In seiner Einladung zur Mitwirkung hatte der Herausgeber als Arbeitstitel für diesen Band formuliert: "Erziehungswissenschaft am Ausgang der Moderne"; von dieser Vorgabe sind meine Überlegungen an­ geregt worden. 2 Dahmer I Klafkis (1968) "Ausgangs' -Diagnose war fast noch druckfrisch als die Renaissance der geistes­ wissenschaftlichen Pädagogik einsetzte. 3 Auf die sich die Postmoderne-Debatte aber nicht reduzieren läßt. 4 Weitere Varianten sind im Kontext evolutionstheoretischer Entwürfe der Pädagogik oder im Anschluß an new-wave-philosophies entstanden, vgl. z.B. Treml 1987 sowie Huschke-Rhein 1988. Auf (...) diese Arbeiten will ich im folgenden nicht eingehen, weil dadurch eine immanente Diskussion von,System' -Denken not­ wendig würde, die nicht nur von erziehungswissenschaftlichen Problemen, sondern gelegentlich über­ haupt von Theorieproblemen wegführen würde. 5 Die Rezeptionsgeschichte bei Oelkers/Tenorth 1987 b; Seiler I Meyer 1987 können im übrigen durch den Bezug auf die Herbart-Rezeption zeigen, daß solche eigentümlich verzerrenden Formen der Aneignung von Theorie in der wissenschaftlichen Pädagogik keineswegs singulär sind. 6 Mit,Systemtheorie' sei im folgenden die Form bezeichnet, zu der sich die Systemtheorie modo Luh­ mann I Schorr in der Rezeption der Pädagogen gewandelt hat. Meine Bemerkungen gelten beiden Modi der Systemtheorie. 7 Ich nutze einen Begriff, mit dem Th. Luckmann den Effekt analysiert, den die phänomenologische Theo­ rie und Philosophie den Weltbildern der Sozialwissenschaften zugefügt habe. 8 In der Analyse pädagogischer Argumente liegen solche Erweiterungen vor, z.B. bei Künzli 1986, Paschen 1988. 9 Am bekanntesten vielleicht in der pädagogischen Formel vom,Implikationszusammenhang von Ziel, In­ halt und Methode' vertreten. (shrink)

Background: To better understand the kinds of ethical challenges that emerge when using coercion in mental healthcare, and the importance of these ethical challenges, this article presents a systematic review of scientific literature. Methods: A systematic search in the databases MEDLINE, PsychInfo, Cinahl, Sociological Abstracts and Web of Knowledge was carried out. The search terms derived from the population, intervention, comparison/setting and outcome. A total of 22 studies were included. Ethical considerations: The review is conducted according to the Vancouver Protocol. (...) Results: There are few studies that study ethical challenges when using coercion in an explicit way. However, promoting the patient’s best interest is the most important justification for coercion. Patient autonomy is a fundamental challenge facing any use of coercion, and some kind of autonomy infringement is a key aspect of the concept of coercion. The concepts of coercion and autonomy and the relations between them are very complex. When coercion is used, a primary ethical challenge is to assess the balance between promoting good (beneficence) and inflicting harm (maleficence). In the included studies, findings explicitly related to justice are few. Some studies focus on moral distress experienced by the healthcare professionals using coercion. Conclusion: There is a lack of literature explicitly addressing ethical challenges related to the use of coercion in mental healthcare. It is essential for healthcare personnel to develop a strong awareness of which ethical challenges they face in connection with the use of coercion, as well as challenges related to justice. How to address ethical challenges in ways that prevent illegitimate paternalism and strengthen beneficent treatment and care and trust in connection with the use of coercion is a ‘clinical must’. By developing a more refined and rich language describing ethical challenges, clinicians may be better equipped to prevent coercion and the accompanying moral distress. (shrink)

