PA RT T H R E E
. . . to sense
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of the words in them. This basic agreement on meaning is re
flected in analytic
sentences, which is what makes them of great interest to semanticists.
The notions analytic, synthetic, and contradiction
each apply to individual
sentences. Analyticity, syntheticity, and contradiction are, then, sense
properties of sentences.
Example
That man is human has the sense property of analyticity (or of being analytic).
That man is tall has the sense property of syntheticity (or of being synthetic).
That man is a woman has the sense property of being a contradiction.
Practice (1) Does the analyticity of
That man is human depend in some
crucial way on a semantic relationship
between the sense
of
man and that of
human?
Yes / No
(2) Which of the following statements seems to express this semantic
relationship between
man and
human correctly? Circle your choice.
(a)
The
sense of man includes the sense of
human.
(b)
The sense of
human includes the sense of
man.
(c)
The sense of
man is identical to the sense of
human.
(3) Does the semantic relationship that exists between
man
and
human also exist between
man and
tall?
Yes / No
(4) Does the absence of this semantic relationship between
man and
tall account for the fact that
This man is tall is
not analytic, like
This man is human?
Yes / No
Feedback
(1) Yes (2) (a) (3) No (4) Yes
Comment Note the interdependence of sense relations and sense properties. Sense
properties of sentences (e.g. analyticity) depend on the sense properties of,
and the sense relations between, the words they contain. The sense relation
between the predicates
man and
human is known as hyponymy, a kind of
sense inclusion relationship between predicates which we will explore further
in Unit 10. The sense relation between the predicates
man and
woman is a
kind of antonymy, or oppositeness, which we will explore further in Unit 11.
The sense structure of a
language is like a network, in which the senses of all
elements are, directly or indirectly, related to the senses of all other elements
in these and other kinds of ways.
For the rest of this unit, we will explore a limitation in the idea of sense, a
limitation which is quite parallel to a limitation in the idea of extension,
pointed out in the previous unit (Unit 8). For convenience, we repeat below our
statement of the relationship usually envisaged between sense and extension.
A speaker’s knowledge of the sense of a predicate provides him with an
idea of its extension. We said earlier that another way of talking about this
relationship is that the sense of a predicate determines or ‘
fixes’ the extension