This paper explores the pragmatic foundations of unreliable narration (UN), a narrative technique highly popular in western literary texts. It sets out by giving a critique of the competing theoretic frameworks of UN, namely the seminal Boothian concept and more recent constructivist approaches. It is argued that both frameworks neglect a pragmatic perspective as the most viable way for identifying and analysing UN. Such a pragmatic model is then developed on the basis of theories of cooperation, such (...) as the Gricean maxims, relevance theory, and politeness. The emerging definition of UN treats a narrator as unreliable if he or she violates the cooperative principle without intending an implicature. This model is tested against three prototypical UNs: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, and Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. These sample analyses yield a typology of UN: while pragmatic deviation is shown to be the intrinsic feature of the phenomenon, unreliable narrators vary according to their degree of intentionality. Finally, two recurring issues in the UN debate are briefly discussed: the existence of textual clues of UN, and the role of the reader in constructing unreliability. (shrink)

Pragmatic trials aim to directly inform health care decision-making through the collection of so-called ‘real world data’ from observations of comparative treatment effects in clinical practice. In order to ensure the applicability and feasibility of a pragmatic trial, design features may be necessary that deviate from standard research ethics requirements. Examples are traditional requirements to seek written informed consent and to perform extensive data and safety monitoring. Proposals for deviations from standard research ethics practice have resulted in controversy (...) about their ethical acceptability. One of the justifications for altered procedures is the allegedly high social value of pragmatic trials. In order to properly operationalize the concept in the ethical assessment of pragmatic trial designs, specification is warranted. We identified three determinants from common claims about a pragmatic trial's social value: the extent to which the research question has real world relevance, the trial design's ability to generate a real world answer and the probability of direct uptake of the results by decision-makers in practice. Subsequently, we discuss how these determinants should be applied to the practice of pragmatic trials, and to what extent they might be applicable to explanatory trials. (shrink)

When engaging in verbal communication, we do not simply use language to dispense information, but also to perform a plethora of actions, some of which depend on conventionalised, recurrent linguistic structures. Additionally, we must be skilled enough to arrive at the speaker’s intended meaning. However, speakers’ performance may deviate from certain habits and expectations concerning the way of speaking or accomplishing actions, while various factors may hinder comprehension, which may give rise to misappraisals of their respective abilities and capacities as (...) competent language users. This paper discusses whether such misappraisals may be subsumed by any of the already identified types of epistemic injustice and proposes a new label for them. It also describes the consequences of those misappraisals and approaches their origins from a cognitive perspective. (shrink)

Clinicians have good moral and professional reasons to contribute to pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs). We argue that clinicians have a defeasible duty to participate in this research that takes place in usual care settings and does not involve substantive deviation from their ordinary care practices. However, a variety of countervailing reasons may excuse clinicians from this duty in particular cases. Yet because there is a moral default in favor of participating, clinicians who wish to opt out of this (...) research must justify their refusal. Reasons to refuse include that the trial is badly designed in some way, that the trial activities will violate the clinician’s conscience, or that the trial will impose excessive burdens on the clinician. (shrink)

The paper examines locative expressions and shows that an adequate account of their meaning must be based on two essential understandings: First, the simple spatial relation, often given as the meaning of the spatial prepositions, is only an “ideal” from which there are deviations in context; second, a level of “geometric conceptualization” mediates between “the world as it is” and language. Pragmatic “near principles” are formulated to explain some deviations from the ideal and several other apparent irregularities of prepositional (...) use. A set of “use types” of the ideal meaning is proposed to account for conventional aspects of locative meaning. The paper concludes with a discussion of the consequences of this description of locative expressions for artificial intelligence and linguistics. (shrink)

A brief discussion is offered of what it means to say that a set of statements provides D-N explanation with special emphasis given to approximative D-N explanation. An idealized theory is seen to provide approximative D-N explanation. An ideal case provides explanation only if postulates are offered which connect the ideal antecedent condition with actual conditions. Such postulates will help in accounting for deviations between what the consequent of the ideal case entails and what actually occurs. Three ways are presented (...) for deciding on the acceptability of idealizations: (i) as actual conditions more closely approximate the ideal antecedent conditions specified in an ideal case, the more closely actual cases ought to approximate the consequent of the ideal case; (ii) the additional postulates connecting ideal antecedent conditions with actual conditions ought to account for deviations between what is entailed by an idealized theory and what actually occurs; and (iii) an idealized theory is explained by a more general theory when certain state variables in the more general theory are given extreme values. It is argued that (iii) is not a necessary condition for the acceptability of idealizations. (shrink)

This paper examines the generalization of the Internet address term “family” (jiārénmen), a recently emerging phenomenon in language use from the perspective of Pragmatic Identity Theory. The main thrust of this research is to reveal the pragmatic identities and pragmatic functions involved in the use of “family” (jiārénmen). The core point has been arrived at by using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses to explore relevant cases collected from WeChat, Weibo, and in-person conversations. Research findings demonstrated (...) that in different contexts, the address term “family” (jiārénmen) can construct various pragmatic identities, all of which belong to the deviational identity opposite to the default identity. Notably, the construction of these identities functions to patch up address terms slot, promote relationships, and satisfy transactional needs. Furthermore, the generalization of the address term “family” (jiārénmen) mirrors the effect of the psychological mechanism of communicators and the Chinese family culture on discourse practice. The findings above contribute to extending the research line of Internet address term generalization, as well as a deeper understanding of the mechanism of the Internet address term “family” (jiārénmen) towards a harmonious language-using environment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Mental Disorder and Religious ExperienceThe Need for a Humble, Pragmatic PluralismWarren Kinghorn, MD (bio)Mohammed Abouelleil Rashed follows Charles Taylor’s argument that in the “therapeutic turn” of modernity, “certain human struggles, questions, issues, difficulties, problems are moved from a moral/spiritual to a therapeutic register,... from a hermeneutic of sin, evil or spiritual misdirection, to one of sickness” (Taylor, 2007, pp. 619–620). While the project of construing mental disorder in (...) naturalistic, non-religious terms carries the risk of subsuming “the rest of life” into the realm of the medical, it is nonetheless needed in order “to protect a region of illness and incapacity from the reach and excesses of the hermeneutic disciplines with their tendency to over-interpretation, and from cultural traditions, including religious discourse, that can implicate the person in narratives of evil, sin, faithlessness, spiritual misdirection, and moral deviance.” Rashed notes, however, that this medical narrative is challenged not only by religious communities but also by various forms of identity-based activism including the Mad Pride and Neurodiversity movements. He argues that strict illness/purpose, deficit/value, mechanism/meaning dichotomies have become “unstable” and encourages scholars to focus their attention on resolving the apparently contradictory realities that people sometimes demand and require medical forms of care while investing significance in the sociocultural and existential context of their distress and refusing reductionistic constructions of their distress as illness.I agree wholeheartedly with Rashed’s conclusion that clinicians and scholars must move beyond a strict mechanism/meaning dichotomy with respect to unwanted and/or disvalued experience and behavior, and must remain open to the social and contextual interpretations that particular cultural communities—including religious communities—offer. But as a psychiatrist who is also [End Page 215] a Christian theological ethicist, I suggest that this sensible conclusion can be reached more straightforwardly by adopting a more flexible approach to “religious experience” and by abandoning the assumptions that mental disorder is “a fully areligious type of suffering” and that religious experience and mental disorder are “fundamentally separate apprehensions of our experience.”Although Rashed never defines religious experience, he posits a distinction between “psychological distress or anomalous experience that has a religious origin, content, or end (purpose)” and “psychological distress or anomalous experience that has no religious origin, content, or end (purpose).” He then helpfully describes how Islamic tradition narrates psychological suffering as deviation from fitrah and as God’s trial, arguing that in Islamic perspective “mental disorder cannot be disentangled from the person’s religious situation and from the religious origin, content, or end (purpose) of his distress.” I make no claim about Rashed’s interpretation of Islam, but would observe that many voices within Christian tradition resist both the equation of psychological suffering with wrongdoing and the assertion that God is the direct cause of psychological suffering (see, for example, John Paul II, 1984). Suffering may instead have to do with being sinned against (as in the case of war, assault, or oppression), or the experience of living in a fallen world that God will one day make right. When the psalmist cries, “Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck” (Psalm 69:1, NRSVue), many Christians observe that it is the psalmist’s enemies, not God, who are the proximate cause of the psalmist’s distress. That is to say, Christian tradition allows for a broad range of interpretations about the cause of distress, including distress resulting from injury, physical illness, and oppression. Christians are encouraged to regard all of their lives as in some way related to God as the creator, sustainer, and orienting end of life—and so in that sense all experience is “religious” in nature. But at least for Christians this does not preclude more naturalistic or sociological interpretations of distress and suffering.Rashed is right that a “fully areligious type of suffering” with “no religious origin, content, or end (purpose)” can only be invoked from a secular standpoint—if “secularity” is taken in Charles Taylor’s first sense of “public spaces... [that] have been allegedly emptied of God, or of any reference to ultimate reality” (Taylor, 2007, p. 2). This is not because... (shrink)