Does thought precede language, or the other way around? How does having a language affect our thoughts? Who has a language, and who can think? These questions have traditionally been addressed by philosophers, especially by rationalists concerned to identify the essential difference between humans and other animals. More recently, theorists in cognitive science, evolutionary biology, and developmental psychology have been asking these questions in more empirically grounded ways. At its best, this confluence of philosophy and science promises to blend the (...) respective strengths of each discipline, bringing abstract theory to bear on reality in a principled and focused way. At its worst, it risks degenerating into a war of words, with each side employing key expressions in its own idiosyncratic way – or worse, contaminating empirical research with a priori dogmas inherited from outmoded philosophical worldviews. In Baboon Metaphysics (2007), Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth offer an analysis of baboon cognition that promises to exemplify the very best interaction of philosophical theory and empirical research. They argue that baboons have a language of thought: a language-like representational medium, which supports the sophisticated cognitive abilities required to negotiate their complex social environment. This claim is intended to be surprising in its own right, and also to shed light on the evolution of spoken language. Because our own ancestors likely lived in a similarly complex social environment, Cheney and Seyfarth propose that the earliest humans also developed language first as a cognitive medium, and that spoken language evolved as a means to express those thoughts. There are two potential difficulties here. First, ‘Language of Thought’ (LOT) is a term of art, with much associated theoretical baggage and often comparatively little careful exposition. Thus, evaluating the claim requires getting clearer about just what LOT implies in this context.. (shrink)

Theorists often associate certain “poetic” qualities with metaphor – most especially, producing an open-ended, holistic perspective which is evocative, imagistic and affectively-laden. I argue that, on the one hand, non-cognitivists are wrong to claim that metaphors only produce such perspectives: like ordinary literal speech, they also serve to undertake claims and other speech acts with propositional content. On the other hand, contextualists are wrong to assimilate metaphor to literal loose talk: metaphors depend on using one thing as a perspective for (...) thinking about something else. I bring out the distinctive way that metaphor works by contrasting it with two other poetic uses of language, juxtapositions and “telling details,” that do fit the accounts of metaphor offered by non-cognitivists and contextualists, respectively. (shrink)

I argue that stories are ‘equipment for living’ in two senses: retrospectively, they provide ‘configurational comprehension’ of a temporal sequence of events; prospectively, they offer templates for action. Narrative conceptions of the self appear well poised to leverage these functional roles for stories into an intuitively compelling view of self-construction as self-construal. However, the narrative conception defines selves in terms of the lives they live: a self is the protagonist in a lifelong story. And narrative structure is itself defined by (...) ‘retrospective necessity’: the meaning of events within a story is given by their contribution to that story's ending. Together, this entails that life stories hold selves metaphysically, epistemically, and practically hostage to their ends. Fortunately, narratives are just one species of interpretive frame. I suggest some alternative types of frames, including identity labels and metaphors, that support configurational comprehension, action guidance, and self construction without shackling selves to their lives’ ends. (shrink)

Philosophers have often adopted a dismissive attitude toward metaphor. Hobbes (1651, ch. 8) advocated excluding metaphors from rational discourse because they “openly profess deceit,” while Locke (1690, Bk. 3, ch. 10) claimed that figurative uses of language serve only “to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment; and so indeed are perfect cheats.” Later, logical positivists like Ayer and Carnap assumed that because metaphors like..

Metaphor is a pervasive and significant feature of language. We use metaphor to talk about the world in familiar and innovative ways, and in contexts ranging from everyday conversation to literature and scientific theorizing. However, metaphor poses serious challenges for standard philosophical theories of meaning, because it straddles so many important boundaries: between language and thought, between semantics and pragmatics, between rational communication and mere causal association. ;In this dissertation, I develop a pragmatic theory of metaphorical utterances which reconciles two (...) apparently incompatible intuitions. The first is that metaphors are vehicles for undertaking speech acts with a propositional content distinct from their conventional sentence meaning. The second is that metaphors are tools for inducing the essentially non-propositional effect of 'seeing things in a new light' or under a new aspect. These intuitions seem to be incompatible because it is assumed that only one can capture the essential function of metaphor. I propose instead that non-propositional 'seeing-as' or aspectual thought serves as the means by which speakers intend to accomplish their end of communicating content. This does not imply that speakers are not interested in and even committed to the effects of aspectual thought as well, only that it is not their sole, ultimate intention. ;In order to substantiate this proposal about how metaphor works, I develop an account of the psychological structures on which aspectual thought operates and the changes it engenders; I then show how the content of the speaker's intended speech act is determined by the aspect the sentence generates. By bringing propositional content and non-propositional aspectual thought together in this way, my account can treat the full range of metaphors, from 'ordinary' to 'poetic', within a unified theory. Armed with this account, we have the explanatory resources necessary to acknowledge both that ordinary conversational metaphors are efficient and sometimes essential vehicles for communicating determinate propositional contents, and also that rich, poetic metaphors are invitations to an open-ended contemplation of the subject under discussion. These apparently very different effects turn out to be manifestations of the same basic process of comprehension. (shrink)

Elisabeth Pacherie is a research fellow in philosophy at Institut Jean Nicod, Paris. Her main research and publications are in the areas of philosophy of mind, psychopathology and action theory. Her publications include a book on intentionality (_Naturaliser_ _l'intentionnalité_, Paris, PUF, 1993) and she is currently preparing a book on action and agency.

