CriticalThinking Tutorial 2

1 Chapter 2: Meaning and Definition1.1 The Complexity of LanguageThischapterisconcernedwiththemeaningoflanguage. Itisimportanttorecognizethedifferencebetween written and spoken language. Spoken language introduces many additional layers ofmeaning to that which is present in the actual words spoken. A very good example of this isthe sentence ‘You shouldn’t steal library books’; with different emphasis placed on each word themeaning of the sentence changes, as in the following two sentences:You shouldn’t steal library books (implying that it may be acceptable for others todo so)You shouldn’t steal library books (implying that something like deafacing them mightbe acceptable)Sincewewillonlybeconcernedwiththemeaningofwrittenlanguagewecanignorethesubtletiesof speech but you should remember that there are differences.1.2 The Meaning of LanguageNow we turn to the consideration of the nature of meaning. We will briefly look at three theoriesof meaning. The first two are common sense views which have serious difficulties.Reference Theory: The reference theory of meaning, which traces back to Aristotle, considersthe meaning of a word to be that which the word refers to, i.e. the extension (or referenceclass) of the word. For instance the word cat refers to all the cats in the world, and theword book to all the books. Problems with this theory are:1. that we can understand the meaning of the word book with only partial experience ofall the books, which is puzzling if ...