Instructions for the Final

Hamilton College, Spring 2009

Instructions for Preparing for the Final Exam

The final exam will consists of three parts, each with six questions. You will be asked to answer two questions from each of the three sections, for a total of six answers. Your answers should be organized responses, approximately one-to-three paragraphs long. The score for each response will be weighted equally.

The eighteen questions will be drawn from among the following list. The three parts of the exam will be divided as indicated below.

Part I: Reference

Locke, “Of Words”

1. How does Locke argue that words stand for ideas in our minds?

Frege, “The Thought”

2. How do thoughts/propositions exist in a third realm? That is, how are they distinct from both psychological objects (ideas) and physical objects?
4. What is intensionalism? Why do we call Frege an intensionalist?

Frege, “On Sense and Nominatum”

1. Describe Frege’s three motivations for the sense/reference distinction.
2. How do the senses of singular terms differ from the referents of singular terms? How do senses of sentences differ from the referents of sentences?
3. How does the distinction between sense and reference solve the problem of cognitive content for identity statements?
4. How does the distinction between sense and reference solve the problem of false presupposition/empty reference?
5. How does the distinction between sense and reference solve the problem of substitution into opaque contexts?

Russell, “Descriptions”

1. How does Russell solve Frege’s puzzle without positing senses?
2. How do Frege and Russell differ in their analysis of ‘the king of France is wise’? How do their analyses differ on their attributions of a truth value to that sentence?

Strawson, “On Referring”

2. How does ‘the purple platypus on my left has no teeth’ suffer from a failure of presupposition? How would Strawson’s analysis of this sentence differ from that of Russell? From that of Frege?
3. What are the bearers of truth values? Compare the answers of Frege, Russell, and Strawson.

Donnellan, “Reference and Definite Descriptions”

1. Consider, “The Dean of Faculty is well-educated.” Provide an attributive interpretation and a referential interpretation of that sentence.

Kripke, “Naming and Necessity”

2. How are the Gödel/Schmidt and Jonah cases counter-examples to cluster descriptivism?
3. What is a rigid designator? Distinguish rigid from non-rigid designators. What does Kripke’s claim that names are rigid designators mean?
6. How does the rejection of descriptivism leave open a question of how names hook onto the world? How does Kripke attempt to answer that question?
7. What problems face direct reference theory that descriptivism solved? How might Kripke solve those problems?

Putnam, “Meaning and Reference”

1. What is externalism about meaning? How does Putnam’s Twin Earth example support externalism?
3. Describe Putnam’s division of linguistic labor hypothesis. What does it mean for the claim that meanings are apprehended by language users?

Part II: Meaning

Positivism (Ayer and Hempel)

2. How does the verifiability criterion of meaning involve semantic atomism?
4. How is positivism a foundationalist project?

Quine, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” and “Ontological Relativity” (through p 51)

1. What are the two dogmas? How are they related?
2. How does Quine interpret ‘analyticity’? Why?
5. How is the explanation of synonymy in terms of modality (necessity) circular?
6. What is the connection between the analytic/synthetic distinction and the problem of radical translation?
10. How does semantic holism differ from semantic atomism? Why should we believe in holism?

Grice, “Meaning”

1. What is speaker-meaning, according to intension-based semantics (IBS)? How does speaker-meaning relate to sentence-meaning?
3. How is IBS a two-step reductionist program?

IBS (Schiffer and Johnston)

1. What is deflationism? What is deflationism about meaning?
2. How might concerns about physicalism lead to meaning deflationism?

Tarski, “The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics”

2. What is the liar sentence? What problem does the liar present for a theory of truth? How does Tarski avoid the problem of the liar?
3. What is the T-schema? How does it relate to the theorems of a Tarskian truth theory? Distinguish the roles of an object language and a metalanguage in the construction of Tarski’s theory.

Davidson, “Truth and Meaning”

2. How does Davidson propose to use Tarski’s work to explain meaning?
3. Is Davidson’s proposal successful? Explain.

Katz, “Introduction” and “Sense”

1. How does Katz’s new intensionalism differ from Fregean intensionalism?
2. Describe the autonomous theory of sense, and its related version of analyticity.

Part III: Rule-Following and Ontology

Wittgenstein, “On the Private Language Argument”

1. How do the terms ‘five’ ‘red’ and ‘apples’ differ in their meaning? How does Wittgenstein use these terms to oppose the Augustine/Locke theory of meaning?
3. Describe Wittgenstein’s deviant counters. What is the problem? Why can’t we solve the problem by pointing?
4. According to Wittgenstein, what is a private language? Why can’t we have one?

Kripke, “On Rules and Private Language”

1. Describe Kripke’s quus/plus problem. Why does the problem arise?
2. Distinguish skeptical solutions from straight solutions. How does Kripke depict Wittgenstein as providing a skeptical solution?

Millikan, “Truth Rules...”

2. How does Millikan’s distinction between distal rules and proximal rules support her solution to the rule-following problem?
3. How is Millikan’s solution to the rule-following problem straight, rather than skeptical?

Chomsky, “Language and Problems of Knowledge”

1. What is Chomsky’s poverty of the stimulus argument? How does it support both nativism and the existence of a universal grammar?
4. How is Chomsky’s view of language psychologistic? Does this view conflict with Frege’s claims that we should understand language as objective?

Katz, “The Unfinished Chomskyan Revolution”

1. Characterize and distinguish linguistic nominalism, linguistic conceptualism, and linguistic platonism.
2. Why is infinity in linguistics incompatible with concretism in the foundations of linguistics?

Devitt, “Linguistics is not Psychology”

2. What are Devitt’s three distinctions? How do they lead to an argument for linguistic reality?
4. How does Devitt attempt to make linguistic reality, with its use of linguistic types, compatible with nominalism?