This article discusses whether Christian talk about God can be literal. First, it is argued that the meaning of a word cannot be reduced to its use, that metaphorical language is indirect in its use of words, and that the change of meaning of a word by analogical extension differs from the change of meaning by repeated metaphorical use. Next, it is shown that in Christian talk about God, God can be literally referred to by God's proper name, “YHWH,” and (...) by words that in contexts of prayer and praise function as proper names. Then it is argued that terms for non‐basic actions can be literally applied to the Christian God, and that some of God's essential properties can be literally described on the basis of his self‐revealing actions. (shrink)

The two demonstrate a profound shared passion, a way of literally being one with a medium and speaking about it with a dazzling lyricism interspersed with dryly ironic remarks, fueled by a conviction that inspires them to traverse history. Their point of intersection is obvious. Duras, a writer, is also a filmmaker, and Godard, a filmmaker, has maintained a distinctive relationship with literature, writing and speech."--Cyril Béghin, back cover.

Background COVID-19 has greatly impacted the health of incarcerated individuals in the US. The goal of this study was to examine perspectives of recently incarcerated individuals on greater restrictions on liberty to mitigate COVID-19 transmission.Methods We conducted semi-structured phone interviews from August through October 2021 with 21 people who had been incarcerated in Bureau of Prisons (BOP) facilities during the pandemic. Transcripts were coded and analyzed, using a thematic analysis approach.Results Many facilities implemented universal “lockdowns,” with time out of the (...) cell often limited to one hour per day, with participants reporting not being able to meet all essential needs such as showers and calling loved ones. Several study participants reported that repurposed spaces and tents created for quarantine and isolation provided “unlivable conditions.” Participants reported receiving no medical attention while in isolation, and staff using spaces designated for disciplinary purposes (e.g., solitary housing units) for public health isolation purposes. This resulted in the conflation of isolation and discipline, which discouraged symptom reporting. Some participants felt guilty over potentially causing another lockdown by not reporting their symptoms. Programming was frequently stopped or curtailed and communication with the outside was limited. Some participants relayed that staff threatened to punish noncompliance with masking and testing. Liberty restrictions were purportedly rationalized by staff with the idea that incarcerated people should not expect freedoms, while those incarcerated blamed staff for bringing COVID-19 into the facility.Conclusions Our results highlighted how actions by staff and administrators decreased the legitimacy of the facilities’ COVID-19 response and were sometimes counterproductive. Legitimacy is key in building trust and obtaining cooperation with otherwise unpleasant but necessary restrictive measures. To prepare for future outbreaks facilities must consider the impact of liberty-restricting decisions on residents and build legitimacy for these decisions by communicating justifications to the extent possible. (shrink)

Media use can empower people, provided that this is accompanied by a deeper understanding of the actors, processes and structures in the media sector – including media policy. It is, however, to be expected that media users’ literacy of media policy is rather limited. This is problematic as the absence of such understanding makes it impossible for citizens to hold the politicians they elected accountable for the media policy they develop. This article explores what media users know about media policy, (...) what they expect to know, and whether they care. We adopted a case-study approach, researching this question for the region of Flanders based on a combination of quantitative (representative survey) and qualitative (49 in-depth interviews) data. While the article focuses on the case of Flanders, its theoretical basis as well as conclusion section are relevant beyond that specific context. (shrink)

The writing piece ‘Literal transitions’ proposes a literary answer to the question as to whether a potential transit from the word ‘organic’ to the word ‘digital’ exists. The piece as well as its creation process and the author’s comments on it will be described in the following. What can result from this experiment is a reflection of the language material itself, a certain degree of awareness of the implications of the traditional or unconscious constraints in language. Literal Transitions is not (...) an explanation, but an examination with artistic means. This examination is based on three assumptions: (1) the potential of literature unfolds when writing is constrained; (2) restrictions make the language’s silence speak and (3) we need fictions to build our world. (shrink)

We distinguish between literal and metaphorical applications of Bayesian models. When intended literally, an isomorphism exists between the elements of representation assumed by the rational analysis and the mechanism that implements the computation. Thus, observation of the implementation can externally validate assumptions underlying the rational analysis. In other applications, no such isomorphism exists, so it is not clear how the assumptions that allow a Bayesian model to fit data can be independently validated.

