Sunday, November 4, 2007

The Intension and Extension of Terms


The main task of logic is the evaluation of arguements. But there are many arguments in which the process of evaluation is the observation, " Well, that depends what you mean by.." The only way to clarify this problem is by giving a definition. Words are the basic units of language, and a Term, is any word or arrangement of words that may serve as the subject of a statement, Some examples of this are
Proper Names: Napoleon, McDonalds, Bill Clinton, The United States, California
Common Names: animal, house, activity, person, restitution
Descriptive Phrases: first president of the United States, Author of Harry Potter
However words that are not terms are stuff like verbs, adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and etc, and examples of these terms that wont work as terms are dictorial, run quickly, craves, and cabbages into again the forest, which is also an example of a nonsyntactic arrangement.

In the pervious chapter 2.1 they explored the cognitive meaning of language in general. The cognitive meaning of terms is made up of two kinds: Intensional and extensional.
1. Intensional meaning: is made of qualities or attributes that the term connotes, and connotes means to suggest or imply in addition to the dictionary definition. So an intensional meaning is one that has an implied meaning to the word. An example will be the word Dog, which consists of attributes including four legs, canines, and barking. Is also known as the inension or connotation of a term, which can also be related to sense.
2. Extensional meaning: is made of the members of the class that the term denotes, and denotes means to signify directly or refer to specifically. An example will be the word Dog again but will refer to Dogs themselves and all dogs in the universe. Also known as the extension or denotation, which can be also related to reference.

However there is a probelm with using connotations, because a dog lover may see dogs as cute and cuddly, while dog haters might see them as obnoxious, loud, and drooling. To solve this problem we use conventional connotation which includes the attributes that the term commonly promotes in the minds of people who speak the same languages. With the insight, that this is more or less the same from person to person and form time to time.

There is also a problem with the denoation of terms as well. For one if the term "a currently living dinosaur" or "the king of Mesopotamia" they were all once existing beings, however they have long since perished from our present. These are terms known as empty extension, and like the name implies these are words taht denote a null class, meaning a group or class with no memebers.

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