I compare two of Davidson's main discussions of metaphor. I argue, first, that despite some puzzling inconsistencies, the overall thrust of “What Metaphors Mean” is a radical form of noncogitivism, on which speakers of metaphors merely cause their hearers to perceive certain features in the world, but do not claim or implicate that things are any particular way. By contrast, in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Davidson endorses a neo‐Gricean account of metaphor as a form of speaker's meaning. However, he (...) also now advocates a radical anticonventionalism about linguistic meaning in general, which threatens to undermine his new view of metaphor. Finally, I articulate and evaluate a neo‐Davidsonian view of metaphor, which retains as much as possible from both papers. (shrink)

Stalnaker’s Context deploys the core machinery of common ground, possible worlds, and epistemic accessibility to mount a powerful case for the ‘autonomy of pragmatics’: the utility of theorizing about discourse function independently of specific linguistic mechanisms. Illocutionary force lies at the peripherybetween pragmatics—as the rational, non-conventional dynamics of context change—and semantics—as a conventional compositional mechanism for determining truth-conditional contents—in an interesting way. I argue that the conventionalization of illocutionary force, most notably in assertion, has important crosscontextual consequences that are not (...) fully captured by a specification of dynamic effects on common ground. More generally, I suggest that Stalnaker’s purely informational, propositional analysis of both semantic content and dynamic effects distorts our understanding of the function of language, especially of the real-world commitments and consequences engendered by robustly ‘expressive’ language like slurs, honorifics, and thick terms. (shrink)

Les deux ouvrages conjoints de 1960 et 1962, Mathématiques et métaphysique chez Descartes et La Philosophie de l’algèbre, marquent dans l’oeuvre de Vuillemin un tournant qui peut éclairer le sens philosophique de la classification des systèmes. Nous présentons successivement la contribution de ces ouvrages à la définition de la méthode dite génétique en philosophie, le nouvel arbitrage « structural » attendu entre les deux histoires des sciences et de la philosophie, le rodage de l’idée de classe de systèmes entre annonce (...) et rejet de l’« intuitionnisme » ultérieur. (shrink)

We do many things with words. We describe, we plan and promise, we invite and command, we hint and intimate. We also use words to wound – to demean, insult, and exclude. The fact that words can have such potent, pernicious effects is puzzling, because they are, after all, just words. As the schoolyard chant goes, “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.” Words do hurt though–not only our feelings, but our social status, even (...) our basic dignity as human beings. How can sounds and shapes do all that? Many philosophers have thought of language as a kind of game. Both games and language are complex, abstract structures that we deploy strategically to achieve serious goals, as well as for fun. Thinking through some of these similarities can illuminate how something so intangible can have such powerful effects, and seeing how people wield that power for malicious ends can reveal how to turn the tables and fight back. (shrink)

Philosophers have long debated the relative priority of thought and language, both at the deepest level, in asking what makes us distinctively human, and more superficially, in explaining why we find it so natural to communicate with words. The “linguistic turn” in analytic philosophy accorded pride of place to language in the order of investigation, but only because it treated language as a window onto thought, which it took to be fundamental in the order of explanation. The Chomskian linguistic program (...) tips the balance further toward language, by construing the language faculty as an independent, distinctively human biological mechanism. Devitt (Ignorance of language. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2006) attempts to swing the pendulum back toward the other extreme, by proposing that thought itself is fundamentally sentential, and that there is little or nothing for language to do beyond reflecting the structure and content of thought. I argue that both thought and language involve a greater diversity of function and form than either the Chomskian model or Devitt’s antithesis acknowledge. Both thought and language are better seen as complex, mutually supporting suites of interacting abilities. (shrink)