The opposition prose/verse can only be established in the heart of literal language. The only way of producing nonliteral language is in conversation. . . . Enrique Anderson Imbert published a book in 1958 titled ¿Qué es la prosa? , in which he says: 'No, we do not speak in prose. Prose is not a projection of everyday speech, but rather artistic elaboration."1 But my adherence to his intelligent point of view is not total because he situates prose in the (...) heart of written language, and I think that it should be ascribed to literal language. For Anderson Imbert such an idiomatic modality results in an artistic elaboration; but the intention of prose can be quite different. The reader, for instance, by virtue of his reading, can transform prose into literature; and unwritten prose does exist, as has been stated. In many cases it is impossible to compose the texts in verse; structurally, then, an opposition cannot be established, just as in the case of the student who takes notes following the explanations of the professor. These texts can only be what they are: a more or less truthful transcription, a "copy" of oral language, a mere change of substance, abbreviated in order to bring it closer, as a simple memento, to the elliptical articulations of inner language. · 1. "No, no hablamos en prosa. La prosa no es proyección del habla corriente, sino elaboración artística." Enrique Anderson Imbert, ¿Que es la prosa? 4th ed. , p. 31. Fernando Lázaro Carreter is the director of the department of Spanish at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a member of the Real Academia Española. The author of books on both linguistics and criticism, his published works include: Las ideas lingüísticas en España durante el siglo XVIII; Diccionario de términos filológicos; Estilo barroco y personalidad creadora; Ensayos de Poética ; and Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca. This article is a preliminary statement of a problem he is currently investigating: literary language understood as "literal language.". (shrink)

Against Barnett (2012), I argue that the theory I advance in DeRose 2010 is best construed as one on which ‘"were"ed-up’ future-directed conditionals like ‘If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby’ are, in ways important to how they function in deliberation, different in literal content from their ‘straightforward’ counterparts like ‘If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby’. I also defend my way of classifying future-directed conditionals against an attack (...) by Barnett by defending a standard (among philosophers) approach to the basic structure of some conditionals. Finally, I counter Barnett’s charge that by using the concept of deliberation in my account of the meaning of future-directed conditionals, I put an implausibly demanding constraint on what it takes to understand such sentences. (shrink)

The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinction has theoretical importance. The distinction between literal and (...) metaphorical needs to be captured by our account of communication because literal uses transmit information in a way that metaphorical ones do not. We argue that there is a way to explain the literal/metaphorical distinction that preserves the core of the folk-linguistic idea and gives the distinction theoretical relevance. We propose that literal uses of a word are made with the intention to conform to an established practice of use, while metaphorical uses do not so conform, but depend on this pre-existing practice. Our account can deal with data that are problematic for other theories. A further advantage is that it extends naturally to other non-literal uses of words, including metonymy. (shrink)

One can lie by asserting non-literal content. If I tell you “You are the cream in my coffee” while hating you, I can be rightfully accused of lying if my true emotions are unearthed. This is not easy to accommodate under many definitions of lying while also preserving the lying-misleading distinction. The essential feature of non-literal utterances is their falsity when literally construed. This interferes with accounts of lying and misleading, because such accounts often combine a literal construal of what (...) is said by an utterance with a falsity requirement for lying. In the presence of non-literal lies such definitions struggle to make plau- sible predictions for non-literal lies and merely misleading utterances together. In this article I aim to fix this by extending Daniel Hoek’s pragmatic account of conversational exculpature to assertions in general. Since this mechanism is designed to compute the intended meanings of non-literal utterances, it straightforwardly predicts non-literal lies to be as such. The lying-misleading distinction is also preserved, because merely misleading utterances arise out of exploiting a different pragmatic mechanism—Gricean additive implicatures. Along the way I also draw some general lessons about assertion and implicatures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman WorldsGeorge A. KennedyTeresa Morgan. Literate Education in the Hellenistic and Roman Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. xviii + 364 pp. Cloth, $64.95. (Cambridge Classical Studies)This book is a study of the evidence for elementary education found in papyri in comparison with what is found in literary sources, especially in descriptions of teaching reading and writing by Quintilian, Plutarch, (...) and his alter ego, Pseudo-Plutarch. Although H.I. Marrou (A History of Education in Antiquity [New York 1956]) and others have cited exercises on papyri, much of the information is scattered and difficult for the nonspecialist, and Morgan performs a valuable service in reviewing it systematically. About four hundred exercises have been found on papyri, dating from the third century before Christ to the Byzantine period. They provide a record of practice in writing and evidence for what was read at an elementary stage in Greco-Roman Egypt. Morgan classifies them into copies of single letters, alphabets, syllabaries, word lists, gnomic sayings (the largest single group), short nongnomic quotations, scholia, grammatical exercises, rhetorical exercises, and other. The nongnomic quotations come chiefly from the Homeric poems (total 58), Euripides (20), and Menander (7). Rhetorical exercises are limited to rather simple narratives of myths, fables, chrias, and incidents from epic, with a very few historical subjects; there is no example of declamation or exercise in argumentation in the papyri.Morgan argues (pp. 71-72) for a "core" curriculum, consisting of methods of learning to read and write, with reading of gnomic sayings and of parts of the Homeric epics, and a "peripheral" curriculum, in which individual teachers experimented with other texts and other types of exercise. Students in Egyptian towns and villages were on the margins of Greek culture, and in many instances Greek was not their native language. Greco-Roman literate education gave them access, at varying social levels, to a world of culture and a route to power. "We can now begin to see how that culture is imparted," she says (103). "It [the education] begins by reducing the pupil to a reciter of nonsense, before feeding him, bit by bit, fragments of cultural information out of context." This is highly [End Page 331] authoritative: the pupil must accept what the teacher says before thinking or articulating anything originally, and this is repeated at every stage of education short of the schools of rhetoric and philosophy. The reference to "him" is necessary, for the papyri provide no evidence for the education of girls, and references to women in the exercises are almost entirely negative in tone.In a chapter entitled "Grammar and the Power of Language" (152-89) Morgan argues persuasively that formal grammar was not used in antiquity as a way to teach Greek to nonnative speakers; it was, instead, an initiation into a slightly higher level of education and taught the student how to recognize, and to a limited extent how to use, "correct" language. She speculates that it also provided a model of the relationship between the grammar of a sentence and what it represents in the world, "such that the grammatical accuracy of a sentence helps to guarantee the truth of the utterance" (188). However that may be, classicists need to understand how pervasive, all over the world, is the use of separate registers of formal language; to be taken seriously, speakers and writers everywhere have needed to employ the appropriate linguistic register as well as a number of other formal conventions (see my recent discussion in Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction [Oxford 1997] esp. 64-68, 101-5, 125-27, 228).The following chapter, "Rhetoric: Art and Articulation" (190-239), attempts, as Morgan puts it, "to widen a little what we understand as the aims and effects of learning rhetoric" (197). Elementary rhetorical exercises as found in the papyri would not have produced a civic orator: "They teach pupils, most of whom are likely to use their literacy as bureaucratic middleman in a variety of posts, to read and analyse complicated texts, to articulate and pass on information in clear and concise form. The pupils who had learnt this much... (shrink)

