week of february 4

On Monday and Friday, we talked about proper names. Several types of knowledge are needed to master the use of proper names: syntactic and semantic knowledge, conceptual knowledge concerning individuation and personal identity through time, and knowledge about the naming conventions in a community. Knowing what a proper name refers to requires that we divide up reality in a particular way, and Eco's story of the Hyde brothers was meant to make you aware of that fact. What I tried to do was force you to use the proper name "Dr. Jekyll" to refer to an 'abnormal' individual that did not correspond to the usual way humans carve up reality. It was an individual that was composed of discontinuous time slices belonging to two twin brothers. Opinions were divided as to whether it is or is not possible to use a proper name in this way, and I changed my original slides to reflect this divergence of opinions. I also added a slide where a 1st person pronoun is used with the speaker's intention to refer to that very same abnormal individual. My judgment is that that's truly impossible, but I am eager to find out what YOU think. In the second part of Monday's lecture we investigated what young children assume about the semantic properties of proper names: they assume that proper names, unlike adjectives or indefinite DPs, refer to unique individuals in a given context. Here are Monday's slides. On Friday, we started out with the question of how proper names get hooked up with the individuals they refer to. We observed that the link between a proper name and its referent is established via special naming conventions in a community. If a proper names is directly linked to its referent via a naming 'ceremony', it is directly referential, that is, it does not have descriptive content. This correctly predicts that sentences like "If circumstances had been different, Elizabeth II might not have become a queen" or "If circumstances had been different, Shakespeare might have died in infancy and would not have become a playwright" are not contradictory, even if all of us associate the concept 'queenhood' with Elizabeth II and the concept 'playwright' with Shakespeare. We concluded that proper names have a public and a private meaning. Their public meaning is their referent, their private meaning is all the relevant information about the bearer of the name that a person associates with the name. The public meaning of a proper name is an individual in the world, hence not 'in our heads'. The private meaning of a proper name is represented in our heads in one way or other. In linguistic semantics, we are primarily interested in public meanings. Those are the kinds of meanings that are relevant for compositionality. Friday's slides are here.

On Wednesday, we had a lab session with problem sets from set theory. The assigned reading was Partee et al., chapter 1. The lab sheet is here. Florian prepared a commented answer sheet, which is here.