The following statement is a report of the Committee on Philosophy in Education of the American Philosophical Association and was approved by the Association's Board of Officers in September, 1959. The Committee was composed of the following: C. W. Hendel, Chairman, H. G. Alexander, R. M. Chisholm, Max Fisch, Lucius Garvin, Douglas Morgan, A. E. Murphy, Charner Perry, and R. G. Turnbull. Primary responsibility for the preparation of this report belonged to a subcommittee composed of Roderick M. Chisholm, Chairman, H. (...) G. Alexander, Lewis Hahn, Paul C. Hayner, and Charles W. Hendel. (shrink)

This argument map reconstructs David Hume's famous skeptical argument in logical form. The argument is open for debate and comments in AGORA-net . Search for map ID 9857.

In this article, I consider the notion of facework in the context of unfinished turns in French conversation. Unfinished turns in French conversation normally occur in the environment of talk that can be characterized as delicate or problematic. They provide a mechanism for dealing with such talk in a way that both manages misalignment and divergence between the participants and minimizes possible threats to the participants' face. They provide a subtle avoidance or minimization mechanism in that they enable the participants (...) to hint at what remains unarticulated, whilst registering enough of the type of actions that they seek to accomplish. I conclude that, although unfinished turns can be seen as one way in which participants engage in facework, their analysis suggests that only an interactional-sequential account reveals the work that they accomplish, and insists upon a conceptualization of face/facework as interactional. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice by Shane J. RalstonPiers H.G. Stephens (bio)Pragmatic Environmentalism: Towards a Rhetoric of Eco-Justice Shane J. Ralston. Leicester, UK: Troubadour Publishing Ltd, 2013. Xxxv + 146 pages.But no word could protect the doctrine from critics so blind to the nature of the enquiry that, when Dr. Schiller speaks of ideas ‘working’ well, the only thing they think of is their immediate workings (...) in the physical environment, their enabling us to make money, or gain some similar ‘practical’ advantage. Ideas do work thus, of course, immediately or remotely; but they work indefinitely inside the mental world also.(James, 1978: 267)Thus wrote an exasperated William James in The Meaning of Truth in 1910, attempting to refute the persistent misunderstanding of classical American pragmatism as being some form of reductive and technocratic epistemological capitalism. A century on and the misunderstandings rather depressingly continue in new contexts, most notably environmental philosophy, and we must ask “Why?” I suspect that this question has several interconnected answers: the popular non-philosophical associations of the word “pragmatism”; the mistaken tendency to equate pragmatism with runaway subjectivism; poorly informed impressions of the pragmatist criteria of “success” [End Page 123] and “workability”; and the misguided common assumptions, popularized in early environmental ethics work, that pragmatist schemes have no room for noninstrumental values (Leiss 1972; Rolston 1989; Hargrove 1989). The last of these continues despite scholarly refutations (Weston 1992; Minteer 2001; McDonald 2004; Stephens 2009 and 2012), and it is possible that a deeper reason for this obdurate resistance to pragmatist persuasion may lie in the philosophical history of persuasiveness itself. For as Shane Ralston observes in this book’s introduction, there is an intimate relationship between pragmatism and rhetoric, one which clashed with emergent Platonic ideas of truth during the very birth pangs of Western philosophy and may thus have led both to “a philosophical prejudice that rhetorical persuasion is inferior to philosophical logic” (xiv) and a related awareness that “the democratic spirit of rhetoric and its moorings in commonsense, everyday experience make it especially compatible with pragmatism” (xiv). Thus the mistaken tendency to equate philosophical pragmatism with the crassly opportunistic or the crudely populist, and the persistent failure to register pragmatist philosophy’s subtleties may well both have their roots in antique rivalries—Plato’s contrast of truth to mere popular opinion and his related condemnation of the Sophist rhetoricians. Ralston’s response to this problem is first to sensibly orientate his pragmatism to the philosophically sophisticated end of the spectrum and then employ it to enrich contemporary theory of rhetoric. He then attempts to demonstrate the potential of the new pragmatic rhetoric in a series of studies of particular areas of environ-mentalist contestation.Ralston’s variety of pragmatism is one that tries to largely eschew the generic popular associations of the word, and he notes the sensible distinction between the classical or paleo-pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey as against the contemporary neo-pragmatism of Rorty and others. Though Ralston claims to “combine elements of both classical pragmatism and neo-pragmatism to highlight how pragmatism improves discursive practice” (xvii), in practice the most significant influence on the work appears to be Dewey, and this paleo-pragmatist reviewer was pleased to see that Ralston tries to avoid the tendency to play up the managerialist aspects of pragmatism in favor of “philosophical pragmatism’s other rich resources” such as “its fallibilism, experimentalism, and meliorism” (xxv). The aim of connecting up these pragmatist resources to rhetoric is to show that “a deeply pragmatic rhetoric, once introduced into environmental communication, has the potential to transform the way environmental activists speak about their [End Page 124] methods and goals, moving them toward what I call a rhetoric of eco-justice” (xxx), a rhetoric which can displace the current focus on value theory because it “offers a superior route toward advancing an agenda that preserves the natural environment and promotes ecological justice” (xxxi).In attempting to demonstrate these declared goals, the main body of the book is organized into five chapters. In Chapter 1, Ralston outlines and distinguishes two environmental rhetorics: a rhetoric of control and a... (shrink)