Ecologists attempt to understand the diversity of life with mathematical models. Often, mathematical models contain simplifying idealizations designed to cope with the blooming, buzzing confusion of the natural world. This strategy frequently issues in models whose predictions are inaccurate. Critics of theoretical ecology argue that only predictively accurate models are successful and contribute to the applied work of conservation biologists. Hence, they think that much of the mathematical work of ecologists is poor science. Against this view, I argue that model (...) building is successful even when models are predictively inaccurate for at least three reasons: models allow scientists to explore the possible behaviors of ecological systems; models give scientists simplified means by which they can investigate more complex systems by determining how the more complex system deviates from the simpler model; and models give scientists conceptual frameworks through which they can conduct experiments and fieldwork. Critics often mistake the purposes of model building, and once we recognize this, we can see their complaints are unjustified. Even though models in ecology are not always accurate in their assumptions and predictions, they still contribute to successful science. (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)

Scoring rules measure the deviation between a credence assignment and reality. Probabilism holds that only those credence assignments that satisfy the axioms of probability are rationally admissible. Accuracy-based arguments for probabilism observe that given certain conditions on a scoring rule, the score of any non-probability is dominated by the score of a probability. The conditions in the arguments we will consider include propriety: the claim that the expected accuracy of _p_ is not beaten by the expected accuracy of any (...) other credence _c_ by the lights of _p_ if _p_ is a probability. I argue that if we think through how a non-probabilist can respond to pragmatic arguments for probabilism, we will expect the non-probabilist to accept a condition _stronger_ than propriety for the same reasons that the probabilist gives for propriety, but this stronger condition is incompatible with the other conditions that the probabilist needs to run the accuracy argument. This makes it unlikely for the probabilist’s argument to be compelling. (shrink)

I propose that human experience of matter provides the source domain for the metaphor that motivates the grammatical category of aspect in Russian. This model is a version of the universal TIME IS SPACE metaphor, according to which SITUATIONS ARE MATERIAL ENTITIES, and, more specifically, PERFECTIVE IS A DISCRETE SOLID OBJECT versus IMPERFECTIVE IS A FLUID SUBSTANCE. The contrast of discrete solid objects with fluid substances reveals a rich array of over a dozen properties; the isomorphism observed between those properties (...) and the complex uses of aspect in Russian is compelling. This model presents a more finely articulated account of Russian aspect than feature analysis can achieve. Although some of these properties overlap significantly with the count versus mass distinction often associated with aspect, the properties provide more detail and ground the metaphor to concrete experience. Properties of matter can be divided into three groups: inherent properties such as edges, shape, and integrity (which correspond to inherent situation aspect); interactional properties such as juxtaposition, dynamism, and salience (which correspond to discourse phenomena of aspect); and human interactional properties such as graspability and impact (which correspond to pragmatic phenomena of aspect). The interactional and human interactional properties can be used to motivate subjective construal, whereas the inherent properties serve as default motivators. The model will be demonstrated in detail using Russian data, followed by a survey comparing Russian with the other Slavic languages, which will show that deviations consist of either non-implementation of a given property, or the implementation of an inherent (default) property in place of an interactional or human interactional property. This model will be contrasted with a brief discussion of a selection of non-Slavic languages. The specific metaphor in this model does not apply beyond Slavic, but perhaps it will encourage investigation into the source domain of aspect in other languages. There appears to be a correlation between the relatively heavy morphological investment Slavic languages make in nominal individuation and the individuation of situations presented in this metaphorical model. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the relation between man and the world in Kant’s anthropology. Within Baumgarten’s Metaphysica, used as a manual by Kant for his lessons, empirical psychology is situated between cosmology and rational psychology. However, this view is untenable for Kant, at least after the first Critique. Consequently, whereas Baumgarten explains, for instance, obscure ideas referring to the bodily position in the world, Kant’s pragmatic approach excludes this. Yet, the concept of «Welt» retains paramount importance within Kant’s Anthropology. (...) The two parts of the work are thus harmonically linked: the first offers an account of a largely pathological human psychology; the second a way out of the pathology through the construction of a social and historical human world. Accordingly, anthropology responds to the «Weltbegriff» of philosophy and helps to correct the deviations from the final rational destination of mankind. (shrink)

Since the early 1980s, metonymy has progressively gained central stage in linguistic investigations. The advent of cognitive linguistics marked a new turn in the study of this trope conceived, not as a deviation from semantic conventions, but as a phenomenon rooted in non-language-specific mechanisms of conceptualization of the world. Acknowledging that metonymy is ultimately cognitive in nature, this paper proposes to consider metonymy from its multiple levels of manifestation, integrating cognitive, pragmatic, semantic, but also ontological angles of approach. (...) Taking whole-for-part metonymies as a case study, I aim to show how recent developments within these respective disciplines can enrich our understanding of such metonymic mechanisms, sometimes without even identifying them as such. This paper proposes to establish a dialog between these disciplines on the topic of WP-metonymy. So, after a presentation of the most standard cognitive and pragmatic approaches to WP-metonymy, I will argue for the relevance of recent semantic investigations on quantity gradability, and for the theoretical importance of keeping these two kinds of part-reference clearly apart. I will show that the literature on gradability provides strong semantic arguments for doing so. Finally, connecting the debate on WP-metonymy with the ontological debate on property inherence will open the way for a formal treatment of WP-metonymy within ground logic. (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)

The paper offers an account of the structure of information provided by models that relevantly deviate from reality. It is argued that accounts of scientific modeling according to which a model’s epistemic and pragmatic relevance stems from the alleged fact that models give access to possibilities fail. First, it seems that there are models that do not give access to possibilities, for what they describe is impossible. Secondly, it appears that having access to a possibility is epistemically and pragmatically (...) idle. Based on these observations, an alternative is developed. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On "Methodolatry" and Music Teaching as Critical and Reflective Praxis Thomas Regelski State University of New York, Fredonia Introduction: Professions and Professionalism Most teachers, including those in music, like to think of themselves as professionals. However, the "professionalization" of teachers traced by sociology generally refers to only the transition early in the twentieth century from two years ofteacher preparation in normal schools to four years in newly created professional (...) schools, departments, orprogramsofeducationinuniversities. Traditional sociological theory still considers teaching to be at best a "semiprofession."1 In the "ideal" descriptionofsociologist Max Weber, professionals shared these traits: They were self-employed providers of services, diey entered dieir profession because diey were 'called' to it out of some deep personal commitment, and dieir qualifications were based upon tiieir possessionof'expert' andesotericknowledge. In addition, dieir knowledge base could be acquired only by a select few who underwent long and rigorous study. Their services dealt widi serious, often life or deadi matters, and dieywere remunerated by fees from clients. Communication between professionals and dieir clients was legally privileged so uiat courts oflaw could not require its disclosure. Most important, entrance to mese professions was controlled by professional peers, who set requirements for entry, training, and certification. Boards ofpeers also developed reviewprocesses to maintain standards and competence. 2 A further criterion of a true profession is that praxis3 relies upon underlying theory4 and the fundofwidelyacceptedpractice-basedknowledge generated by theory that is required to deal with the extensive variety ofpredictably unique problems and needs presented by those served. Teaching clearly deviates substantially from these conditions. The theory serving as the basis of any profession is not amatterofsimple speculation; it is rooted in research and theoretical principles-fundamentals that importantly include commonly recognized and accepted action ideals of the profession's ethical and other guiding philosophicalconsiderations. Uponsuchtheoretical bases, professional praxis generates ever-new praxial knowledge. Because ofthe particulars of the situatedness governing both the practitioner andthose served, praxis-based knowledge always takes idiosyncratic form for a particularpractitioner -but, importantly, within the general theoretical, ethical, and philosophical stance ofthe profession. As a result, there are no "standard results " for any practitioner or for the overall profession. Furthermore, there are no standard methods ;just "standards ofcare" rooted in the profession 's theoretical and ethical premises. Music educationhas evolvedno such shared action ideals concerning ends and so the issue of theory-guided practice or of a professional ethic remainsambiguous, evencontroversial.1 Without professionally based consensus on ends, no stable criteria exist for selecting means and evaluating results and, thus, no ethic of accountability can apply. As aconsequence, results areconsiderably unpredictable-and not infrequently negative-and the appropriateness and usefulness ofmuch what is taught and learned is regularly disputed. This is not at all to say or to argue that music education has historically brought about mainly negative results, or that individual music©Philosophy ofMusic Education Review 10, no. 2 (Fall 2002): 102-123. Thomas Regelski 103 teachers are never successful. It wouldbe wrongheaded not to acknowledge the existence ofmuch well-intentioned, hardworkby individual teachers who are both musically competent and 'naturals' in working with students. This paper addresses instead mainly structural weaknesses in the field of music education that result in it as a field falling far short of at least the general kinds of professionalism found in helping professions. The comparisons made here to helping professions are made only in a very general way. However, overall, the field ofmusic education fails to compare well with the most obvious traits of familiar professions. As shall be argued, judgments concerning successful practice in music education should depend in large part on criteria provided by theoretically substantiated auricular goals and ideals and by implied and explicit process criteria of both an ethical and practical nature.6 Lacking such criteria, the question or degree of teaching success remains vague. As a result music education fails to promote predictable and pragmatic "right results" that students, parents, and the public at large can easily recognize as the professional "value-added" to general education and society by music education and this creates the increasing need foradvocacyofschool music. Philosophy, Theory, and Professional Praxis Whetherornot teachingcan everfullymeet the sociological conditions ofbeing a true profession, it would profit from and... (shrink)

In my work on Kant’s Transcendental epistemology, I criticize his three Critiques and show that none of them can solve the problems that Kant endeavored to solve; and he even, in a way, admitted it. In the first Critique, Kant attempts to solve the difficulties of the Cartesian Idealism and Humean Empirism, in combining them mechanically in his own Transcendental formalism and Sensual matter without being able to bridge the gap between them. In the second Critique, Kant endeavored to make (...) his Practical Reason of the a priori pure fact of formal morality into free moral conduct to materialize his ideal commonwealth of ends, but he could not bridge this gap. In his third Critique, Kant attempted to make the aesthetic reflective judgment of beauty objective, including of artworks, but failed to do so. The Peircean pragmaticist method can save the theory of knowledge both from the dogmatism of the metaphysical realists and from the inconsistency of the phenomenalists and holists. Peirce developed his epistemological realism in response to the difficulties of Kant’s transcendental epistemology, especially that of his three Critiques. It seems that in his late research Kant tries to follow Spinoza in the distinction between the causality in nature and the human inner causality as one’s Moral freedom and yet for Kant they operate in different domains to keep human freedom absolute, while the Spinozist conception of human freedom is in Nature and relative to human knowledge of reality and one’s relative power in Nature. Kant’sAnthropology from a Pragmatic Point of Viewis a continuation of his Transcendental critical philosophy, but also his intended empirical epistemology by which to develop a practical deviation from his Copernican Revolution in the direction of the Peircean contra-revolution in Pragmaticist epistemology. (shrink)

Pragmatism emphasizes practical consequences and empirical explanations rather than introspective contemplations. However, the arguments of pragmatists are not uniform, as shown by the four prominent pragmatists presented in this article. The major difference between them is that Peirce and Haack acknowledge an objective truth, whereas James and Rorty do not. Thus, for a fuller understanding of the pragmatist view of our knowledge, both camps must be consulted. In the nursing field, pragmatism is occasionally referred to as a guiding philosophy. However, (...) the influence of James and Rorty has been greater than that of Peirce and Haack on pragmatists, which may risk leading to a skewed understanding of pragmatism by nursing scholars. Still, the four pragmatists share naturalism, which rejects a metaphysics that defines the nature of knowledge before our enquiry and emphasizes experience and practice. Pragmatic naturalism can help ensure that nursing theory does not deviate from clinical practice. This article also explores the broad adaptability of the ideas of all four pragmatists to philosophical issues in nursing, such as mixed‐methods research, epistemic relativism and realism. By showing that pragmatism can be relevant and stimulating to each of these topics, the article demonstrates that the different approaches to pragmatism can provide more inspiration for nurses and nursing researchers in the future. (shrink)

This study belongs to the ethnomethodological tradition of identifying the everyday practices accounting for the oiled machinery of social organization and applies this approach to understanding direction light usage. We observe a set of episodes videorecorded in North-East Italy in the urban traffic. We first unpack the meaning of direction light usage from a pragmatic perspective and then test our interpretation against the cases in our collection that seem to deviate from it. We argue that direction lights’ usage works (...) as an announcement to some road users and a request to a subset of them; in both cases, direction lights convey contextualized (indexical) coordinates about the vehicle’s prospective trajectory. We then explain the cases in which signaling is omitted and draw some implications for traffic coordination and safety. (shrink)

Purpose: Often radical constructivists are confronted with arguments why radical constructivism is wrong. The present work presents a radical constructivist alternative to such arguments: a comparison of the results of two instructional practices, the standard, realist-based instruction and a radical constructivist-based instruction, both in physics courses. Design: Evidence from many studies of student conceptions in standard instruction (Duit 2004) is taken into account. In addition, diagnostic data, pre and post instruction, were collected from over 1,000 students in multiple institutions across (...) the U. S. over a period of about 15 years via an established diagnostic of conceptual understanding of motion and force. Findings: Evidence from many studies of student conceptions in standard instruction (Duit, 2004) is that little or no change in student conceptions happens in standard instruction. About half the students in the particular study reported, all science and engineering majors, experienced standard, realist-based instruction and show an average effect size of 0.6 standard deviations and an average normalized gain of 15%. The other half of the students, none of whom were science and engineering majors, experienced radical constructivist-based instruction and show an average effect size over 2.5 standard deviations and an average normalized gain over 60%. Diagnostic pre scores were nearly the same for both groups. Practical implications: The outcome, that students, neither science nor engineering majors, made changes in understanding foundational topics in physics far greater than science and engineering students, poses (1) an ethical challenge to the continued adherence to standard, realist-based instructional practices and (2) an intellectual challenge to the usefulness and appropriateness of the elitist-realist paradigm on which such standard instruction is based. Conclusion: This radical constructivist argument uses the effect of paradigms to judge their pragmatic value, not their truth-value. Based on pragmatic value, radical constructivism results in superior outcomes when applied to physics instruction. The approach to instruction can be applied generally in education. (shrink)

FROM VARIOUS THINKERS and in different languages we have been receiving an identical message: the philosophy of the subject initiated by Descartes' cogito has reached a definitive impasse. Critical reactions range from attempts to dispose of the subject altogether to efforts to restore pre-Cartesian theories. The authors here presented adopt positions different from either of those extremes. Fully aware of the modern predicament they advocate neither a return to a pre-Cartesian past nor do they dismiss outright the post-Cartesian subjective starting (...) point. Theoretical attitudes once adopted cannot simply be discarded: philosophy has to work its way through them. Still, the proposed answers vary substantially. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty advocates abandoning traditional truth claims in favor of a rational "conversation" carried on between incommensurable positions. Francis Jacques's Différence et subjectivité reverses the traditional priority of subject to relation. In Généalogie de la psychanalyse Michel Henry attempts to reclaim a theory of "pure" subjectivity from the wild growth of its objectivist deviations. Alasdair MacIntyre exposes the disastrous moral consequences that have resulted from the primacy of an autonomous, isolated subject and proposes a program for a socially and historically more integrated ethical reconstruction. No idea has of late more consistently come under fire than that of the subject as sole source of meaning and value. Heidegger attributed it to Descartes, and three of the studies show the direct impact of his reading. Yet similar tendencies had been at work in analytic philosophy. Rorty presents pragmatic anti-subjective interpretations of language going back to Wittgenstein; Francis Jacques supports his attack by Russell's theory of relations. (shrink)

ROBERT SPAEMANN’S NEW APPROACH TO THE CLASSICAL THEORY OF THE PERSON The article is concerned with the subject of the person, which constitutes the core of anthropological reflections of the eminent German thinker, Robert Spaemann. The issue of the person was especially noticeable in one of his most important works entitled Personen. This issue generated a keen interest and recognition of specialists in many countries. These reflections are based on the metaphysical concept of human existence. That is why Spaemann’s theory (...) of the person is often defined as metaphysics of the person. First, in the introduction, the author points to the significance of the issue; second, he describes its most important threads: understanding the person, the person’s identity and traits such as rationality, freedom, intentionality, love, religiousness, transcendence, ability to forgive, to keep one’s promise and to speak. The next part of the article presents the issues of the person’s self-fulfilment, indestructibility, being the subject of law, having a special status, i.e. dignity. Readers also learn why the classical vision of the person (Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, Kant) is not outdated, whereas Locke’s theory (as well as its radicalised version propagated by its well-known supporters, Parfit, Hoerster, Singer) remains unacceptable as contradictory in itself. As has been emphasized, it involves some false anthropological assumptions, e.g. the issue of the so-called potential person and the difference between human life and person’s life. However, the latter theory is increasingly popular at present since it supports, among others, the justifiability of abortion and euthanasia, and it suits the contemporary mentality with a definitely hedonist overtone. Many of Spaemann’s views on the person are truly significant and innovative. The issue that Spaemann himself regards as particularly important is his response to the false ideas of Locke and his contemporary continuators. The eminent scholar not only reveals the logical incoherence of this thought and its deviation from common sense, but using unique linguistic and transcendental-pragmatic argumentation, he proves that human is a person, i.e. “someone”, since the moment of conception. Thus, we cannot be thought of as if we had been “something” at first. That is why, not accidentally, the subtitle of Spaemann’s most important book on anthropology, i.e. Personen, is The difference between “someone” and “something”. In this response to Locke’s false theory (and its supporters), he explains that one cannot talk about such a distinction in the case of human beings. The second innovative issue in Spaemann’s work is the defence of the classical concept of the person and expressing it in a new way. The third one is his attempt at overcoming both spiritualistic and naturalistic perception of the human being. The fourth is Spaeman’s observation that our ability to forgive and to keep promises should be treated as a significant trait of the person. The article presents also some aspects of Spaemann’s vision of the person which have not been the subject of analyses yet, neither in the Polish nor in the Western literature, e.g. characteristics of the person, the person being the subject of laws and the person’s special status (ontological and moral dignity). Keywords: ROBERT SPAEMANN, THEORY OF THE PERSON, ONTOLOGICAL DIGNITY, MORAL DIGNITY. (shrink)

Michael Devitt claims that the predicative material that constitutes complex referential expressions makes a semantic contribution to the proposition expressed. He thus deviates from direct referentialism, according to which every referential expression -either simple or complex- contributes just with an object to the proposition expressed, leaving the predicative material out of the semantic content. However, when dealing with misdescriptions, Devitt has suggested a pragmatic way out: the audience can understand what the speaker is referring to even if the object (...) does not fall under the corresponding description. From my perspective, this proposal questions the semantic validity of the predicative material, together with Devitt's original claim. In this paper, I propose a way to solve the problem posed by misdescriptions that appeals to the idea of epistemically relativized properties, according to which the properties ascribed to the object -by means of the predicative material- correspond to the way the speaker thinks of it and not to the way the object really is. Michael Devitt sostiene que el material predicativo que constituye las expresiones referenciales complejas hace un aporte semántico a la proposición expresada, alejándose así del referencialismo directo, para el cual toda expresión referencial -sea ésta simple o compleja- contribuye sólo con un objeto singular a la proposición expresada. Sin embargo, al enfrentarse al problema de las descripciones fallidas, Devitt ofrece una salida pragmática: el oyente comprende a qué se refiere el hablante aun cuando el objeto referido no caiga bajo la descripción utilizada. Esto pone en cuestión la validez semántica del material predicativo, desestimando la postura original de Devitt. En el trabajo propongo una solución a este problema, apelando a la idea de propiedades epistémicamente relativizadas, de acuerdo con la cual lo que se predica del objeto por medio del material predicativo corresponde a las creencias del hablante, y no a lo que el objeto realmente es. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, and Race by David BaumeisterHuaping Lu-AdlerDavid Baumeister. Kant on the Human Animal: Anthropology, Ethics, and Race. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2022. Pp. 176. Hardback, $99.95; paperback, $34.95.This book examines a central but previously neglected aspect of Kant’s philosophy: human animality. While Kant is now best known as a philosopher of reason, Baumeister makes a compelling case for reading him also (...) as a “philosopher of animality,” and the first such philosopher at that. As Baumeister’s study reveals, the concept of animality plays a significant role in multiple parts of Kant’s system, from his moral philosophy and philosophy of religion to his anthropology, pedagogy, and theory of race. By the end of the book, it is clear that whoever has not understood Kant’s theory of human animality has not yet fully understood his philosophy. So, the book is a must-read for Kant scholars and for anyone interested in Kantian morality, rationality, and/or humanity.This book consists of an enticing introduction (which opens with a section on Kant’s skull) followed by five chapters. Chapter 1, “Animals, Human and Otherwise,” outlines Kant’s account of animals in general and of the differences and similarities between human and nonhuman animals. Baumeister constructs the account out of the relevant remarks scattered across various texts. Analyzing these remarks holistically, Baumeister shows that Kant was consistently committed to three propositions about humans: humans are animals; what makes humans unique is their possession of reason; therefore, only humans enjoy full moral status and have direct duties to other humans qua rational beings but only indirect duties to nonhuman animals.Chapter 2, “Animality and Morality,” builds on the opposition between animality and rationality teased out in chapter 1. This opposition underpins what Baumeister calls a [End Page 667] “severance of human animality and human morality” (28). Chapter 2 tracks this severance across Kant’s works. The central and also most interesting part of Baumeister’s analysis concerns the “violence of [Kantian] morality” (37): from the perspective of morality, Kant not only devalues animality relative to humanity but also sees it as a threat to the latter; accordingly, if humanity is to be perfected, violence (Gewalt) to animality is necessary—not to destroy or expunge it altogether, which is impossible, but to keep it in check for the sake of morality.What exactly is the trainable but indelible “animal residue” in human nature as Kant understands it (47)? Chapter 3, “Anthropologies of the Human Animal,” answers this question with an extensive study of Kant’s works on anthropology. Baumeister begins with an illuminating analysis of an underappreciated text, Kant’s 1771 review of a work by the Italian anatomist Pietro Moscati. This review anticipates several key elements of Kant’s later work on anthropology. It is one of the rare texts in which Kant gave a concerted account of the relation between animality and reason as two incongruent aspects of human nature that pull human beings toward opposite directions. Kant illustrated this tension in the Moscati review with a fascinating take on human anatomy: human beings’ bipedalism is at once unnatural, as an artificial deviation, induced by reason, from animals’ natural quadrupedalism; and natural, insofar as reason itself is a germ (Keim) originally placed in the human being. This naturally endowed faculty of reason played the decisive role in verticalizing the animal body of humans and thereby elevating them above all other animals (51–55). This claim points to another way in which the Moscati review is significant: it shows that Kant’s anthropology is both practically or pragmatically oriented and rooted in physiology from the very start (56). The rest of chapter 3 examines the evolving relationship between these two registers—the pragmatic and the physiological—in Kant’s later works on anthropology.Chapter 4, “Animality Unfolded,” shows how, after the mid-1780s, the treatment of human animality migrated from Kant’s explicitly anthropological works to what may be loosely called his “works on human nature.” These belong in three domains, in each of which Kant foregrounds a particular aspect of animality. He presents animality as (1... (shrink)

In the background of accelerated interdisciplinary development of phenomenology, there appears more clearly a deficiency of the epistemological groundingand methodological explanation of present research. This is particularly evident in the field of social phenomenology, in which the research positions extend fromthat of the “orthodox” transcendental phenomenologists to an endless search for a new foundation for pragmatic social phenomenology in philosophical anthropology, to a vague thesis about “fruitful discussion” between E. Husserl and A. Schutz. The main task of this article (...) consists in the establishment of the fundamental significance of the epistemological succession between Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology and Schutz’s natural phenomenology. This confirms itself through the analysis of such concepts as sense and constitution, which play the prominent methodological role in the main works – Ideas-I and correspondingly The Phenomenology of the Social World. Such comparative analysis allows not only to highlight the most important similarities in the projects of both thinkers such as a “sense-giving function” of consciousness, but also to distinguish small deviations of the mundane phenomenology from the transcendental project, i.e., the rejection of transcendental reductions and the “pragmatic conditioning” of the subjective action’s sense through now- and so-states of the ego. It is proposed to interpret the famous Schutzian “turning away from Husserl” first of all as a skeptical turn; however, that does not mean that the essential transcendental prerequisites such as a correlation of “attitude – experience – world” should be abandoned. In the end, it is demonstrated that the main metaphysical statements of Husserl can still retain their value within the framework of the contemporary conventional research models such as the “scientific research program” by I. Lakatos, whereas further theoretical statements, i.e., of social phenomenology, can be bound with this “hard core” as “auxiliary hypotheses” in cooperation with empirical sciences. (shrink)

We argue for a perspective on bilingual heritage speakers as native speakers of both their languages and present results from a large-scale, cross-linguistic study that took such a perspective and approached bilinguals and monolinguals on equal grounds. We targeted comparable language use in bilingual and monolingual speakers, crucially covering broader repertoires than just formal language. A main database was the open-access RUEG corpus, which covers comparable informal vs. formal and spoken vs. written productions by adolescent and adult bilinguals with heritage-Greek, (...) -Russian, and -Turkish in Germany and the United States and with heritage-German in the United States, and matching data from monolinguals in Germany, the United States, Greece, Russia, and Turkey. Our main results lie in three areas. We found non-canonical patterns not only in bilingual, but also in monolingual speakers, including patterns that have so far been considered absent from native grammars, in domains of morphology, syntax, intonation, and pragmatics. We found a degree of lexical and morphosyntactic inter-speaker variability in monolinguals that was sometimes higher than that of bilinguals, further challenging the model of the streamlined native speaker. In majority language use, non-canonical patterns were dominant in spoken and/or informal registers, and this was true for monolinguals and bilinguals. In some cases, bilingual speakers were leading quantitatively. In heritage settings where the language was not part of formal schooling, we found tendencies of register leveling, presumably due to the fact that speakers had limited access to formal registers of the heritage language. Our findings thus indicate possible quantitative differences and different register distributions rather than distinct grammatical patterns in bilingual and monolingual speakers. This supports the integration of heritage speakers into the native-speaker continuum. Approaching heritage speakers from this perspective helps us to better understand the empirical data and can shed light on language variation and change in native grammars. Furthermore, our findings for monolinguals lead us to reconsider the state-of-the art on majority languages, given recurring evidence for non-canonical patterns that deviate from what has been assumed in the literature so far, and might have been attributed to bilingualism had we not included informal and spoken registers in monolinguals and bilinguals alike. (shrink)

Neutral Counterpart Theories of slurs hold that the truth-conditional contribution of a slur is the same as the truth-conditional contribution of its neutral counterpart. In, DiFranco argues that these theories, even if plausible for single-word slurs like ‘kike’ and ‘nigger’, are not suitable for complex slurs such as ‘slanty-eyed’ and ‘curry muncher’, figurative slurs like ‘Jewish American Princess’, or iconic slurring expressions like ‘ching chong’. In this paper, we argue that these expressions do not amount to genuine counterexamples to neutral (...) counterpart theories of slurs. We provide a positive characterization of DiFranco's examples that doesn't deviate from the core of those theories. (shrink)

