Cumulative level test: Meaning, modality, and the furniture of the world: reference, speech, necessity, time, and conceptual revision

Check understanding, separately from reading

12 questions · 80% to pass · no timer. This longer test revisits both units in the level. These authored questions assess recognition and application of the taught distinctions, not professional qualification. You may review the lessons and retry. Repeat attempts reuse the question bank; a remembered answer is not proof of transfer to a new situation.

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Question 1

Two students dispute whether 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is trivial. One says it must be, since it says of one object that it is itself; the other says it was a real astronomical discovery. Assess both claims.Both are right about different things: the statement is necessary because it identifies an object with itself, yet it was discovered empirically and expresses a different thought from 'Hesperus is Hesperus', since the two names present the object differentlyThe first student is right, because a necessary identity is knowable a priori by anyone who understands the names, so the astronomers discovered nothing

Question 2

At a party a speaker says 'the man in the corner drinking a martini is a famous logician', indicating a man who is in fact drinking water. The man is a famous logician. A listener objects that the sentence is false because the description misdescribes him. Assess the objection.The objection is right: because the description is false of the man, no reference was achieved and the sentence is false under every analysisOn Donnellan's referential use the speaker referred to that man, and the predication is true of him, so the assertion can be true even though the description is false of the referent; the attributive reading gives a different verdict

Question 3

A couple exchange vows before a friend who has no licence to solemnise marriages, believing him to be authorised. The friend declares them married. A later dispute turns on whether a marriage occurred. Using the vocabulary of speech acts, assess.The illocutionary act misfires: the words had locutionary meaning and may have had perlocutionary effects, but a declarative of this kind requires authority among its felicity conditions, so no marriage was effectedA marriage occurred, because the couple sincerely intended to marry and sincerity is the condition that matters for a performative

Question 4

A carpenter makes a table from a particular block of oak. A philosopher says the table could have been made from a different block, since we can imagine a workshop in which a different block is used. Assess the inference.The inference is sound, because whatever can be imagined without contradiction is possible, so conceivability entails possibilityConceivability is a fallible guide: on origin essentialism the table could not have come from a different block, though it could have been stained differently, and the intuition that it could is disputed rather than decisive

Question 5

A city dweller cannot tell an elm from a beech and has never seen either closely, yet uses both words correctly and asks a botanist when precision matters. A theorist concludes that she does not really mean anything by 'elm'. Assess.She does mean something: her use is deferential, with the extension fixed by experts under a division of linguistic labour, so her competence does not require the ability to identify the treesThe theorist is right, because meaning requires the speaker to be able to recognise the kind, and without that ability the word is empty in her idiolect

Question 6

'Eight is necessarily greater than seven. The number of planets is eight. Therefore the number of planets is necessarily greater than seven.' A student says the conclusion is false, since there might have been five planets, and concludes the argument is invalid. Assess.The argument is invalid because identity fails in modal contexts, so no term may be substituted into a modal sentenceThe conclusion is false on the de dicto reading and true on the de re reading; the argument is valid when the description takes wide scope, so the student has detected an ambiguity rather than an invalidity

Question 7

A barometer reading falls before every storm. A forecaster says the falling reading causes storms, and defends the claim by noting a perfect correlation, temporal priority, and spatial contiguity. Assess the claim.The correlation is not causal: intervening to change the reading would not change the weather, so the relation fails an invariance test, and both are effects of a common cause in the atmosphereThe claim is well supported, since constant conjunction with priority and contiguity is what a causal relation consists in

Question 8

Two observers moving relative to one another disagree about whether two distant flashes are simultaneous. A presentist concludes that his view is untouched, since simultaneity is only a matter of description. Assess that reply.The reply is adequate, because presentism concerns what exists and relativity concerns measurement, so no physical result can bear on itIt is too quick: if simultaneity is frame-relative, there is no single privileged set of simultaneous facts for presentness to select, so the presentist must either restrict the view to a frame or deny that frame-relative simultaneity is fundamental, and both moves are contested

Question 9

An argument runs: composition cannot be vague, so for any objects either they always compose something or they never do; we exist and are composed of particles; therefore any particles whatsoever compose something. A critic replies that noses and door-knobs are absurd consequences. Assess the exchange.The argument is valid and its conclusion follows from its premises; the absurdity objection targets universalism's cost rather than the inference, and the weakest premise is that composition cannot be vague, which restricted views denyThe argument is invalid, because it moves from a claim about vagueness to a claim about existence without any intermediate premise

Question 10

A commission is asked whether patients with irreversible loss of all brain function are dead. One member says the question is empirical and neurology will answer it; another says it is purely a matter of word use and any answer will do. Assess both.The first member is right, since death is a biological fact and the criteria for it are discovered by physiology aloneNeither is adequate: the question requires an explication of the concept of death that is answerable to prior usage and to coherent biological criteria, and the choice carries normative consequences that must be argued for rather than assumed

Question 11

'If you publish that story, your funding will be reviewed.' The editor calls it a prediction; the journalist calls it a threat. What does the dispute turn on, and how should it be resolved?It turns on illocutionary force rather than content: the same proposition can be asserted as a prediction or issued as a conditional threat, and the resolution looks to the speaker's standing, intention, and the direction of fit, not to the words aloneIt turns on truth: since the conditional may well be true, the utterance is a prediction, and the journalist's reaction is a misinterpretation of its content

Question 12

A philosopher argues that because 'woman' is a social kind whose boundaries were fixed by contingent history, the term should be redefined to track a structural position, and that this redefinition is correct. Assess the step from the historical premise to the normative conclusion.The conclusion follows, because if a kind is socially constructed then any definition of it is equally legitimate, and the structural one is at least politically usefulThe premise supports the possibility of revision but not the particular revision: an ameliorative analysis must state the purpose the concept is to serve and defend that purpose, and its adequacy is judged by the function it performs rather than by the history alone

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