.philosophyoflanguage.

assignments

Submit your completed assignments by email to Professor Pete Mandik at the email address: mandikp@wpunj.edu This assignment is acceptable as email only.

Assignment 1. Due Monday, Sept. 25

Answer the following 3 questions as concisely as possible.

1) What is the primary disagreement between Frege and Russell?

2) List a few things that, according to Frege, senses are not.

3) Given an example of a name and a definite descripition that have the same reference.

 

Assignment 2. Due Monday, Oct. 9

Answer the following 3 questions as concisely as possible.

1) What is the problem of inexistence?

2) What is the Fregean solution to the problem of inexistence?

3) What is the Meinongian solution to the problem of inexistence?

 

Assignment 3 Due Monday, Oct. 30

Answer the following question as concisely as possible.

Suppose that Frege allowed that senses could be subjective ideas. Suppose further that Frege was a materialist and allowed that subjective ideas could be identical to physiolgical properteris of brains. What difference, if any, would remain between Frege and Quine regarding the semantic properties of natural languages, based on the assigned readings?

Explain your answer as clearly as you can.

Extra Credit Assignment Due Monday, Nov. 13 (This can earn you as many as 5 extra points toward the midterm exam)

Answer the following question as concisely as possible.

What, according to Dummett, does the appeal to use do for the theory of meaning?

Explain your answer as clearly as you can.

 

Assignment 4 Due Monday, Nov. 13

Explain in a small number of sentences each of the following four ideas

1) metaphysical necessity and contingency  

2) epistemic necessity and contingency  

3) rigid designator  

4) indexical/token-reflexive/deictic

Assignment 5 Due Monday, Nov. 2

(The following paragraph is from Rick Grush's Philosophy of Language website.) A definite description is a set of properties that specify necessary and sufficient conditions for something to be the denotation of an expression -- it is the denotation if and only if it, and only it, satisfies all of the properties as specified in the description. Given this, Russell's proposal is that one knows the meaning of an expression if one knows the definite description it corresponds to -- that is, if one knows the necessary and sufficient conditions for being the reference of the expression. Compare this to Putnam's proposal for the meaning of the term 'gold'. There is a sense in which Putnam agrees with the Russellian idea, but a very important sense in which he disagrees. What are they?

Prof. Pete sez: Explain your answer in approximately 500 words.

Assignment 6 Due Monday, Dec. 11

According to Wiggins, can Putnam's doctirine of natural kind words and Frege's doctrines of sense, reference, and extension cohere?  Explain why Wiggins gives the answer he does in approximately 1,000 words.