Because my paper was often metaphorical, some participants on the symposium expressed puzzlement about my literal meaning, especially about the passage from Mailer. Here are ten literal "theses" that the paper either argues for, implies, or depends on.1. What metaphor is can never be determined with a single answer. Because the word has now become subject to all of the ambiguities of our notions about similarity and difference, the irreducible plurality of philosophical views of how similarities and differences relate will (...) always produce conflicting definitions that will in turn produce different borderlines between what is metaphor and what is not. We thus need taxonomies, not frozen single definitions, of this "essentially contested concept.". (shrink)

Many recent definitions of lying are based on the notion of what is said. This paper argues that says-based definitions of lying cannot account for lies involving non-literal speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, loose use or irony. It proposes that lies should instead be defined in terms of assertion, where what is asserted need not coincide with what is said. And it points to possible implications this outcome might have for the ethics of lying.

This article is designed to form a question-focused cross-cultural dialogue, rather than compare Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130–1200) with Meister Eckhart (1260–1328) in general terms. It will start with an analysis of the exegetical/hermeneutical rules that Zhu Xi and Eckhart set up for their own scriptural commentaries. The study of Eckhart will then be extended to Augustine, in order to explore how Eckhart resorts to Augustine in his commentary writings. Having explored Eckhart’s affinity with Augustine regarding their consensus about the multiplicity (...) of literal senses, as well as their emphasis on the renewal or the continuous growth of the meaning of scriptural texts, the discussion will come back to the starting point of this comparative model, and attempt to form a comparison between the two traditions, through the exemplars of Zhu Xi, Eckhart, and Augustine, with a focus on the implications of these hermeneutical rules. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that theories of perception that appeal to Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (“Helmholtzian” theories) should be taken literally, i.e. that the inferences appealed to in such theories are inferences in the full sense of the term, as employed elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary discourse. -/- In the course of the argument, I consider constraints on inference based on the idea that inference is a deliberate acton, and on the idea that inferences depend on the (...) syntactic structure of representations. I argue that inference is a personal-level but sometimes unconscious process that cannot in general be distinguished from association on the basis of the structures of the representations over which it’s defined. I also critique arguments against representationalist interpretations of Helmholtzian theories, and argue against the view that perceptual inference is encapsulated in a module. (shrink)

