MEANING, TOUGHT AND REALITY

MEANING, TOUGHT AND REALITY

1. Language allow the speaker to describe or model aspects of what he or she perceive.

2. In semantics the action of picking out or identifying with words (Nelson Mandela / Paris) is called referring on denoting.

3. Approaches

   • Referential
   • Gives the meaning of words and sentences by showing how they relate to situation.
   • Nouns: meaningful because they donate entities in the world. Also because they denote situation and events.
   • literal

4. Type of reference

   • Referring expressions: nouns
   • non referring expressions: so, very, maybe, if, not, all.
   • Constant: “The pacific ocean is the biggest” ..don’t need context
   • Variable: “he is fast”..(pronouns) Need context.

5. Nouns and noun phrases

   • can be used to refer (indefinite and definite)
   • Can operate like names to pick out an individual

6. Reference as a theory of meaning

   • This theory would claim that reference picks out elements in the real word.
   • Semantics is reference that to give the meaning of a word one shows what it denotes.

7. MENTAL REPRESENTATIONS

   • There must be more to meaning that simple denotation: sense
   • Sense places a new level between words and the world: mental representation.

8. Necessary and sufficient conditions

   • A traditional approach to describing concepts is to define them using sets of necessary and sufficient conditions.
   • Prototypes
     • Relations between concepts

9. Words, Concepts and Thinking

   • Linguistic relativity
   • The language of thought hypothesis