The paper builds on a methodological idea from experimental philosophy and on findings from psycholinguistics, to develop and defend ordinary language analysis (OLA) as practiced in J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia. That attack on sense-datum theories of perception focuses on the argument from illusion. Through a case-study on this paradoxical argument, the present paper argues for a form of OLA which is psychologically informed, seeks to expose epistemic, rather than semantic, defects in paradoxical arguments, and is immune to the main (...) objections to ordinary language philosophising, including those arising from the semantic/pragmatics distinction: A key project in current experimental philosophy is to develop psychological explanations of philosophically relevant intuitions that help us determine what warrant thinkers have for accepting them. Psycholinguistic work on the role of stereotypes in verb-comprehension has shown that intuitive judgments can be generated by automatic cognitive processes that duplicate both semantic and pragmatic inferences and are shaped by dominant uses of words. For systematic reasons, philosophers are prone to unwittingly deviate from such dominant uses. Where this happens, they are liable to automatically infer unwarranted conclusions that strike them as intuitively compelling. OLA helps us to determine those dominant uses, to identify unwitting deviations from them, and thus to expose unwarranted intuitions – e.g., in the premises of paradoxical arguments. Ordinary language does not determine the bounds of sense but shapes our leaps of thought. The paper shows how this enables its ‘Austinian’ analysis to contribute to a novel, epistemic, resolution of philosophical paradoxes and problems. (shrink)

Purpose. An empirical verification of the Hemingway’s “sad hypothesis” and study of some individual characteristics of a discourse formation in a process of short texts understanding. -/- Methods and procedure of research. The study was based on the principle of a standardized interview, which was carried out on a random sample (103 respondents) using the questionnaire. The subjects interpreted two proverbs and the short story by Hemingway (“For sale: baby shoes, never worn”). In each case, it was proposed to choose (...) one of the six ready-made interpretations or to create an original one. Proverb explications were classified by experts as “normative” or “deviating”, and interpretations of the story were evaluated into “sad” or “pragmatic” ones. Also, a “normativity index” was calculated for each respondent, reflecting the number of normative renditions of proverbs. The Psychogeometric test was used, and such socio-demographic characteristics were recorded as: gender, age, having children. -/- Results. This study refutes the “sad hypothesis” regarding Hemingway’s six-word story affect. The prevalence of pragmatic type interpretation over sentimental one is statistically significant. The type of interpretation turned out to be not directly related to any of the considered socio-demographic characteristics. It was found that the sad interpretation of the story reliably corresponds to a high normativity of the proverbs explications. Conversely, respondents with deviating interpretations of proverbs were significantly more likely to interpret Hemingway’s story in a pragmatic way. Differential psychological features, which were distinguished using the Psychogeometric test, turned out to be an insignificant predictor of the six-word story interpretations. -/- Conclusions. The analysis of the research results made it possible to argue the thesis that the differences in the formation of individual discourses are directly related to a worldview and indirectly determined by other factors in turn influencing the outlook. The interaction of the worldview with discursive practice that arises in the process of short texts understanding is carried out according to differential scenarios. These scenarios are conditioned by such individual characteristics as discursive conformity and discursive lability, which, in turn, correspond with high and low normativity, respectively. Above features are cognitive in nature. Their ontological localization coincides with the I-language (Chomsky). (shrink)

Developments in Soviet ethics have been largely, but not exclusively, determined by the official ideology. Since 1917 philosophers have debated four successive models of morality. In the first, morality was regarded as tool of the exploiting classes and thus was superseded by communism. This attitude in fact fostered moral nihilism and anarchism. In the second period of ethical reflection, morality was contrued as a social, class-relative, phenomenon, conceived in utilitarian terms. With respect to Communist morality whatever serves socialism as defined (...) by the Communist Party acquires the force of a moral imperative. It is important to understand whether this perspective is true to Marx''s views. Whereas classical ethics assumed an extraworldy foundation for morality Marx adopted the humanist, immanentist perspective, according to which morality has a pragmatic sense as an ideal, the goal of activity. Soviet ethical theory of the Stalin era did not deviate from this perspective, for which reason ethics as a professional science was entirely subordinated to Party decrees about socialism as an ideal. In the third period beginning in the mid-fifties, a new view came to the fore which was codified in the 1961 Party program: moral values are now regarded as having a specific quality, social development involves a moral dimension, and moral values exhibit an all-human import. During this period the leading issue among philosophers is the question of the essence and specificity of morality as distinct from other forms of social consciousness. Just prior to the era of perestrojka beginning in 1985 a fourth model emerged which in fact prepared in most essential respects the actual new thinking in morality. The matters under consideration had to do with the global dimensions of moral problems given the common experience and fears of humanity. For this reason morality was now seen as superseding politics. Presently, this reorientation has not only enabled abandoning attitudes favoring class morality, but thrown into relief the tragic consequences of this attitude within Soviet history.The new image of morality corresponds to abstract humanism with its stress on the person and universal values. The task before Soviet ethicians is to provide theoretical and methodological foundations for their research by which they can improve the professional quality of their work and provide the discipline with a new identity over and against Marxism. (shrink)

Disbelief, lies, and manipulations have been objects of scholarly consideration from widely different perspectives: historical, sociological, philosophical, ethical, logical, and pragmatic. In this paper, these notions are re-examined in the framework of a Transactional Discourse Model which operates in terms of the location and relocation of various knowledge items within two sets of knowledge, A and B, representing two interlocators A and B, and two of their subsets Ca and Cb, which constitute the sets of the matters of A's (...) and B's current concern. This approach reveals certain formal features shared by lies, disbelief, and manipulations that indicate that these three types of discourse behavior constitute a deviation from successful interpersonal communication as defined in the proposed model. The model, moreover, enables us to explicitly capture both the similarities and the differences of lies and manipulations with other pragmatic phenomena, such as jokes, impersonating, role-acting, memory failure, politeness expressions, and tact; the comparison suggests that certain modifications of Gricean conversational maxims may be in order. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on the emergence of modern racist ideology during the nineteenth century. It examines the role played by the Victorian anatomists and anthropologists who constructed classifications of humans according to racial type, and depicted these types as having distinct and certain characteristics determined by their biological inheritance. This ideology of racism is a racial inequality dependent on a biological determinism based on science. From the 1930s to the 1950s, developments in science, specifically in human genetics and anthropology, led (...) to the retreat from scientific racism and biological determinism. In the aftermath of the Second World War, movements such as the international consensus on human rights and equality, decolonization, and civil rights advancement brought new hope to the eradication of racism. Despite initiatives for the abolition of racism, forms of inequality and discrimination persisted. These persistent forms of racism were largely based on institutional or pragmatic racism and deviated from the theoretical racism backed by biological determinism and scientific racism. They posed a great challenge to the empire. Taking the dominant mode of thinking on race as biological determinism, this chapter aims to reconsider this thinking as it misrepresents the Victorian discourse and misconstrues the nineteenth-century legacy on racism and race relations. What follows is an outline of the fault lines surrounding the disputes over the meaning and significance of race. (shrink)