In this paper a first order theory for the logics defined through literal paraconsistent-paracomplete matrices is developed. These logics are intended to model situations in which the ground level information may be contradictory or incomplete, but it is treated within a classical framework. This means that literal formulas, i.e. atomic formulas and their iterated negations, may behave poorly specially regarding their negations, but more complex formulas, i.e. formulas that include a binary connective are well behaved. This situation may and does (...) appear for instance in data bases. (shrink)

Working in the framework of object-oriented ontology, Graham Harman claims that science strictly adheres to literal language as opposed to metaphorical language. In this article, I argue that such a distinction between literal and metaphorical language cannot be made cleanly in the context of contemporary physics. First, I identify aspects of scientific practice that point to non-literalism, which include non-linguistic elements of scientific discourse, the problem of interpretation of mathematical formulations of some theories, and the acceptance of incompatible theories that (...) describe the same object. Second, I outline an argument that at least some theories in physics constitute complex metaphors based on Harman’s own definition. (shrink)

Literate Experience argues for the existence of certain shared patterns of intellectual association in the English seventeenth century, patterns that follow the outlines of Bacon’s project of epistemological reform. Bacon’s project offered a theory of how knowing as a private act could be transformed into a public one, an act related to the creation and maintenance of public authority. The question thus becomes, how did thinkers in the period reimagine civil society as a polity of knowledge? This study traces (...) out a variety of answers to that question, ranging from the Royal Society’s communal rhetoric to the work of four literary writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the notion that political society exists as a community of shared knowledge. (shrink)

The distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning can be traced back to folk models about the relationship between language and the world. According to these models, sentences can be seen as building a representation of the world they describe, and understanding a sentence means knowing how each linguistic element affects the construction of the representation. Papers in this volume connect these folk models to the more scientific notions of the literal/nonliteral distinction proposed by philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. The current (...) volume examines the literal/nonliteral distinction from a number of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, outlining some of the problematic assumptions in traditional paradigms and pointing to promising directions for the study of meaning. (shrink)

May I be permitted to chat a little, by way of recreation, at the end of a somewhat toilsome and perhaps fruitless adventure?”1 So begins the introduction to Robert Browning’s “transcription,” as he entitles it, of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which the principles of literal translation are discussed and defended.2 As one who has recently been on the same adventure as Robert Browning, I wonder whether it is not salutary to review his arguments, for I have come to believe firmly that (...) the path he took was fruitless, or very nearly so. Yet of the many translators, stretching into the most recent times, who have provided us with literal renditions of ancient Greek texts, he at least offered an apology for it, and a better one, in my view, than any I have seen. I want to try, by reviewing Browning’s arguments, to shed some light on why his adventure of translation was barren, and in the process state some precautions for the translation of ancient Greek literature. I am not sure whether these precautions apply to the philosophy of translation in general, for the differences between two languages vary greatly with time and place; nevertheless, the review may be of some general help. (shrink)

Are occurrent states of forgetting literal experiences of absences? I situate this question within the debate on mental time travel (MTT) to understand whether these states can be explained as literal experiences of absent episodic memories. To frame my argument, I combine Barkasi and Rosen’s literal approach to MTT with Farennikova’s literal approach to the perception of absences, showing that both are built on the idea that for an experience to be literal it must afford an unmediated contact with the (...) object that constitutes it. I test the idea that forgetting affords literal experiences of mnemonic absences by considering different views of absence perception and I evaluate whether the objections raised against Farennikova’s approach also apply to my exploratory idea. I show that, while the idea resists the objections that an advocate of a cognitive approach to mnemonic absences may raise, the same does not apply to those elaborated by advocates of a metacognitive approach. Even if conceiving of occurrent states of forgetting as literal experiences of mnemonic absences sounds appealing, this idea is misleading. Therefore, I suggest conceiving of occurrent states of forgetting as states with metacognitive features, which track the absence of episodic memories from awareness in an affectively mediated way. (shrink)

Traditionally, the dominant theory of metaphor has taken the form of saying that metaphor is a matter of using a word with a figurative meaning, that is, a meaning which deviates from standard, literal, meaning. The present article challenges the assumption on which such a characterization rests: that there are standard meanings for words fixed by conventions normative for our use of words. It argues that the most sophisticated defence of such a conception of meaning‐that of David Lewis‐gives an account (...) of convention that cannot be coherently applied to the case of language, and which misdescribes the phenomena of language. The fluidity and flexibility exhibited in our normal literal uses of words is such that to say that a meaning deviates from past meanings assigned to a word registers no contrast between the metaphorical use of words and the literal. Hence if we contrast the literal and the metaphorical, we must do it in some other way than by talking about what happens to the meanings of words. (shrink)

