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January 23, 2006
knows how to box, but he can also use the diamond...
The Ethical Werewolf imagines Scott Soames as Tyson. This, frankly, is what the blogosphere is all about. (That will, of course, be my main thesis at the panel on blogging at the pacific APA.)
Posted by logican at 11:10 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 17, 2006
Back to School
Well, today was the first day of my undergraduate philosophy of language course. I'm using Martinich's Philosophy of Language
...modern philosophy of language is highly inaccessible. It is very hard for the ordinary student ... to appreciate the problems it explores, or the methods it uses. The interest of the results ... is thus largely hidden... Naturally it would not do merely to survey various positions on various issues. For the point of the book was not to enable a student to go through the hoops, but to enable him to understand why the hoops are placed where they are. (v-vi)
My idea for addressing this problem was this:
often the problems discussed by a writer are easier to appreciate if they have occurred to you independently beforehand. So perhaps if I could get my students to run into some of the problems that arise in thinking about language all by themselves, then they'd be less suspicious of them as introduced by, say, Frege, or Russell, or Grice.
So part of the class today was getting students to brainstorm answers to questions like:
- What is a language?
What do we use language for?
Do these two sentences mean the same thing?
- George Bush lives in the White House
The president of the United States lives in the White House
Could someone understand two words that meant the same thing and not know that they did?
And, er,...
What would a theory of meaning be like?
Questions 3 and 5 worked particularly well and it was nice to see students coming up with alternative views and producing sketches of arguments for them. I was a bit worried that I'd run into the crazy answers (e.g. word learning works by telepathy, all words just sound like their referents etc, both of which I'd met before) but instead I got the argument that the two sentences must mean different things because when George Bush is not president one is false while the other is true, and the counter-suggestion that the meaning of the sentence with the description changes, so that the two sentences mean the same thing while George Bush is in power, but different things as soon as he leaves.
I don't know how much more receptive to the section of the course on names and descriptions this will have made the class, but I have hopes...
Posted by logican at 07:54 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack