Quantified NPs in questions may lead to an interpretation in which the NP quantifies into the question. Which dish did every guest bring? can be understood as: 'For every guest x: which dish did x bring?'. After a review of previous approaches that tried to capture this quantification formally or to explain it away, it is argued that such readings involve quantification into speech acts. As the algebra of speech acts is more limited than a Boolean algebra – it only (...) contains conjunction, not disjunction or negation – it is predicted that only universal quantifiers can scope out of questions or other speech acts. The approach is extended to indirect questions, which either are embedded speech acts or coerced to denote the true answers, depending on the embedding verb; in the latter case a Boolean structure results, and we find wide-scope readings of non-universal quantifiers. (shrink)

Given the beginnings of the United States of America, its sympathy with the French revolution and its rationalist attitude towards the institutions of society, one would have expected that it would have been one of the first nations to adopt the new metric system that was introduced in France in 1800. But the history of the attempts to do so is decidedly mixed. American Congress authorized the use of the metric system in 1866. In 1959, American measurements were defined in (...) relation to the metric system. In 1968, the government ordered a study which was published three years later under the title “A Metric America: A Decision Whose Time Has Come”. The year 1975 then saw the Metric Conversion Act, leading to the establishment of the US Metric Board. Amended in 1988, it resulted in the Metric Program, an organization founded to support the various federal agencies, which are required since 1991 to file an annual report on their efforts to change to the metric system. (shrink)

The paper explains response particles like yes and no as anaphoric elements that pick up propositional discourse referents that are introduced by preceding sentences. It is argued that negated antecedent clauses introduce two propositional discourse referents, which results in ambiguities of answers that are partly resolved by pragmatic optimization. The paper also discusses response particles like okay, right, uh-huh, uh-uh, and German ja, nein and doch.

In the logical, philosophical and linguistic literature, a number of theoretical frameworks have been proposed for the meaning of questions (see Ginzburg (1995), Groenendijk & Stokhof (1997) for recent overviews). I will concentrate on two general approaches that figured prominently in linguistic semantics, which I will call the proposition set approach and the structured meaning approach (sometimes called the “propositional” and the “categorial” or “functional” approach). I will show that the proposition set approach runs into three problems: It does not (...) always predict the right focus structure in answers, it is unable to distinguish between polarity (yes/no) and a certain type of alternative questions, and it does not allow to formulate an important condition for a type of multiple constituent questions. On the other hand, I will show that the main argument brought forward against the structured meaning framework, namely that it does not give us an elegant way to account for embedded questions, does not withstand closer scrutiny. In this I will take up an issue raised in von Stechow (1990), namely, that the greater expressive power of the structured meaning approach might be necessary for the proper treatment of semantic phenomena like question formation and focusation. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, Dieter Henrich wrote an influential little text on ‘Fichte’s Origi­nal Insight’. Seldom so much food for thought has been put in a nutshell. The essay, bearing such an unremarkable title, delivers a diagnosis of why two hundred years of penetrating thought about the internal structure of subjectivity have ended up so fruitless. Henrich’s point was: Self-consciousness cannot be explained as the result of a higher-order act, bending back upon a first-order one, given that “what reflection finds, must (...) already have been there before” (Novalis). Whereas Henrich’s discovery had some influence in German speaking countries (and was dubbed the ‘Heidelberg School’), it remained nearly unnoticed in the anglophone (and now dominant) philosophical world. This is starting to change, now that a recent view on (self-) consciousness, called ‘self-representationalism’, is beginning to develop and to discover its Heidelbergian roots. (shrink)

The immediate successors of Kant in classical German philosophy considered a subjectivity irreducible to objecthood as the core of personhood. The thesis of an irreducible subjectivity has, after the German idealists, been advocated by the phenomenological movement, as well as by analytical philosophers of self-consciousness such as Hector-Neri Castaneda and Sydney Shoemaker. Their arguments together show that self-consciousness cannot be reduced to a relation whereby a subject grasps itself as an object, but that there must be a core of subjectivity (...) always already familiar with itself before reflection. A number of contemporary accounts of self-consciousness are unaware of these old and new arguments, and flawed in that they do not account for the core 'non-objectal subjectivity' necessary for self-consciousness and. (shrink)

In the 1960s, a school formed in Heidelberg around Dieter Henrich that criticized—with reference to J. G. Fichte—the ‘reflection model’ of self-consciousness according to which self-consciousness consists in a representational relation between two mental states or the self-representation of a mental state. I present a new “Heidelberg perspective” of pre-reflective self-consciousness. According to this new approach, self-consciousness occurs in two varieties which regularly are not sufficiently distinguished: The first variety is egological self-consciousness that exists in connection with the use of (...) concepts. It consists in the consciousness of having an awareness of oneself as the Ego of a conscious state. The second variety is anonymous pre-reflective self-consciousness, which is awareness of consciousness but does not contain egological information. The pre-reflective self-consciousness does not exhibit a subject-object structure and thus cannot be appropriately determined as a representation, self-representation, or even acquaintance relation. Rather, anonymous self-consciousness is characterized by an indistinction of subject and object. However, pre-reflective self-consciousness is the basis of egological self-consciousness. (shrink)

Rhetoric as a persuasive technique, school subject and social practice has determined our literary and social linguistic life since the 5th century BC. Its history is the history of the production of speech under changing social conditions. Rhetoric has managed to re-establish itself as an academic subject at German universities since the 1960s, and today, in our advanced media society, it plays an outstanding role in advertising, sales and the social technology of management. - The Rhetoric Yearbook summarises rhetoric research (...) in Germany and presents new publications in an extended review section. A current bibliography provides information on all German-language publications related to rhetoric.Contributions are published in English, French and German. (shrink)

In the Fall of 2007, ten neuroscientists published a proposal for an interdisciplinary research initiative, the Decade of the Mind, that would focus on four.