It is not the case that there is only one literal sense of “same person.” When presented in different contexts, “she is/is not the same person” can have different answers concerning the same entity or set of entities across the same period of time. This is because: Persons are composed of many parts, and different parts have different persistence conditions. This follows from a reductionist view of the self. When we ask about sameness of persons, or “personal identity,” we are (...) asking because of certain practical concerns. Different concerns will look to the persistence of different parts of the person for criteria of sameness. No single criterion of sameness tracks all concerns. By combining reductionism with contextualism, the disparate answers to the personal identity question can be clarified without losing the practical concerns motivating them. (shrink)

The principle of explosion asserts that any formula can be derived from any pair of other contradictory formulas. Paraconsistent logic is typically regarded as a logic in which the universal validity of this principle is questioned. Therefore, a key point is determining when the validity can be considered universal to classify a logic as paraconsistent. A pertinent example to illustrate this point is the calculus CB1 that admits the principle but only for negated formulas, i.e., from any set {α, ∼α} (...) any other formula follows if and only if α is of the form ∼γ. Another example is Sette’s calculus P1, which is paraconsistent at the level of variables but not complex formulas. Both serve as compelling examples of the so-called borderline cases. In this paper, we examine several calculi expected to be paraconsistent at the level of literals. It means that a pair of formulas, α and ∼α, can yield any β if, and only if α is neither a propositional variable nor is its iterated negation. Furthermore, it is assumed that in some calculi presented here, β must adhere to specific restrictions. Once these conditions are satisfied, we refer to calculus as paraconsistent in a “controllable manner”. (shrink)

Many eminent philosophers of religion and theologians have postulated metaphorical understanding of religious dogmas instead of a literal one. Despite differences all have been sympathetic to Christian moral tradition and to religion in general. They proclaim a "third way" beyond traditional theism and atheism. The metaphorical approach to religious beliefs has gathered momentum in the context of the processes of globalization. The Church however defends traditional, literal interpretation of its dogmas. First, the difference between literal and metaphorical understanding of religious (...) dogmas is explained. Then reasons for and against each position are examined with a conclusion that instead of the “subsumption” of the one paradigm by another, for the undefinite future both should be treated as a justified and autonomous discourses remaining in a dialogue. (shrink)

Language sample analysis is an important practice for providing a culturally sensitive and accurate assessment of a child's language abilities. A child's usage of literate language devices in narrative samples has been shown to be a critical target for evaluation. While automated scoring systems have begun to appear in the field, no such system exists for conducting progress-monitoring on literate language usage within narratives. The current study aimed to develop a hard-coded scoring system called the Literate Language (...) Use in Narrative Assessment, to automatically evaluate six aspects of literate language in non-coded narrative transcripts. LLUNA was designed to individually score six literate language elements. The interrater reliability of LLUNA with an expert scorer, as well as its' reliability compared to certified undergraduate scorers was calculated using a quadratic weighted kappa. Results indicated that LLUNA met strong levels of interrater reliability with an expert scorer on all six elements. LLUNA also surpassed the reliability levels of certified, but non-expert scorers on four of the six elements and came close to matching reliability levels on the remaining two. LLUNA shows promise as means for automating the scoring of literate language in LSA and narrative samples for the purpose of assessment and progress-monitoring. (shrink)

When a word is used metaphorically (for example “walrus” in the sentence “The president is a walrus”), some features of that word's meaning (“very fat,” “slow-moving”) are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation while other features (“has large tusks,” “lives near the north pole”) are not. What happens to these features that relate only to the literal meaning during processing of novel metaphors? In four experiments, the present study examined the role of the feature of physical containment during processing of (...) verbs of physical containment. That feature is used metaphorically to signify difficulty, such as “fenced in” in the sentence “the journalist's opinion was fenced in after the change in regime.” Results of a lexical decision task showed that video clips displaying a ball being trapped by a box facilitated comprehension of verbs of physical containment when the words were presented in isolation. However, when the verbs were embedded in sentences that rendered their interpretation metaphorical in a novel way, no such facilitation was found, as evidenced by two eye-tracking reading studies. We interpret this as suggesting that features that are critical for understanding the encoded meaning of verbs but are not part of the novel metaphoric interpretation are ignored during the construction of metaphorical meaning. Results and limitations of the paradigm are discussed in relation to previous findings in the literature both on metaphor comprehension and on the interaction between language comprehension and the visual world. (shrink)

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a (...) literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned. (shrink)

Although the concept of the literal is very widely used in the discussion of biblical interpretation, it has seldom been deeply analysed. “Conservative” understandings of the Bible are often thought of as literal, but it is equally true that “critical” views are built upon literality. In some relations, literality seems to imply physicality, in others to mean exactitude in the rendering of “spiritual” realities. In Christianity the relation of Christians to the laws of the Old Testament is a prime area (...) of application of these categories. Are the silences of the Bible to be taken as “literally” as its words? And does literality give us access to intentions? (shrink)

