King’s College London
University of London
This paper is part of an examination of the College counting towards
the award of a degree. Examinations are governed by the College
Regulations under the authority of the Academic Board.
BA EXAMINATION
6AANA048
Topics in Philosophy of Language
SUMMER 2013
TIME ALLOWED: 2 HOURS
Answer TWO questions
Where a question gives you the option to answer one or more parts of
that question, credit will be given for the quality and coherence of
your answer rather than the quantity of parts answered.
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6AANA048
Answer TWO questions.
1. Bracketing ambiguity, indexicals and demonstratives, is there a
significant class of English sentences such that for each of these there
is the thought it expresses (in meaning what it does)? Bracketing
ambiguity, and assigning references to indexicals and demonstratives
where they are part of a sentence, is there a thought which is the one
the sentence expresses of those references? (If you like, you can
answer just one of these.)
2. What would it mean to give a negative answer to question 1, but go
on to say that, nonetheless, sentences are means for expressing
thoughts?
3. On what aspect of ‘say’ might it be true that a sentence says that
something? What does this show?
4. What would it be to identify what a sentence means? What
objection might there be to the idea that this could be done by
assigning a sentence a truth-condition? What might that idea mean by
a ‘condition’?
5. Consider this idea: In constructing a theory which assigned each
(declarative) sentence of the language a truth-condition, one would
inevitably assign each well-formed expression of the language a
property an expression would have only in meaning what that one
does. Explain and evaluate that idea.
6. Can an utterance of the sentence “I am here now” ever be false?
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6AANA048
7. Frege remarked that sometimes “the mere wording, as fixed in
writing, is not the complete expression of a thought.” (“The Thought”:
64) In such a case, he suggests, the thought’s complete expression
involves “accompanying circumstances” of the sentence’s use. How
should this idea of accompanying circumstances be understood? How, if
at all, does the meaning of the sentence in such a case fix what these
are, or how they relate to the thought expressed?
8. What is the meaning of a name? What, then, does a name do?
9. Russell thought that what we ordinarily call names cannot
contribute to the expression of a singular thought (anyway by
functioning to make the thought expressed a singular one). Why did he
think that?
10. What is a singular thought? Why are such thoughts important?
(Optional: Could we do without them?)
11. Does Kaplan show us how to avoid Russell’s conclusion about what
we call names? (See question 8.) If so, how does Kaplan do this? What
is the general importance for semantics of what he thus shows? (If not,
why not?)
12. Can two people share a psychological state and yet refer to/speak
of different things when they say things like, "Water sates thirst''?
13. Frege remarks that if grammar were not a mixture of logic and
psychology, there would be but one grammar. a) What role is there for
psychology in grammar, but not in logic? b) Is there an identifiable part
of grammar which is just logic? Discuss a or b or both, with reference
to Chomsky’s idea of a human language faculty.
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