The subject of this research is the phenomenon of mystery fiction and its evolution in the context of development of sociocultural project of modernity. The latter is viewed as a complex system, which fundamental principles permeate the entire fabrics of European culture, generating such phenomenon as a mystery fiction plot. The analysis of its varieties deepens the understanding of specificity of modernity and mature of crises that has captured it. Hermeneutic analysis allows going beyond the frames of the narrow-disciplinary analysis (...) of the corresponding texts, allowing to determine the inevident layers within the phenomenon of narration of mystery fiction. The initial methodological point is presented by the concept of V. P. Rudnev, who identified interrelation between the mystery fiction storylines and dominant gnoseological paradigm. The author determines the four levels of narration of mystery fiction: ontological, gnoseological, anthropological, and ethical-normative. The classical (analytical) mystery fiction describes reality commensurable to human reason (ontological level), investigation appears as strict analysis (gnoseological level), detective resembles a “private thinker” who is distant from the society and the crime itself (anthropological level), and a crime is interpreted as a deviation that disturbs harmony of the rational order (ethical-normative level). In this sense, a classical mystery fiction is a reflection of metanarrative of modernity, aimed at building a complete system, and excluding the Other. At the same time, the crisis of the basis of modernity is essentially reflected in metamorphoses of mystery fiction genre. In existential and pragmatic mystery fiction, reality is irrational, and boundaries between the norm and deviation are being diluted. Such situation may be describes as disappointment in metanarrative – in underlines the inability of modern culture to adequately fulfill its fundamental functions. The Other strike roots in the cultural space; however, the space itself exists in accordance with the principles of postmodern anarchy. (shrink)

Adopting Murdoch’s pragmatist reading of Bohr’s theory of meaning with regard to Bohr’s notion of complementarity, in this paper I try to see Bohr’s post-Como and, in particular, post-EPR philosophy of quantum mechanics in the light of Peircean pragmatism with the hope that such a construal can shed more light to Bohr’s philosophy. I supplement Murdoch’s position on Bohr’s pragmatism by showing that in addition to his complementarity, Bohr’s correspondence principle, instrumentalism and realism can be read on the basis of (...) Peirce’s pragmatic maxim and his notion of indeterminism has commonalities with Peirce’s tychism. Also, Bohr’s practice of applying the correspondence principle can be interpreted in the light of Peirce’s fallibilism. However, when it comes to Bohr’s understanding of the symbolic character of quantum mechanics, Bohr’s philosophy deviates from Peircean pragmatism. Bohr’s philosophy distinguishes between the symbolic language of quantum formalism, which counts as a tool practically useful for prediction, and observation sentences which are visualizable in space and time and refer to the so-called individual phenomena. Such an epistemologically significant distinction is not recognized by Peircean pragmatism. (shrink)

It has been suggested (cf. Sinha et al. in Science 329:418, 2010) that the Born rule for quantum probability could be violated. It has also been suggested that, in a generalized version of quantum mechanical probability theory such as that proposed by Sorkin (Mod. Phys. Lett. A 9:3119, 1994) there might occur deviations from the predictions of quantum probability in cases where more than two paths are available to a self-interfering system. These would lead to additional contributions to interference. Here, (...) these ideas, some in the theoretical context and some in the experimental context, are briefly reviewed and pragmatically extended to situations involving bipartite systems, so that corresponding interference enhancement due to entanglement might be witnessed. (shrink)

This collection of essays surveys the current philosophical milieu which has emerged from the three centuries’ fusion of European national traditions within the pragmatic conditions of the New World. Properly believing that a thinker reacts to his own environment, it provides an imaginative introduction to the American tyro musing on possible subjects for study. Under the comprehensive lead of Dr. Winn, a team of experienced teachers and scholars expound, analyse and evaluate the current attitudes, problems and solutions of philosophy (...) with concise lucidity and candid local feeling. Its very success in statement raises the difficulty that in stating complex, subtle problems and answers with an intelligibility which demands a minimum of technical knowledge, it may lose its hold upon the thinker already in technical operation. The two-fold aim is not easy to satisfy and it is hardly surprising that different sections deviate differently from the golden mean. (shrink)

I investigate patterns of usage of thanking formulae in the closing section of a corpus of 94 telephone calls made by tenants to a UK housing association. The data suggest that unilateral thanking is the norm when calls are institutionally and interactionally unmarked. In contrast, mutual thanking correlates mainly with the presence of interactional problems of various kinds, or, in a few cases, with features that are not problematic as such, but simply interactionally marked given the nature of the activity. (...) When initiated by agents rather than by callers, thanking is frequently hearable as conveying an apologetic stance. Participants thus seem to orient to different thanking patterns as devices which may be used either to mark the preceding interaction as an instance of ‘business-as-usual’ or, if such is not the case, to restore interpersonal harmony or index awareness that aspects of the preceding interaction have otherwise deviated from situational expectations. (shrink)

Frege held that the bare demonstrative ‘that’ is incomplete, and that it is the word together with a gesture that serves as the designating expression, and likewise that it is the word ‘yesterday’ together with the time of utterance that designates the relevant day. David Kaplan’s original theory of indexicals holds that Frege’s supplementation thesis is correct about demonstratives but incorrect about ‘yesterday’. Kaplan’s account of demonstratives deviates from Frege’s in treating supplemented demonstratives as directly referential, hence rigid. It is (...) argued here that the gesture or other demonstration that accompanies an utterance of ‘that’ is not part of the designating expression but instead part of the utterance context. (shrink)

Kripke made a good case that ..... the phi....,, is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that .... .the phi....,, is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that "...the phi....,, is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by "...the phi".. on the one hand, and what Russell's theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to (...) implicature. This paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When CC the ph....,, is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim. (shrink)

This paper defends a theory of speech act that I call concurrentism. It consists of the following three theses. 1. We believe, ceteris paribus, that other people’s speech acts concur with their beliefs. 2. Our speech acts, ceteris paribus, concur with our beliefs. 3. When our speech acts deviate from our beliefs, we do not, ceteris paribus, declare the deviations to other people. Concurrentism sheds light on what the hearer believes when he hears an indicative sentence, what the speaker believes (...) when he says an indicative sentence, what the speaker does after he says an indicative sentence contrary to what he believes, why Moore’s paradox occurs, why it is puzzling to say some variants of Moorean sentences, and why it is not absurd to say other variants of Moorean sentences. (shrink)

Kripke made a good case that “…the phi…” is not semantically ambiguous between referential and attributive meanings. Russell says that “…the phi…” is always to be analyzed attributively. Many semanticists, agreeing with Kripke that “…the phi…” is not ambiguous, have tried to give a Russellian analysis of the referential-attributive distinction: the gross deviations between what is communicated by “…the phi..”, on the one hand, and what Russell’s theory says it literally means, on the other, are chalked up to implicature. This (...) paper shows that, when the phenomenon of implicature is scrutinized, there is overwhelming reason to doubt that a Russellian analysis can succeed. A positive, non-Russellian analysis is proposed: it is shown that, if definite descriptions are treated as referring expressions, it is easy to deal with the referential-attributive distinction. When “…the phi…” is functioning attributively, the definite description is seen as referring to some object described in an understood, antecedent existence claim. (shrink)

The article surveys the history of “terror” vis a vis the development of international humanitarian and human rights law. During the French Revolution, the word “terror” was coined to describe a deviation from the laws of war. Justified by a mixture of ideology and necessity. People who resort to terrorism either suspends or rejects the laws of war (jus in bellum) in the name of an alternative and heightened sense of truth. However, the terrorists’ strong sense of probity and (...) mission is also an opening for re-establishing communication, arbitration and mitigation of cruelty and destruction. This paper represents International Humanitarian Law (IHL) as an “abstract Leviathan”, submission to which is the contemporary norm of pacification. From the perspective of radical terrorism, it is tyrannical. From other perspectives, it is open to criticism and change. Most importantly, it is on the side of rational arbitration rather than arbitrary ordeal. Even radical terrorism, which refuses to recognize the legitimacy of the abstract Leviathan, seeks to communicate its radical messages rather than to seek victory my means of physical annihilation of its opponents. (shrink)