According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be (...) understood as properties of public languages. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE IN THE REPRESENTATION OF GOD IN HIS SEMINAL work on the theory of signs, Charles Morris affirms that human beings are " the dominant sign-using animals" and that" the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs-if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning." 1 By means of acculturation we learn to use and interpret signs, both linguistic and (...) non-linguistic; and by virtue of these capacities we can appropriately designate the human animal as homo symbolicus, homo loquens, and homo sapiens. Indeed, all forms of human culture presuppose the ability to use and interpret signs, including that form of human culture which leads us to speak of ourselves as homo religious. Over the years I have come to understand and speak of religion as a community with its cultus. There is the community, be it triba1, national, or universal with its polity or structure and ongoing history; and there is the cultus with its organic system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, encompassing ·such elements as stories, creeds, scriptures, doctrines, theologies, confessions, prayers, chants, songs, rites, rituals, sacraments, artifacts, etc. Like any other cultural system, scheme or network of signs one can characterize a religious cultus as an inter -subjective set of signs whose usage is determined by the implicit or explicit rules that govern the relations of signs to each other; the relations of the signs to the objects which the signs designate or denote, or stand for in some way; and the relations of signs to the users or interpreters of these signs and to those who are affected by these signs in some way. 1 Charles W. Morris, FoundatioJi of the Theory of Signs, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, No. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. L 6~7 628 WILLIAM L. POWER: Given this understanding of community and cultus, one can describe a religion as an organized group of socially interdependent human beings which uses or employs ·a system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs to represent reality in its various modalities and mixtures of good and evil and to affect human ways of life on the basis of that representation. Altering the terminology somewhat, one could say that a religious community uses its cultus to proclaim, enact, and display a comprehensive worldview.and to form and tr:msform the ethospathos of human beings in their solidarity and solitude. Expressed semiotically, there is the system of signs of a particular community, the intended signification of these signs, and the significance of these signs for those who use and are affected by them. What distinguishes a religion from other forms of human culture is that a rel·igious cultuml sy•stem or a religious community with its cultus is primarily concerned with ultimate or supreme reality or with that which is divine, holy, or sacred and that reality's bearing on and relevance for human life and well-being. In short, a religion is a cultural system which functions to map the whole of re.ality and to acculturate in desirable ways or to civilize. If a religion is a cultural system, then one can identify three distinct yet inseparably related dimensions of every religion. There is 1) the cultural dimension consisting of the interrelruted signs, symbols and expressions of a cultus; 2) the reality and value dimension consisting of the ontological and axiological purport of the cultus; and 3) the experiential dimension consisting of the existential import of the cultus. It is this thioo dimension which has led many in the past and in the present to speak of religion as piety, consciousness of things divine, ultimate concern, religiousness, etc. In the tradition of Peircian semiotics, one can speak of these three dimensions as the syntactic, semantic, and praigmatic dimensions of a religion; and they can be analyzed and studied with the aid of syntactics or syntax, semantics, and pr:agmatics, which as a unity LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE 629 constitute the discipline of semiotics. As Peirce recognized, modem semiotics is continuous with the Medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric-the semiotics of almost a millennium a;go... (shrink)

Julie Houts has cultivated a devoted following as "Instagram's favourite illustrator" (Vogue) by lampooning the conflicting messages and images women consume and share with the world every day. A collection of darkly comic illustrated essays, Literally Me chronicles the daily exploits of "slightly antisocial heroines" (Refinery29) in vivid, excruciatingly funny detail, including: -The beauty routine of a deranged bride who aspires to be "truly without flaws" on her wedding day -What happens when Kylie Jenner has an existential crisis and can (...) no longer "step out" -A journey to Coachella by the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse -The true dating confessions of a fembot -The terrifying description for Alice Staunch's book How to be the Perfect Feminist -The diary of Fiddle Ficus, a tree that lives inside a CÉLINE store, and much more. Literally Me marks the launch of a brilliant new social satirist. Julie's singular voice and beautiful illustrations reveal the truth about the absurdity of life in the social media age: the line between becoming a total `Girlboss' and a 21st-century American Psycho is razor-thin."--Dust jacket. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to motivate and defend a conventional approach to assertion and other illocutionary acts. Such an approach takes assertions, questions and orders to be moves within an essentially rule-governed activity similar to a game. The most controversial aspect of a conventional account of assertion is that according to it, for classifying an utterance as an assertion, question or command, “it is irrelevant what intentions the person speaking may have had” (Dummett 1973, p. 302). I understand (...) this to mean that it is irrelevant for the issue of whether an utterance is an assertion whether the utterer has certain communicative intentions, such as the intention to utter something true, the intention to get one’s audience to believe (that one believes) what one has asserted etc. Just as one can commit a foul in football without meaning to do so, one can make an assertion, issue a command or ask a question without meaning to do so. The rules of football specify that a certain form of conduct (tackling an opponent in a certain way), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a team engaged in a game of football) counts as committing a foul. Similarly, I claim, the rules of language specify that a certain form of conduct (uttering an assertoric sentence), carried out under certain general conditions (being a member of a speech community engaged in a conversation) counts as making an assertion. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against a widely accepted model of utterance interpretation, namely the LS model, according to which the literal interpretation of an utterance (the proposition literally expressed by that utterance) must be computed before non-literal interpretations can be entertained. Alleged arguments in favor of this model are shown to be fallacious, counterexamples are provided, and alternative models are sketched.

