Unit quiz: Meaning, reference, and what speakers do with words

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Question 1

A newspaper profile states that Lois believes Superman can fly, and the same issue reports that Superman is Clark Kent. A subeditor concludes that Lois believes Clark Kent can fly, and is surprised when the sentence reads as false. Using Frege's distinction, what has gone wrong, and what does it show about the names inside the belief report?The two names share a reference but differ in sense, and inside the report the words stand for their customary senses rather than for the man, so the substitution changes the thought attributed and the conclusion does not followIdentity is not substitutable in any context, so Leibniz's law fails generally and no term may ever be replaced by a co-referential one

Question 2

A minute records: 'The chair of the safety committee approved the override.' The committee had been dissolved a month earlier and had no chair. A member argues that because the description has no referent, both the minute's sentence and its negation are neither true nor false, so no finding of fault can be recorded. Is that reasoning sound?Yes: a description that fails to denote makes the sentence meaningless, and a meaningless sentence cannot ground any findingNo: on Russell's analysis the sentence is false and its wide-scope negation true, so there is no truth-value gap, and avoiding both meaninglessness and gaps was the point of the theory of descriptions

Question 3

A reference letter reads in full: 'The candidate's command of medieval Latin is excellent, and his attendance was regular.' The hiring panel concludes that his philosophical work is weak. The candidate protests that the letter contains no such statement. Who is right about what the letter says, and on what does the panel's inference rest?The candidate is right that nothing of the kind is asserted, and the panel's conclusion is a conversational implicature generated by flouting the maxims of quantity and relation, hence cancellable and not part of what is saidThe panel is right that the letter asserts the candidate is weak, since a maxim of relevance makes whatever a cooperative writer omits part of the letter's literal content

Question 4

A historian objects to the thesis that names are abbreviated descriptions: 'If Aristotle meant the teacher of Alexander, then the statement that Aristotle might not have taught Alexander would be false. But it is true, since he might have devoted himself to zoology. So the description is not the meaning of the name.' Reconstruct the argument and state what it establishes.The argument fails because the premise that Aristotle might not have taught Alexander is false, since he did teach Alexander and possibility cannot outrun actualityThe argument is valid: a description supplies only a contingent property, so if it were the name's meaning the modal claim would be false, and since the modal claim is true the name designates the man rigidly in every world where he exists

Question 5

Oscar on Earth and Twin Oscar on Twin Earth are molecule-for-molecule identical. Each says 'water is wet' of the clear liquid around him, which is H2O on Earth and XYZ on Twin Earth. A philosopher concludes that because their inner states are identical their words mean the same, and the difference lies only in their surroundings. Assess that conclusion.It is false as stated: the terms differ in extension and therefore in meaning, so meaning is not fixed by internal state alone, and identity of inner state yields at most identity of narrow contentIt is true, because meaning is a psychological state, and two subjects in identical psychological states cannot mean different things by the same word

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