Phil 253 Midterm Review

Question 1

Define: Universals

Answer 1

properties, relations, kinds. Instantiated by many things in the concrete world. Opposite: particular objects

Question 2

Define: realism

Answer 2

the position that universals really exist

Question 3

Define: nominalism

Answer 3

the position that universals don’t really exist

Question 4

Define: structuralism

Answer 4

An early 20th century intellectual movement that influenced a wide range of disciplines, including linguistics to anthropology, sociology, psychology, literary criticism, economics, architecture and philosophy
Key idea: phenomena are defined not in terms of their intrinsic properties, but in terms of the place they fill in a larger system or structure

Question 5

Define: Linguistic relativism

Answer 5

The thesis that the language we habitually speak shapes how we think

Question 6

Define: Linguistic determinism

Answer 6

The thesis that the language we habitually speak strictly determines and constrains how we think. (Also called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)

Question 7

Define: Externalism

Answer 7

the meaning of an expression is fixed by stuff that isn’t “in the head” of the person/system using the expression: rather it’s fixed by the history of how that expression is used in the linguistic community of which that person/system is a part

Question 8

Define: Internalism

Answer 8

meaning of expression is fixed by the ideas, beliefs, experiences or associations that the person/system using that expression has with respect to it

Question 9

What is a language, according to Lewis?

Answer 9

A language is a set of ordered pairs
between strings of sounds/ marks/ movements1 (i.e.
sentences) and meanings.
£: {⟨ stringa, meaningz ⟩, ⟨ stringb, meaningy ⟩, ⟨ stringc ,
meaningx ⟩… }

Question 10

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

Answer 10

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 £.” (7)

Question 11

What are some objections you might have to this answer?

Answer 11

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

Question 12

Are natural languages finite or infinite? What supports this conclusion?

Answer 12

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”.

Question 13

Is Borges a linguistic optimist or a linguistic pessimist in The Library of Babel ? Why do you
think this?

Answer 13

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.

Question 14

What does Locke say a word stands for? List two objections to this view that we discussed in
class (hint: we got to these objections during our discussion of Mill)

Answer 14

“…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

Question 15

What are “general terms” and “abstract ideas”, for Locke?

Answer 15

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.”

Question 16

What does Mill think names stand for?

Answer 16

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

Question 17

What, for Mill, is the difference between denotation and connotation?

Answer 17

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.

Question 18

Give an example of a connotative and non-connotative term (according to Mill).

Answer 18

Proper nouns are non-connotative eg. Navya

Common nouns are connotative eg. man

Question 19

What is the Principle of Compositionality?

Answer 19

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.

Question 20

What, according to the view discussed in class, is the denotation of a verb? How does this help explain compositionality?

Answer 20

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&raquo_space;

Question 21

What does Saussure mean when he says “concepts are purely differential and defined not
by their positive content but negatively by their relations with other terms in the system”
(Saussure, p. 117)? Say how this is related to his endorsement of linguistic structuralism

Answer 21

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?

Question 22

How do Locke and Saussure differ concerning their views on how language is related to thought?

Answer 22

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.

Question 23

In what ways does Wittgenstein disagree with the Augustinian picture of language?

Answer 23

§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

Question 24

What is a “language game”? List five different language games, according to Wittgenstein.

Answer 24

▶ 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

Question 25

In what major way is the Heptapod language game different from human language games?

Answer 25

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)

Question 26

Does Wittgenstein think there’s anything that all language games have in common?

Answer 26

There’s nothing that all language games have in common

Question 27

What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

Answer 27

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

Question 28

What famous claim did Benjamin Whorf make about the Hopi language, and how was it proven
wrong?

Answer 28

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)

Question 29

What difference between English and Nuu-chah-nulth did Whorf think reflected different “cos-
mical pictures” between English and Nuu-chah-nulth speakers?

Answer 29

“Some languages have means of expression in which the
separate terms are not so separate as in English but flow
together into plastic synthetic creations. Hence such
languages, which do not paint the separate-object picture of
the universe to the same degree as English and its sister
tongues, point toward possible new types of logic and
possible new cosmical pictures”

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.”

Question 30

Give two of the examples that Deutscher thinks show that language doesn’t strictly determine
thought.

Answer 30

• 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?

Question 31

What is the Boas-Jokobsen principle?

Answer 31

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?

Question 32

What is an aspect of experience that the English language forces its speakers to express whereas
another language doesn’t? What is an aspect of experience that another language forces its
speakers to express whereas English doesn’t?

Answer 32

• 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.

Question 33

Why do some thinkers believe that a language model’s words don’t refer?

Answer 33

“a system trained only on form has…no way to learn
meaning”

Large langauge 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.

Question 34

How is reference established, according to an externalist?

Answer 34

What determines reference is
what the relevant experts say.

Question 35

Semantics

Answer 35

Semantics is a subdiscipline which asks about the meaning
of particular linguistic expressions.

Question 36

Metasemantics

Answer 36

Metasemantics is a subdiscipline which asks about the
fundamental nature of meaning and how things come to
have it.