Long story short, I didn't have any clothes to change into once his pool got my khaki shorts wet. So, being the cool guy that he is (his name is Chas, by the way), he noticed my perdicament and went up to his room to take responsibility for his pool being uncovered by getting me a dry pair of his own.
This is a terrible picture of what they look like:
So basically, I have a term here - 'these shorts'
The intension of my term would be "gray with red and white stripes, soft and comfortable, having a drawstring to tighten the waist"
But I am mildly confused about the extension
-This is because he never actually said that the shorts were mine - so as far as I can tell, they are neither fully mine, nor his, but maybe both of ours?
-The question is this: Would the extension here be both 'me and Chas' or because he's never going to get these shorts back, would the extension just be 'me'?
The extension of a term is the set of things it denotes. In this case the set contains a single item: these shorts. The question about to whom they belong is, I think, an intentional one -- it is one of the features of the shorts, like having a drawstring or being ugly, that they belong to someone. Who that is depends on the nature of the transaction: did Chas make a gift of them, loan them to you, or just hand them to you and let you figure it out?
ReplyDeleteI think I should point out that Prof. Silliman made a spelling error in the sentence, "The question about to whom they belong is, I think, an *intensional one..."
ReplyDeleteIt's an easy error to make since "intention" and "intension" are homophones.