Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Course Reflections [Morgan Johnson]

I found the unit on names to be the most interesting unit that we studied. The back and forth between Searle and Kripke/Putnam over the viability of the cluster and causal chain theories really made me think about how and why we give names to things, especially how those names give meaning. I found the cluster/family theory of naming to introduce naming in a way I had never thought about by connecting not just a single definition to a name, but rather a group of descriptions such that we can get a sense of what that name means without limiting the meaning of the name to the descriptions we listed. I also enjoyed the way Kripke responded to this theory with the causal chain of reference that we are apart of when we borrow how someone uses a name. It intuitively makes sense that we often borrow the reference of a name without needing to know what exactly that name means based simply on the way it was used by others.

2 comments:

  1. Although I wrote about slurs in my reflection, I did enjoy the discussions about name as well. As a student studying religions, cooperative civilizations and philosophy, I have always been interested in "existence" and "epistemology", and the relations between the world I sense and the world itself (as if it does exist externally) always fascinates me. This class, especially the unite on names, did provide me another layer of understanding of those things.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I agree that the unit on names was particularly interesting; I still can't make up my mind on whether meaning is in the head or not. I think to call Kripke's causal explanation intuitive is slightly misleading, though I agree that once all the pieces are in place it coheres nicely with our intuitions. There are interesting questions Kripke has to respond to regarding the starting points of these causal chains for words, but I think the genesis of language is difficult to account for on any theory of names, so Kripke is not alone.

    ReplyDelete