Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
For example, in the definition "An elephant is a large gray animal native to Asia and Africa", the word "elephant" is the definiendum, and everything after the word "is" is the definiens. [7] The definiens is not the meaning of the word defined, but is instead something that conveys the same meaning as that word. [7]
The term or phrase that is being defined in a definition. definiens The words or phrases that are used to provide the definition of the definiendum. definite description A phrase that uniquely identifies a particular individual or concept, often using "the" to specify uniqueness. definition
There are times when a grammatically marked definite NP is not in fact identifiable. For example, the polar bear's habitat is the arctic does not refer to a unique, familiar, specific bear, in an example of a form-meaning mismatch. "The theoretical distinction between grammatical definiteness and cognitive identifiability has the advantage of ...
Fallacies of definition are the various ways in which definitions can fail to explain terms. The phrase is used to suggest an analogy with an informal fallacy. [1] Definitions may fail to have merit, because they are overly broad, [2] [3] [4] overly narrow, [3] [4] or incomprehensible; [4] or they use obscure or ambiguous language, [2] contain mutually exclusive parts, [3] or (perhaps most ...
An extensional definition gives meaning to a term by specifying its extension, that is, every object that falls under the definition of the term in question.. For example, an extensional definition of the term "nation of the world" might be given by listing all of the nations of the world, or by giving some other means of recognizing the members of the corresponding class.
definiens The meaning of something being defined derivative A derivative of a subclass of a series is the class of limits of non-empty subclasses description A definition of something as the unique object with a given property descriptive function A function taking values that need not be truth values, in other words what is not called just a ...
[13] He ends his section with the following observation: "A definition may very well rely upon notions that are equivalent to the one being defined; indeed, in every definition definiens and definiendum are equivalent notions, and the strict observance of Poincaré's demand would make every definition, hence all of science, impossible". [14]
Its meaning, rather, is a rule of revision that determines how to generate a new hypothetical extension given an initial one. These new extensions are at least as good as the originals, in the sense that, given one extension, the new extension contains exactly the things that satisfy the definiens for a particular circular predicate. In general ...