PhB Bachelor of Philosophy Philosophy of Language 3

Question 1

Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth defines truth through:

Accepted Answer

A meta-linguistic schema: 'p' is true if and only if p

Answer

Coherence with a broader system of accepted beliefs

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Practical utility of the belief for guiding action

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Correspondence to innate mental representations

Question 2

Donald Davidson's truth-conditional semantics holds that understanding a sentence consists in:

Accepted Answer

Knowing the conditions under which it would be true

Answer

Knowing the emotional associations its words carry

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Being able to translate it into a formal logical language

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Knowing the speaker's communicative intentions

Question 3

Wittgenstein's private language argument concludes that:

Accepted Answer

A language whose terms are meaningful only to a single individual is conceptually impossible

Answer

Only languages that can be written down are meaningful

Answer

Private thoughts exist but cannot be adequately expressed in language

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All language ultimately refers to private mental states

Question 4

Grice's concept of 'conversational implicature' refers to:

Accepted Answer

Meaning communicated beyond what is literally said, inferred via cooperative principles

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The literal meaning encoded in the sentence's grammatical structure

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The logical entailments derived from the sentence's formal content

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Grammatical implications of a sentence's syntactic form

Question 5

Grice's distinction between 'natural meaning' and 'non-natural meaning' (meaningNN) is central to his account because meaningNN is defined by:

Accepted Answer

The speaker's intention to produce a belief in the hearer by the hearer's recognition of that very intention

Answer

The causal connection between a sign and what it indicates

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The grammatical rules governing the sentence uttered

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The truth conditions of the proposition expressed

Question 6

Austin's distinction between 'constative' and 'performative' utterances holds that performatives:

Accepted Answer

Perform an action in being uttered rather than describing one, and are assessed as felicitous or not

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Describe a state of affairs and can be evaluated as true or false

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Are always false when the speaker lacks the relevant authority

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Are meaningful only when produced in written rather than spoken form

Question 7

Semantic holism, associated with Quine and Davidson, is the view that:

Accepted Answer

The meaning of any term depends on its inferential relations to all other terms in the language

Answer

The meaning of each word is fully determined by its dictionary definition alone

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Every sentence has meaning independently of all other sentences

Answer

Meaning is grounded in sensory experience of individual objects