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Logic and Critical Thinking Assignment

Philosophy of language examines the origins, nature, and functions of language. It questions how language relates to reality and conveys meaning. Language can be used to convey cognitive meaning by communicating information, or emotive meaning by expressing feelings and values. Logic is chiefly concerned with cognitive meaning and aims to separate value claims from factual statements. Vagueness and ambiguity in language can cause deficiencies in conveying cognitive meaning clearly. These deficiencies are due to blurred or mixed expressions that allow for a range of interpretations. Vagueness and ambiguity can then lead to verbal disputes over word meanings or factual disputes over stated facts.

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50 views2 pages

Logic and Critical Thinking Assignment

Philosophy of language examines the origins, nature, and functions of language. It questions how language relates to reality and conveys meaning. Language can be used to convey cognitive meaning by communicating information, or emotive meaning by expressing feelings and values. Logic is chiefly concerned with cognitive meaning and aims to separate value claims from factual statements. Vagueness and ambiguity in language can cause deficiencies in conveying cognitive meaning clearly. These deficiencies are due to blurred or mixed expressions that allow for a range of interpretations. Vagueness and ambiguity can then lead to verbal disputes over word meanings or factual disputes over stated facts.

Uploaded by

Meskir Alemu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Logic and meaning

Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the origins of language, nature of meaning, the
usage and cognition of language and the relationship between language and reality. It is an important
discipline in its own right and hence, it poses questions like "what is meaning?"," how does language
refer to the world? “and etc.

Language is a body of standard meanings of words and the form of speech used as a means of
expressing the feeling, emotion, desire, thought etc. in a consistent pattern of communication.
Philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein thought that the number of functions of language to be virtually
unlimited. Language can be used in every aspects of everyday life.

For our purpose, two linguistic functions of language are particularly important:(i) to convey information
( ii) to express feelings

 Terminology that conveys information is said to have cognitive meaning.


 Terminology that expresses feeling is said to have emotive meaning.

Logic is concerned chiefly with cognitive meaning. While, emotive meanings encompasses value claim.
Value claim is that something is good, bad right, wrong,better,worse, more important, less important
than some other thing. For purpose of logic, we must be able to disengage the value claims of emotively
charged statements. In arguments, emotive terminology accomplishes basically the same function as it
does in statements.

Deficiency of cognitive meaning

If we consider cognitive meaning specifically from emotive meaning, two defectives may raise. Namely
they are vagueness and ambiguity.

A vague expression: is one that allows for borderline cases in which it is impossible to tell if the
expression applies or does not apply. Trouble arises only when the language is not sufficiently precise
for what the situation demands.

An ambiguous expression: is one that can be interpreted as having more than one clearly distinct
meaning in given context. It can affect entire statement. Such ambiguity and vagueness is that vague
terminology allows for a relatively continuous range of interpretations. A vague

Due to those blurred and mixed up expressions a conflict may occurred. The role of vagueness and
ambiguity in arguments may be conveniently explored in the context of conflicting arguments between
individuals. Such conflicts are called disputes.

Disputes are generally classified into two. Namely

1Verbal disputes : are disputes from vagueness or ambiguity of words.

2.Factual dispute : are disputes from given fact.

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