Lesson 4: Exercises on Meaning
Context
Sharing meanings and using categories seem to be important human abilities. How we do these
things seems relevant to a consideration of language, as a way of knowing.
The view that students often seem to hold is that categories correspond to natural kinds that exist
out there in the world, on which we hang labels (words) when we recognize them. According to
this view, the objects that make up this natural kind, whether it be birds or tables, are a part of
this category because they share a common property or feature. Because we recognize this
feature, so the reasoning goes, we are able to group them together and name them.
This view of meaning can easily be shown to be faulty in various ways. The first of these is to say
that even if one could categorize tables in this way, we would have serious problems doing the
same with freedom or good or any number of concepts of that sort. The complexity of
categorization should be illustrated by the activities.
Aims
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To examine the meaning(s) of words and our knowledge of these meanings.
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To highlight the importance of categorization in the construction of knowledge.
Class Management
These activities could take up one or two 45-minute lessons. Discussion in small groups, followed
by a plenary, would be appropriate. At other points in the TOK course there should be sufficient
opportunity to return to the issues raised.
Focus Activity
Define the word good. It might help to provide some statements to stimulate discussion.
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He is a good man.
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She is a good athlete.
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There are a good many liars in this outfit.
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Are you good for a few dollars?
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The common good.
This activity can be repeated with other generic words, such as true.
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He was true to his word.
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She is a true friend.
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Everything he told us was true.
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That arrow flies true.
Teacher Support Material—Theory of Knowledge Lessons from Around the World - © IBO, August 2000
Lesson 4—page 1
Lesson 4: Exercises on Meaning
Discussion Questions
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Do we need to know a definition of a word, in order to understand its meaning?
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Is knowing how to use a word similar to knowing how to walk or swim; that is, could it be
viewed as a skill?
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Do words have meanings or do we give them meanings?
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What do people mean when they claim that young people no longer use language properly?
Students may quickly fix on a variety of uses (the moral good versus the good used in
winetasting, for example). It is also possible to narrow the discussion by asking for a single
definition of good when describing human action only (the moral dimension). The likelihood is
that students will be unable to provide an answer to everyone’s satisfaction. If they object to the
choice of word, arguing that it is too abstract, try them out on Wittgenstein’s defining game.
These are words that they use successfully every day, and so they are competent users of these
terms and yet they are unable to define them. Does this mean, as Socrates would have it, that they
have no idea of what they are saying? (This is the metaphysical view so eloquently portrayed in
Plato’s dialogues, where Socrates goads prominent Athenians, requiring them to define key
concepts which they are prone to use as if they were experts on the subject, such as beauty,
justice, virtue, and when they are unable to do so, concludes that no one knows anything. One
cannot improve on Hubert Dreyfus’s quip that someone should have suspected that this was not
a good starting point for Western philosophy.)
An alternative view, that could emerge when these questions are considered, is the meaning as
use view. Here words take on meaning as ways in which we use the term (often in varied and
specialized contexts), which need not respond to any one underlying paradigm or model.
Links to Other Areas of TOK
Most of the concepts in the programme can lend themselves to the question of whether they
could be considered a language, and therefore the question of meanings becomes relevant. (As
Dennet has recently pointed out in his Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (Simon and Schuster, 1995, p.371)
it sometimes seems as if the highest praise we can bestow on a phenomenon we are studying is
the claim that its complexities entitle it to be called a language.) Might meanings work very
differently in different types of language? For example, does the word truth always mean the
same thing, or is it applied in the same circumstances, in all the areas of knowledge covered by
TOK? The same could be asked in relation to evidence, or justification. This is central to TOK.
How much of what is going on when we apply such words is common, and how much is
particular, to different areas of knowledge?
For example, in a discussion of what science is, should we include social research and analysis? Is
there one common feature typical of all those practices we call science? Or do we use it in
different ways, some of which make it easier to accommodate social studies than others? The
same applies to the discussion of art, or of good actions, or indeed the word language itself.
How we actually categorize is not an entirely resolved question. This lesson can focus attention
on the extent to which we are passive describers, registering the world about us, or active
interpreters of our surroundings (the or is not of the either/or variety).
Teacher Support Material—Theory of Knowledge Lessons from Around the World - © IBO, August 2000
Lesson 4—page 2
Lesson 4: Exercises on Meaning
From Other Times and Places
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Use of the word good in Australian English? (I’m good = I’m well)
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Use of these words in the past. For example, between the 15th and 18th centuries the word
presently meant immediately. It still does in British English, but means currently in American
English. Words are not static, but shift meaning with time, place, culture and purpose.
Quotations
Definitions are like belts—the shorter they are, the more elastic they need to be.
Steven Toumlin
Language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing
but a compromise—that which is common to you, me and everybody.
Thomas Ernest Hulme
Meanings receive their dignity from words instead of giving it to them.
Pascal
Ours is a Copious Language, and Trying to Strangers.
Mr Podsnap in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend
References
Hayakawa, AR & SI, Language in Thought and Action, (1991) Harcourt Brace, ISBN 0156482401
Keller, H, The Story of My Life, (1999) Demco Media, ISBN 0606159983
Kolak, D & Martin, R, Wisdom Without Answers, (1998) Wadsworth Publishing Co, ISBN
053425974X
Teacher Support Material—Theory of Knowledge Lessons from Around the World - © IBO, August 2000
Lesson 4—page 3