Phil 253

Finals Studying

linguistic optimism

language is a tool that clarifies rather than confuses

linguistic pessimism

language is a tool out of our control that confuses, rather than clarifies

universals

properties, relations, kinds; represented by things in the concrete world; particulars are opposite

realism

the position that universals exist

nominalism

the position that universal's don't exist

syntax

the study of the way strings of morphemes are organized or structured into phrases or sentences

epistemology

metaphysics

structuralism

20th century intellectual movement across disciplines; phenomena are defined not in terms of their intrinsic properties, but in terms of the place they fill in a large structure or system

linguistic relativism

the language we habitually speak shapes how we think

linguistic determinism

the language we habitually speak strictly determines and constrains how we think; also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

behaviorism

our mental states are our actions, knowing language is being able to use it

verificationism

a tenet of logical positivism, the theory that a statement is meaningful only if it can be verified by experience

truth-apt

whether a statement can be assessed for truth or falsity

implicature

what is suggested, apart from what is explicitly said

metarepresentation

recursive mindreading, representing other's mental representations of their mental states and further

semantics

the study of relationship between signs and what they stand for

pragmatics

the study of the relationship between signs and their interpreters

Lewis

- a language is something that assigns meanings to certain strings of types of sounds or of marks; a set of pairings between strings of sounds/marks and meanings
- common knowledge, desire to communicate, desire of truthfulness required to speak a language
- languages are infinitely large due to recursive syntactic rules and infinite meanings
- the meaning of a sentence is based off of its truth conditions, the way the world has to be for the sentence to be true

Borges/The Library of Babel

- linguistic pessimist

Locke

- a word stands for ideas in the mind of the person using them
- general terms signify a sort of things, abstract ideas don't signify particular entities or collections
- optimist, God created language to use for men to communicate and build societies

Mill

- word meaning is the thing
- denotation picks out something and connotation denotes and applies an attribute
- common nouns are connotative and proper nouns are non-connotative
- the meaning of a sentence/phrase is determined by the meaning of its terms together with their order
- Locke gets truth conditions wrong, ideas/thoughts are not always true
- issue of apparent disagreement and disagreement

Swift

- Laputan engine inspired Charles Babbage
- linguistic pessimist

Saussure

- there are no pre-linguistic ideas, ideas are not formed before language
- meaning of words only in context of their system (of language, rather than sentences)
- concepts are defined by what others are not, linguistic value is relative
- optimist, we use language to create ideas so language is essential

Chomsky

- language knowledge and use of language are separate
- knowing a language is knowing grammatical rules
- poverty of stimulus: the kind of stimulus children receive is not enough for them to be so competent
- R-Q structure rules
- universal grammar and language faculty: some rules are already in there

Le Guin

- linguistic optimist, the Nna Mmoy use language for creating and expanding on their world and humans use language to contain our world and clarify what is around us

Wittgenstein

- language directly representing objects is too simple because not all words are associated with objects
- language games, there's nothing all language games have in common
- language is never finished
- tone changes meaning

Chiang

- optimist, language as a tool to actualize things

Deutscher

- Sapir-Whorf hypothesis says a difference in language is a difference in thought, what we speak determines and constrains how we think
- Deutscher says language does not constrain thought, many languages lack words for things they understand as concepts
- different languages require us to mark different things, the Boas-Jakobsen principle says language determines what must be expressed and that there is a difference between what must and what may be expressed

Austin

- performative utterances are first person, present tense, active voice, can test by changing one of those things (asymmetry test)
- promises cannot be truth apt -- breaking promises means you did promise
- misfires are when speech acts are not performed (wrong circumstance or person)
- abuses are when speech acts are performed successfully but cannot work
- performative verbs (verdictives, commissives, exercitives)
- naming requires a certain authority

Walker

- optimist, naming/language as a tool?

Langton

- locutionary acts are uttering sentences with a particular meaning
- illocutionary acts are the action done by uttering the sentence
- perlocutionary acts are the resulting action
- porn silences and subordinates as it's illocutionary force
- authority affects power of illocution
- silencing as stopping locution (preventing speaking), stopping illocution (preventing hearer from understanding intent of locution), stopping perlocution (stopping response)

Grice

- code model, hearer makes a copy of what the receiver says
- ostensive inferential model, informative and communicative intention
- non-natural meaning requires intention of implication
- informative intention (intention of hearer to believe what is being implied), communicative intention (intention for hearer to recognize speaker has an II), casual intention (satisfaction of CI as reason for satisfaction of II)
- cooperative principles and maxims, flouting the maxims to show that there is an implicature

Le Guin: Solitude

- pessimist, language controls us

Cheney and Seyfarth

- primates are advanced in social aspects of intelligence, natural selection
- voluntary control, conventions determine language over biology, large repertoire of words, meaningful units compose to make new meanings

Coetzee

- non human animals have no metarepresentation, so no OIC, no language, no rational thought, no morals, and therefore no rights
- can still be objects of moral concern

Davidson

- cognitivism says metaphors do have some implicature, non cognitivism disagrees
- semantic twist, metaphors work because words have multiple meanings and are ambiguous
- pragmatic twist, metaphors work because of implicature

Star Trek

- optimist? language works for them as a tool (though not for anyone else)

Camp

- metaphors are irresistible to try to understand, create complicity, and are anti-deniable

Cohen

- metaphors create intimacy, shared understanding
- hearer has to accept invitation of the metaphor