Perelman's work has been very influential in various disciplines, among them philosophy, rhetoric and law. Especially the typology of argumentative schemes which he developed together with L. Olbrechts-Tyteca has been considered as an excellent classification of arguments in natural language. There are, however, some weaknesses of this typology which make its application to empirical research quite difficult, namely, the lack of explicitness and the absence of clear criteria of demarcation. Still, the typology is highly relevant for empirical research, if these (...) weaknesses are removed. This is illustrated with an example: the scheme called ‘the division of the whole into its parts’ by Perelman/Olbrechts-Tyteca is described explicitly and then applied to the analysis of a sample of everyday arguments (mostly taken from newspapers). (shrink)

In the development of modern philosophy self-consciousness was not generally or unanimously given important consideration. This was because philosophers such as Descartes, Kant and Fichte thought it served as the highest principle from which we can 'deduce' all propositions that rightly claimed validity. However, the Romantics thought that the consideration of self-consciousness was of the highest importance even when any claim to foundationalism was abandoned. In this respect, Hölderlin and his circle, as well as Novalis and Schleiermacher, thought that self-consciousness, (...) itself, was not a principle but must be ranked on a minor or dependent level, and presupposed the Absolute as a superior but inaccessible condition or ground. This reservation did not hinder them from recognising that the foundationalist Fichte was the first to have shown conclusively that from Descartes, via German Rationalism and British Empiricism, up to Kant, self-consciousness was misconceived of as the result of an act of reflection by which a second-order act bent back upon a first-order act that is identical to itself. This conception entailed circular entanglements and infinite regresses, and was too high a price to pay. Whereas Fichte thought pre-reflexive self-awareness was a philosophical principle, the Romantics and their vehement critic Kierkegaard, abandoned the idea of self-consciousness as a foundational starting point of philosophy. Instead, they founded self-consciousness on transcendent Being, a prior non-conceptual consciousness ('feeling') and reproached Fichte for having fallen back into the repudiated reflection model of self-consciousness. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to connect the current debate on relative truth to the discussions of theories of truth in general, in which the so-called platitudes about truth have recently played a prominent role. Truth-relativists propose adding to the standard truth predicate an argument-place for an extra parameter over and above a possible world and they presume that the predicate that results from this relativization is a truth predicate. Yet this relativization arguably isn't just an innocuous extrapolation of (...) the Lewis-Kaplan line in semantics that naturally conserves the predicate's status as a truth predicate. This status has to be specifically established. I'll discuss arguments to the effect that truth-relativists fail on that score since relative truth doesn't satisfy certain basic platitudes about truth, in particular the Equivalence Schema and the normativity of truth. This suggests that a relativized truth predicate cannot play the role required of a truth predicate. I shall discuss the relativist's defensive strategies in detail, the most promising of which is to claim that it is legitimate to deny the Equivalence Schema by arguing that relativism introduces a revisionary concept of truth and so fundamentally revises semantics. However, I'll point out that solely invoking semantic revision doesn't suffice to justify a denial of the Equivalence Schema and that any further justification of such a denial is ad hoc or question begging. Moreover, I suggest that with respect to the normativity of truth the prospects of truth-relativism are equally dim. (shrink)

Imagine the following situation: an act of violent assault has been committed. And there are only two possible suspects, of which one is a small and weak man and the other a big and strong man. The weak man will plead that he is not strong enough and therefore not likely to have committed the crime, which seems reasonable straight away. But there will also be a loophole for the strong man, as Aristotle tells us, who reports exactly that story (...) in book 2, chapter 24, of his Rhetoric. And he also has a name to assign to the inventor of that kind of argument (1402a17–20):The Art of Corax is composed of this topic. For if a man is not likely to be guilty of what he is accused of, for instance if, being weak, he is .. (shrink)

Over de filosofie van Nietzsche in het kader van drie decennia Nietzsche studies in Puerto Rico.

The paper first presents a short survey of ancient and modern logical, rhetorical and argumentative approaches (e.g. Aristotle, Quintilian, Quine, Anscombre and Ducrot) studying the properties of paradoxical utterances. This survey is followed by a tentative definition of paradoxes as seemingly contradictory utterances triggering conversational implicatures in the sense of Grice. A specific group of paradoxes, namely, persuasive paradoxes, is further characterized by the specific implicatures which they trigger: the implicatures of persuasive paradoxes serve the interest of the (political) speaker (...) because they either convey a sharp criticism of the political opponent(s) or praise the political activities of the speaker in a highly effective way.The second part of the paper takes a corpus of about 80 paradoxical utterances from Cicero's speeches to show how they are used 1. for a devastating criticism of Cicero's political enemies, 2. a milder form of criticism in the case of his friends, when their political activities have failed, 3. a praise of successful policies of Cicero and his political friends and 4. a defense of unsuccessful activities started by Cicero and his friends. (shrink)