In order to understand a sentence, one must know the relevant semantic rules. Those rules are not learned in a vacuum; they are given to one through one's senses. As a result, knowledge of semantic rules sometimes comes bundled with semantically irrelevant, but cognitively non-innocuous, knowledge of the circumstances in which those rules were learned. Thus, one must work through non-semantic information in order to know what is literally meant by a given sentence-token. A consequence is that one's knowledge of (...) what is literally meant by a given sentence-token is sometimes embedded in non-semantic knowledge, resulting in a cleavage between what that sentence-token literally means and what the auditor in question takes it to mean. Such deviations obviously have nothing to do with the principles put forth by Grice, since those principles only concern sentence-tokens that have already been understood---since, to put it another way, those principles only concern post-semantic implicature. The just-described deviations are appropriately described as being due to "pre-semantic implicature." Given the phenomenon of pre-semantic implicature, it is easily shown that Russell's Theory of Descriptions, if taken as a theory of literal meaning, is false. In the present volume, these rather elementary principles are entirely ignored, and all of the articles in it are sterile repetitions of the points made by Russell and Strawson. The blinkered approach to language embodied in this volume must be reconsidered in light of psychological principles relating to language-acquisition and language-use. Unfortunately, analytic philosophers shy away from such topics, as is made clear by the papers in this grim volume. (shrink)

I argue that fallibilism, single-premise epistemic closure, and one formulation of the “knowledge-action principle” are inconsistent. I will consider a possible way to avoid this incompatibility, by advocating a pragmatic constraint on belief in general, rather than just knowledge. But I will conclude that this is not a promising option for defusing the problem. I do not argue here for any one way of resolving the inconsistency.

Although fallacies have been common since Aristotle, until recently little attention has been devoted to identifying and defining them. Furthermore, the concept of fallacy itself has lacked a sufficiently clear meaning to make it a useful tool for evaluating arguments. Douglas Walton takes a new analytical look at the concept of fallacy and presents an up-to-date analysis of its usefulness for argumentation studies. Walton uses case studies illustrating familiar arguments and tricky deceptions in everyday conversation where the charge of fallaciousness (...) is at issue. The numerous case studies show in concrete terms many practical aspects of how to use textual evidence to identify and analyze fallacies and to evaluate arguments as fallacious. Walton looks at how an argument is used in the context of conversation. He defines a fallacy as a conversational move, or sequence of moves, that is supposed to be an argument that contributes to the purpose of the conversation but in reality interferes with it. The view is a pragmatic one, based on the assumption that when people argue, they do so in a context of dialogue, a conventionalized normative framework that is goal-directed. Such a contextual framework is shown to be crucial in determining whether an argument has been used correctly. Walton also shows how examples of fallacies given in the logic textbooks characteristically turn out to be variants of reasonable, even if defeasible or questionable arguments, based on presumptive reasoning. This is the essence of the evaluation problem. A key thesis of the book, which must not be taken for granted as previous textbooks have so often done, is that you can spot a fallacy from how it was used in a context of dialogue. This is an innovative and even, as Walton notes, "a radical and controversial" theory of fallacy. (shrink)

This paper compares two alternative explanations of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge (i.e., the claim that whether an agent knows that p can depend on pragmatic factors). After reviewing the evidence for such pragmatic encroachment, we ask how it is best explained, assuming it obtains. Several authors have recently argued that the best explanation is provided by a particular account of belief, which we call pragmatic credal reductivism. On this view, what it is for an agent to (...) believe a proposition is for her credence in this proposition to be above a certain threshold, a threshold that varies depending on pragmatic factors. We show that while this account of belief can provide an elegant explanation of pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, it is not alone in doing so, for an alternative account of belief, which we call the reasoning disposition account, can do so as well. And the latter account, we argue, is far more plausible than pragmatic credal reductivism, since it accords far better with a number of claims about belief that are very hard to deny. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.3 (2000) 193-220 [Access article in PDF] Unveiling Esther as a Pragmatic Radical Rhetoric Susan Zaeske Ahasuerus, king of Persia, hosted in the courtyard of his pavilion a grand feast bountiful in royal wine. Likewise, Queen Vashti gave a feast for the women in the king's palace. On the last day of the celebration, an inebriated Ahasuerus commanded Vashti to appear wearing her crown (only (...) her crown, according to some interpretations 1 ) to show the people her beauty. She refused. Burning with anger, Ahasuerus consulted his advisors with regard to how he should respond to the affront. They concluded that not just the king, but all husbands of the kingdom had been wronged. They advised the king to depose Vashti and issue a law commanding all wives to obey their husbands. Following this advice, Ahasuerus uncrowned Vashti and selected as his new queen the beautiful Esther, who hid the fact that she was a Jew.Esther had been raised in the provinces by her cousin, Mordecai, 2 who came with her to the king's city. One day when Mordecai encountered the king's prime minister, Haman, he refused to obey the law commanding all to bow before the king's official because Haman was an infamous enemy of the Jews. Haman was so angered by Mordecai's insolence that he decided to seek revenge by destroying not just Mordecai, but all the Jews in the kingdom. After casting lots to determine the best time to approach the king, Haman obtained Ahasuerus's permission to annihilate the Jews.When he learned of the imminent execution, Mordecai put on sackcloth and ashes and made his way through the streets of Susa, wailing. Through a messenger, Mordecai bid Esther to intercede with the king on behalf of her people. She protested that doing so would be a dangerous act because approaching the king without summons was an offense punishable by death. Reminded by Mordecai that inaction on her part meant death for her people, and possibly herself, Esther resolved to beseech the king. She commanded Mordecai to gather all the Jews in the city to fast and pray for her for three days. Then, Esther pledged, "I will go to the king, even though it is against the law. And if I perish, I perish!" (Esther 4:16). [End Page 193]On the third day, Esther stood waiting in the inner courtyard of the palace, in front of the king's quarters, where he was sitting on his throne. When Ahasuerus noticed the queen, she won his favor and he extended his gold scepter. The king then said to her, "What do you want Queen Esther? What is your petition? Even if it be half of my kingdom, you may have it"(Esther 5:3). Esther did not immediately state her request, but invited the king and Haman to a banquet she would prepare for them. At the banquet, the king again invited her request. Again, she deferred, instead asking both men to another banquet.During the night between banquets, the king suffered a bout of insomnia and ordered the book of records brought to him. Ahasuerus read that Mordecai the Jew had saved his life by informing the king's guards of an assassination plot. The next day, the king asked Haman how best to honor a man for his loyalty. Thinking that Ahasuerus wished to honor him, Haman suggested that such a man should be paraded through the streets on a fine horse. To Haman's horror, he was ordered to lead a celebratory parade for his worst enemy, Mordecai.Haman was so distraught that he was almost late for the second banquet in the queen's chambers. Once all were assembled, the king repeated his offer to receive Esther's petition. She answered, "If I have obtained your favor, Your Majesty and if it please the king, let my life be granted to me at my request. And my people's at my petition! For we've been sold, I and my people, for destruction! For slaughter and annihilation... (shrink)