2. • Not many people know that in early 2001,
George W. Bush made a secret visit to meet
with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, in the
course of which they went to Kabul, did some
sightseeing, toured an oil refinery together, and
visited a chocolate factory where they ate an
excessive amount (which caused Bush to get
sick later that night).
• Wgksdgophegagarewo
• It’s dangerous to play Frisbee on the motorway.
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3. • Some strings of marks or noises are meaningful
sentences.
• Each meaningful sentence has parts that are
themselves meaningful.
• Each meaningful sentence means something in
particular.
• Competent speakers of a language are able to
understand many of that language’s sentences
without effort and almost instantaneously; they
also produce sentences in the same way.
• Linguistic expressions have the meanings they do
because they stand for things; what they mean is
what they stand for. 3
4. • A theory that is based on the assumption that
language is used to talk about things outside
language and claims that the meaning of a
word (except a syncategorematic word) is the
object it denotes, and the meaning of a
sentence is the proposition it expresses.
• Every meaningful expression has meaning
because there is something that it refers to,
designates, signifies, or denotes.
• It is a symbol that stands for something other
than itself. 4
5. • In over-simplified terms, the meaning of an
expression is that to which the expression
refers.
• But a sense-reference distinction shows that
two expressions can have different meaning but
the same referent.
• Also called the denotative theory because in
modern form of this theory, meaning is a
referring or denoting relation between a term
and the object it picks out. 5
6. Objection 1
• Not every word refers to an actual thing.
• some words don’t refer to anything that exists.
• “Pegasus” does not denote anything real,
because there is no winged horse after all.
• What about the pronouns of quantification, as
in: “I saw nobody.”
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7. Objection 2
• What to do with the subject-predicate?
• “Ralph is fat.” What does “fat” denote?
• “Ralph bears the having relation to fatness.”???
• We need to explain what “bears” refers to. And this
could go on into infinity, and we’d never be able to
work out the referential meaning of the sentence.
• What do the nouns like “sake’ and “behalf” refer to?
• The words like “very,” “of,” “a,” “yes,” and “alas” do
not refer to anything, and yet they are meaningful.
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8. Objection 3
• Referential Theory treats a sentence as a list of
names for things to which the words refer. But a
list of names says nothing:
– Bob Jill Washington Phyllis
• So how could we get meaning from a list of
words that refer to things? There must be
something else going on too.
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9. Objection 4
• There is more to meaning than reference.
• Some words can refer to the same thing but not
have the same meaning, for example “Jose
Mario Bergoglio” and “the Pope.”
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