, The Communicative Intention (CI): intending B to recognize that A intends has II, and The Causal Intention: intending for the satisfaction of CI to function, in part, as a reason for the satisfaction of II. (NB: in the above, x is a sentence, A is the speaker, and B is the audience.)

Answer 40

▶ Agreed that both Informative and Communicative Intentions are required in order for the speaker to satisfy their half of a successful human communicative transaction. ▶ Disagreed that the Causal Condition is necessary for characterizing human communication per se. ▶ Noted that we don’t always try to bring about new beliefs with our utterances, so revised the II condition accordingly ▶ Dubbed the kind of communication that Grice has helped characterize ostensive-inferential communication.

Answer 41

The Eleven-Sorans are acutely aware that communication requires an incursion into someone else’s mind. As a result, they are deeply suspicious of it.

Answer 42

Make your conversational contribution such as is required at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the Cooperative Principle. Maxims: - Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required (not more or less). - Quality: Do not say things you believe to be false or for which you lack adequate evidence. - Relation: "Be relevant” - Manner: Don’t be obscure, needlessly ambiguous, excessively wordy or disorderly.

Answer 43

Floutings are designed to prompt the following process in the audience: 1. The audience notes that what the speaker said was uncooperative, which is in tension with their antecedent assumption that the speaker was committed to the CP. 2. The audience asks themself “How can the speaker saying what they did be reconciled with the supposition that they are observing the overall CP?” 3. The audience concludes that the speaker must mean something other than/ beyond what they have said. 4. The audience searches for a proposition that a) would satisfy the CP, and that b) the speaker could plausibly have intended them to recover on the basis of what is said. When the audience finds such a proposition, and so long as it is the one intended by the speaker, the audience has recovered the speaker’s implicature.

Answer 44

Signaler: 4 orders Mary intends4 that Peter believes3 that she intends2 that he believes1 that the berries are edible. Receiver: 5 orders Peter believes5 that Mary intends4 that he believes3 that she intends2 that he believes1 that the berries are edible.1

Answer 45

- primates are highly advanced in specifically those aspects of intelligence that help them function well socially - primates have this social intelligence because of the selection pressures that came with living in large, complex groups (our “socio-cognitive niche”)

Answer 46

Ostensive-inferential communication

Answer 47

Introduction: The child is introduced to two dolls, Sally and Anne. Sally has a basket, and Anne has a box. Scenario Setup: Sally places a marble in her basket and then leaves the room. Change of Location: While Sally is away, Anne moves the marble from Sally's basket to her own box. Key Question: When Sally returns, the child is asked, "Where will Sally look for her marble?" To pass the test, the child must recognize that Sally will look in her own basket, where she last left the marble, demonstrating an understanding that Sally holds a false belief about the marble's location12. Children typically begin to pass the false belief test around the age of 4 to 5 years. This milestone indicates a significant development in their cognitive and social understanding. Objection: C1: Children under four don’t have the capacity for recursive mindreading (P1, P4) C2: Children under four can’t engage in OIC. (C1, P2) C3: Children under four can’t engage in typical human communication. (P3, C2) But C3 is demonstrably false: Children under four are often very adept communicators. So at least one premise must be false.

Answer 48

Whereas in the classic false belief task, children are explicitly asked where they thought the character (Sally) would look for the object (the ball), in these newer tasks, children are not asked about the characters’ mental states directly, but instead the child’s behaviour is used to infer what the child understands about others’ mental states” ...whereas the explicit task is not passed until around the fourth birthday, implicit tasks are passed within the first 18 months of life, and in many cases within the first 12 months... These results have been replicated cross-culturally...”

Answer 49

The Tamarian language, featured in the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "Darmok," is unique in that it relies entirely on metaphors and allegories drawn from the Tamarians' mythology and history12. Instead of using direct statements, the Tamarians communicate by referencing stories and characters from their culture. For example, to express cooperation, they might say, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," referring to a story where two characters work together to overcome a challenge1. It would be impractical for a real-world society due to the inherent complexities and potential for miscommunication. Cons: Learning Curve: Understanding and using the language would require extensive knowledge of the culture's myths and history, making it difficult for outsiders or even young members of the society to learn. Ambiguity: Without context, metaphors can be ambiguous. Misunderstandings could arise if the listener is not familiar with the specific references or if the stories have multiple interpretations.

Answer 50

Cognitive content is truth-apt content; i.e. a proposition. A cognitivist about metaphor thinks that a metaphor carries some cognitive content beyond the one literally expressed A non-cognitivist thinks that metaphor does not carry any cogntive content beyond that which is literally expressed.

Answer 51

When we use the metaphor, we are not teaching the alien something further about the meaning of our words (i.e. that in metaphoric contexts “floor” can mean “planet” or something like that). We are telling them something about (how we see) the world.

Answer 52

If a metaphor succeeds just in case it gets across some particular figurative content, it should be possible to say what that content is. But often, we can’t do this.

Answer 53

When a metaphor dies the words involved come to have multiple (literal) meanings that they didn’t have before. (p. 37) i.e. the mouth of a bottle.

Answer 54

One view: metaphors just are similes in which “like” or “as” is elided the figurative meaning of a metaphor just is the literal meaning of the corresponding simile Whereas metaphors are generally obviously false (can you think of an exception?), similes, Davidson thinks, are generally obviously, even trivially true. And surely when we use metaphors we mean to get across something non-trivial.

Answer 55

There is a unique way in which the maker and the appreciator of a metaphor are drawn closer to one another. Three aspects are involved: 1) the speaker issues a kind of concealed invitation; 2) the hearer expends a special effort to accept the invitation; and 3) this transaction constitutes the acknowledgment of a community.

Answer 56

- The comprehension of an apt metaphor is irresistible: the hearer is ineluctably drawn into an act of interpretation. ▶ this interpretive engagement produces a feeling of complicity: the hearer feels he has done something he shouldn’t. ▶ the hearer is left rhetorically impotent. The usual techniques of rejection leave the metaphor’s effects untouched; in this sense the metaphor exhibits anti-deniability.