Chapter 3 Language Key Concepts Flashcards
the branch of philosophy that addresses
questions like: ‘What is meaning?’; ‘How does language relate to reality?’; and ‘How do written and spoken words express thoughts?’.
philosophy of language (philosophical semantics)
the formal study of arguments and inferences.
logic
the study of the logical properties of words like ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, and
‘if…, then…’, i.e. how the presence of absence of these words affects the validity of arguments that
contain them in their premise(s) or conclusion. The basic unit in this branch of logic are atomic
statements, i.e. sentences that are either true or false.
sentential/propositional logic
the study of the logical properties of predicates and quantifiers like ‘some’ and ‘all’.
First-order predicate logic involves quantifiers whose variables refer to individuals; second-order
predicate logic involves quantifiers that also refer to sets of individuals, or the extensions of
predicates
predicate logic
the study of the logical properties of words like ‘know’.
epistemic logic
the study of the logical properties of words like ‘possible’ and ‘necessary’.
modal logic
the view that if a declarative sentence is meaningful, then there must be ways to
verify or falsify it.
verificationism
the kind of justification one has when something can be known by reason alone.
a priori
the kind of justification one has when something requires more than reason to
discover.
a posteriori
a shift that occurred in philosophy in the late 19th and early 20th century, inspired
in part by the work of Frege and Wittgenstein, whereby philosophers became more preoccupied
with understanding the nature of language.
the linguist turn
one of Frege’s central ideas about language, “to say what a word or
phrase means you have to say how it contributes to the meaning of complete sentences” (88).
the primacy of the sentence
one of Frege’s central ideas about language, “if two words or phrases have the
same meaning, then we should be able to replace one of them with the other in any sentence…
without changing [its] meaning” (89).
compositionality
the mode of presentation or means of identifying the referent of a name, predicate, or
sentence.
sense
a particular person, place, or thing, in the case of a name; a truth-value in the case of a statement; an extension or class of objects in the case of a predicate.
reference
a notion Frege thought could be used instead of predicates in developing a theory
of meaning and reference. An open sentence is produced by removing one or more denoting
expressions from a sentence. It’s reference is the class of ordered pairs of objects that could be
substituted into the open slots to produce a true sentence.
open sentence
the content expressed by a sentence. Two sentences in different languages may
nevertheless express the same proposition.
proposition
the conditions of the actual world or some possible world that determine whether
a statement is true or false
truth conditions
mental attitudes one can take toward a content or proposition, e.g. hope,
fear, believe, doubt, etc.
propositional attitudes
an expression like ‘all’ or ‘every’ that we use to make a claim about everything
that exists in the universe.
universal quantifier
an expression like ‘some’ that we use to make a claim about something about
at least one thing that exists in the universe.
existential quantifier
a complete way all of reality might be. How things actually are is just one possibility
for how reality could be.
possible world
an attempt to understand meaning and reference in terms of truth
conditions at and across possible worlds.
possible world semantics
contexts in which the truth value of a sentence can vary when substituting coreferential
expressions, e.g. contexts involving sentential or propositional attitudes.
intensional contexts
contexts in which the truth value of a sentence is preserved through
substitution of co-referential expressions.
extensional contexts