Entre la première philosophie cavaillésienne de « l’expérience mathématique » et son réexamen au sein de l’œuvre posthume (Sur la logique et la théorie de la science), nous suggérons qu’il existe une différence radicale de statut, qui différencie de l’intérieur la philosophie du concept de celle de l’œuvre publiée. Le sens testamentaire du livre posthume comme sa conclusion hégélienne tiennent à cette différence. Le nouveau cadre construit pour la philosophie mathématique est celui d’un « Traité de logique », qui prend (...) la forme d’une histoire orientée par l’exigence de reconstruire le lien de la logique avec l’ontologie, alors que la première philosophie pouvait, à son niveau, sembler ignorer, ou même écarter cette exigence. Cette histoire de la logique n’annonce pas plus qu’elle n’offre la construction d’une dialectique identifiable à celle que Cavaillès avait d’abord reconnue dans la nécessité de l’expérience mathématique. Ses étapes, non chronologiquement ordonnées, sont celles de la préparation effective d’un passage de la conscience au concept en tant que principes de la doctrine de la science. Ce passage n’est pas un passage nécessité par la préexistence de contradictions à dépasser et la libre et créative réponse qu’elles demandent à la pensée humaine en mathématiques ; il est celui qui anime le libre choix de chercher, dans une Logique entendue comme théorie des formes de l’être, la liberté créatrice qui est définitoire de la pensée en tant que telle. (shrink)

Condillac a tenu à souligner l’originalité radicale de la thèse défendue dans l’ Essai au sujet du statut des signes dans leur rapport originaire à la pensée. Il la maintiendra jusque dans l’ Art de penser inchangée malgré de profonds remaniements intervenus avec le Traité des sensations quant au contenu de cette interaction, que sa Grammaire et sa Logique lui semblent avoir pourtant « achevé de démontrer ». Ce statut des signes se trouve soumis à la critique dès les Lettres (...) à Gabriel Cramer. Condillac y répond à une question concernant la prérogative des signes arbitraires sur les signes naturels par rapport à la maîtrise de nos opérations de pensée. Et il y voit une objection formelle au caractère « embrouillé » de cette origine, une difficulté de fond qu’il n’avait pas prévenue, et enfin « le point le plus délicat de mon système sur la nécessité absolue des signes ». On peut supposer 1) que cette difficulté est liée à, mais distincte de la question formelle, comme des difficultés de contenu qu’y voit alors Condillac travaillant à son Traité des sensations, 2) que ce « point le plus délicat » ne s’éclaire et ne se spécifie qu’au regard de l’arrière-plan leibnizo-wolffien commun à Condillac, Cramer et Mlle Ferrand, et 3) n’est surmonté que par l’évocation de quelques références absentes de l’ Essai, à la Grammaire de Du Marsais dans l’ Encyclopédie et à la méthode de l’Abbé de l’Épée, comme exemples de la méthode analytique mise au service d’une genèse naturelle des signes artificiels sur le modèle de l’art d’une Nature qui commence tout en nous à notre insu. Ainsi s’achève bien le système « démontré » d’une présupposition mutuelle de la Nature et de l’Art, dont le premier ouvrage avait offert l’essai inaugural. (shrink)

Die Autorin befürwortet eine Vertiefung des Übertragungsgeschehens auch dann, wenn nur eine Therapiestunde pro Woche zur Verfügung steht. Ein emotionales Sich-Verankern im Raum wird als hilfreiche Vertiefung im einstündigen Setting beschrieben, und die Intellektualisierung (als Abwehr des emotionalen Sich-Verankerns) wird diskutiert. Zunächst eher im Metaphorischen angesiedelt und spontan mit der einstündigen Therapie einer intellektuell eingeschränkten jungen Patientin assoziiert, untersucht die Autorin ihre These in der Folge – mithilfe einschlägiger Literatur und anhand weiteren Fallmaterials – auf einer konzeptuellen Ebene.

La Correspondance publiée entre Tracy et Maine de Biran présente un intérêt de premier plan pour l'interprétation de l'œuvre des Idéologues, dont elle permet de saisir le mouvement constitutif en un point particulièrement significatif, celui qui précède immédiatement l'éclatement du mouvement, et la rupture de Biran avec ses maîtres. Dans une première partie on trace les étapes principales de l'échange des idées, sur la question centrale du jugement; on cherche ensuite à en cerner l'incidence sur le problème idéologique du jugement (...) dont Biran offre une variante devenue incompatible avec l'entreprise plusieurs fois reprise de Condillac d'un « nouveau Traité des sensations »; enfin, l'aspect logique du problème du jugement met à découvert l'enjeu de cet échange de lettres et les limites indépassables qui se trouvent par là même éclairées, d'une Idéologie comme philosophie critique de la sensibilité exprimée dans les formes du langage. (shrink)