logicandlanguage.net

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
Suppose you have to teach someone a word they don't already know. How could you know when they understand it?
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...

Students seem to stare blankly at me when I ask them questions like this. Maybe I don't ask them properly. You'll have to let us know how it turns out when you get to the names/descriptions section.

Perhaps you manage to be more intimidating than I do. I can never get the stare down...

Hmm, I actually have an assignment like this to do tonight for my formal semantics class this term. I need to write something on my intuitions about what meaning is. Seems a little silly for a graduate level course in linguistics (though that's not suggest it's not worthwhile for people who haven't encountered such questions before, of course). I had to go and explain to the lecturer that after several years studying philosophy of language I had no standing intuitions about what meaning is whatsoever.

And I'm happy to report that when the question was asked in the class yesterday, we did get some of the crazy answers (Wittgenstein and Frege would have been turning in their graves).

I remember David Reeve asking a version of what constitutes the meaning of an expression as the first short assignment (2 pages) in a class at Reed about 25 years ago. I know my answer was mostly crap, but I remember that I said something half intelligent in ruling out an option (which he recognized as not crap), and that this episode was a small part in my (perhaps?) later being able to tell reasonable philosophical arguments from just making things up.

This seems like the sort of assignment that Aidan is talking about, and also of the same general sort as what you are asking in class to motivate the enterprise.