There is a long philosophical tradition of skepticism about the possibility of adequate paraphrases for metaphorical utterances. And even among those who favor paraphrasability, there is a tendency to think that paraphrases of metaphorical utterances may themselves have to be non-literal. I argue that even the most evocative and open-ended metaphorical utterances can be literally and adequately paraphrased, once we recognize that they are actually indirect speech acts—specifically, indirect directives that command the hearer to engage in an open-ended comparison. This (...) leads to an overall picture in which trite, unevocative metaphorical utterances admit of just straightforward, usually non-directive literal paraphrases, while the most evocative metaphorical utterances admit of only indirect directive paraphrases, and metaphorical utterances in a third category admit of two literal paraphrases, one of which is straightforward and usually non-directive, and the other of which takes the indirect directive form. This argument for literal paraphrasability is intended to demystify metaphor, but not to undercut metaphor’s tremendous value as a communicative device. (shrink)

In the study of education, as in many more travelled regions of Classical scholarship, democratic Athens is something of a special case. The cautions formulation is appropriate: in the case of education, surprisingly few studies have sought to establish quite how special Athens was, and those which have, have often raised more questions than they answered. The subject itself is partly to blame. The history of education invites comparison with the present day, while those planning the future of education rarely (...) fail to invoke the past. The place of Classical Athens in European culture has ensured a place for Athenian education in almost every debate from the relation between education and democracy to the value of educationversustraining, and as the original champion of causes as varied as mass education, co-education, and the national curriculum. Desirable as it is to be in demand, such treatment is not calculated to produce the most circumspect account of the subject. The study of education is further hampered by the fact that our knowledge of Athenian culture is so vibrant and diverse in some ways and so partial in others. Plato and Aristophanes present a vivid fictional picture of education in the late fifth century. If we add a few passages from Xenophon and Aristotle, a large number of vases depicting men, women, and children reading, playing the lyre, and doing athletics, and one or two archaeological finds of an educational appearance, it is tempting to take the result as a clear portrait of a society at school. (shrink)

Conventional metaphors such as early bird are interpreted rather fast and efficiently. This is so because they might be stored as lexicalized, non-compositional expressions. In a previous study, employing a maze task, we showed that, after reading metaphors (John is an early bird so he can …), participants took longer and were less accurate in selecting the appropriate word (attend) when it was paired with a literally-related distractor (fly) rather than an unrelated one (cry). This suggests that the literal meaning (...) of conventional metaphors is awakened or made available immediately after their metaphorical interpretation. But does the literal meaning remain available further downstream during sentence comprehension? In two experiments also employing a maze task, we examined whether the awakening effect can be obtained when there is a medium (6 to 8 words) and a large (11 to 13 words) distance between the metaphor and lexical choice. Results indicated that the metaphor awakening effect persists but decreases as word distance increases. An analysis of our data based on a GPT model showed that our maze effects could not be attributed to target predictability. Overall, our results suggest that the literal meaning of a metaphor is accessed and remains available for about three seconds, fading as the sentence unfolds over time. The results support a model of metaphor comprehension that postulates the availability of both literal and metaphoric content in the course of sentence processing. (shrink)

The following remarks should be treated as a discussion of a semiotic claim posed in the quotation above. Kołakowski opted for this rather radical perspective to challenge semiotic views prevailing in the analytical philosophy of that day. No wonder that his intellectual opponents felt obliged to take a stand. I once tended to side with his opponents, which is one of the reasons why I would like to take the emerging opportunity and revisit Kołakowski’s argument. I won’t be discussing the (...) meaning of expressions in general, my purpose here is rather to, as the title suggests, bring into focus the meaning of non-literal expressions, particularly where they are supplied with inverted commas to imply their non-literal, metaphorical character. I chose to pursue this particular topic because there is little agreement as to what they actually mean. (shrink)

Pepper’s concept of a root metaphor possesses profound implications for any theory that attempts to explain language, especially those theories that try to construct explanatory accounts of ambiguity and metaphor. Any explanatory theory of metaphor must as a theory necessarily be metaphorical in the sense of presupposing a root metaphor. But this discovery does not mean that all language is metaphorical; there can be literal language even though metalinguistic accounts of language including metaphor must be founded upon root metaphors.

