Chapter 2: Meaning, Thought and Reality

Chapter 2: Meaning, Thought and Reality

1. denote is used for the relationship between a linguistic expression and the world

   • refer is used for the action of a speaker in picking out entities in the world

2. names are definite in that they carry the speaker's assumption that her audience can identify the referent

3. Nouns and noun phrases can be used to refer: indefinite and definite NPs can operate like names to pick out an individual

4. students of child language describe children both underextending concepts and overextending concepts

5. it seems unlikely then that a word is referring to a conceot composed of a set of necessary and sufficent conditions, or what amounts to the same things, a definition

6. prototype: is a model of concepts which views them as structured so that there are central or typical members of a category

7. one important issue that our discussion has bypassed so far is the relational nature of conceptual knowledge

   • such relations between concepts have been used to motivate models of conceptual herarchies in the cognitive psychology literature

8. knowledge of reality is attainable and comes from correctly conceptualizing and categorizing the world, this is called objectivism

   • we could explain the fact that we successfully interact with reality becuase of a notion of ecological viability. we call this mental constructivism

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