Any even cursory examination of what it is to exchange words about X or to exchange views about Y requires hard thought about what it is to exchange, period. How do we invest in what we give out, and how do we get it back? In kind, or differently moneyed? And, more crucial to the topic into which I am about to make a foolhardy plunge, is there such a thing as free exchange? And if so, what is it worth?How (...) do we perceive worth anyway? What relation does such perception of the invisible system of the initially visible coinage of exchange bear to present visual perception, and then to seeing? And what does perception matter anyway, in relation to writing, reading, and exchanging words? Which is primary?All these questions—in their institutional setting, or then in their freedom from context—can themselves be related to and gathered up into the notion of translation, or the carrying over from one side to, and into, another. All we can learn about speaking and the ways it is taught, reading and the ways we learn it, seeing and the ways it teaches us is translated and transported from sight and its constraints and choices to language and its own. How we read both is itself a subject of choice and constraint, of freedom and explicit value-placing, of variety and fidelity to certain ends. Mary Ann Caws is professor of English, French, and comparative literature in the Graduate School, City University of New York. She is past president of the Modern Language Association and the author of, among other works, The Eye in the Text: Essays on Perception, Mannerist to Modern , Architextures in Surrealism and After , Reading Frames in Modern Fiction , and Interferences. (shrink)

Classical deviance theories about metaphor argue that the metaphorical sense of a word or expression, w, deviates from the sense of the word or expression interpreted literally. Developments in lexical pragmatics challenge these theories by claiming that deviance pervades (nearly) all aspects of linguistic communication. If deviance is the norm, then classical explanans offer little to no insight. In fact, many theorists have abandoned the idea of the literal-metaphorical distinction. This move carries significant consequences for theories of language and communication. (...) We argue against this move and in favour of a linguistically robust literal-metaphorical distinction. We have three goals: The first is to argue that the literal-metaphorical distinction is important for theories of language and communication. The second is to assess Allott and Textor’s Non-Conformity View of deviance which gives up the idea that deviance is marked by a departure from conventional word meaning. Pace Allott and Textor, we claim that the literal-metaphorical distinction must ultimately be couched in some account of lexicalised meaning. Our third goal is to develop a form of qualified deviance that avoids what we take to be shortcomings of the Non-Conformity View. (shrink)

Methodological naturalism states (roughly speaking) that only science can be a route to knowledge. This purported piece of knowledge looks self-condemning, however; after all, it was formulated in the armchair, and not in the laboratory. I argue that on a popular (if largely unarticulated) construal of naturalism as inference to the best explanation, methodological naturalism escapes this charge of internal incoherence, and in fact is self-endorsing rather than self-condemning.

Many theorists take the view that literal meaning can be one of a number of factors to be weighed in reaching a legal interpretation. Still others regard literal meaning as having the potential to legally justify a particular outcome. Building on the scholarly response to HLA Hart’s famous ‘vehicles in the park’ hypothetical, this article presents a formal argument that literal meaning cannot be decisive of what’s legally correct, one which, unusually, makes no appeal to controversial theories within philosophy of (...) language or literary criticism. If the argument is sound, it follows that an enactment’s literal meaning neither weighs in the determination of correct legal outcomes nor permits the application of a sequencing model, ie a non-monotonic logic, to its interpretation. These implications are considerably more controversial within contemporary legal theory than the idea that a statute’s literal meaning is not necessarily its legal meaning. Yet we see that, given an intuitive notion of legal truth, they follow from it nonetheless. (shrink)

This article introduces the special issue on the brain and processing of nonliteral and other forms of language in which meaning is "stretched" or deviates from expectations. The introduction consists of 2 sections meant to orient the reader to the articles that follow. The first section is a brief review and commentary on recent research and theorizing into the evolution of the human brain, selected brain structures, and implications that arise for nonliteral language and thought. The second section reviews and (...) comments on recent advances in technology in cognitive neuroscience that increasingly are being brought to bear on questions of how we process a range of language forms that deviate from literal usage. I take the evidence as indicating that normal understanding of nonliteral language is highly interactive, involving multiple parts of the brain and, based on temporal processing in the brain, these interactions occur very early in the processing of a trope. (shrink)