The fundamental reason for this research study is to point out the challenges encountered by the teachers, students, schools, and parents in facing and handling the oral speech communication subjects during the pandemic. Given that, most of the medium of instruction used is distance learning. It poses issues and concerns on how our respondents dealt with the situation. A descriptive- survey research design was used to obtain themes and phenomena to the questions provided. The questionnaire includes questions that (...) seek to gather information on their basic profile, current experiences, and behavior towards the problem. It was found out that the different problems encountered by the teachers, students, school, and parents include the validity of the issue, the lack of motivation which was a very complicated problem because it deals with emotional readiness and stability, and the difficulty in comprehending the topics of the module because lessons are not explained personally by the teachers. Therefore, oral speech communication requires an in-depth shift of lesson delivery to cater to the needs for improvement. (shrink)

The paper presents two objections against Putnam’s Twin Earth argument, which was intended to secure semantic externalism. I first claim that Putnam’s reasoning rests on two assumptions and then try to show why these assumptions are contentious. The first objection is that, given what we know about science, it is unlikely that there are any natural-kind terms whose extension is codetermined by a small set of microstructures required by Putnam’s indexical account of extension determination. The second objection is that there (...) may not be a plausible concept of a speech community whose adoption would classify Oscar and Twin Oscar as members of different speech communities and, at the same time, render Oscar and Twin Oscar as being in the same psychological state. I contend that Putnam’s argument fails because both objections are justified. (shrink)

Attempts within sociolinguistics to model the African American speech community require a sound account of what a competent participant knows when they give correct interpretations of utterances made within such a community, a phenomenon any larger theory of language use ought to address. To provide this account, I reconstruct a line of argument from the philosophical history of discussions on African American speech communities. I give this history in terms of pragmatic arguments, that is, in terms of the (...) ability of vernacular speakers to manage the "slip" between speaker meaning and conventional meaning so as to effectively communicate, and thus be interpretable to competent auditors. ;In the writings of African American philosophers Alexander Crummell and Alain Locke especially, the general pragmatic strategy is to take the regulative background of speech acts to play a central role in vernacular interpretation, particularly as it relates language use to patterns of interpretation available to a speech community and to communicative aspects of the socialization of members of that community . In terms of meaning, interpretation is seen by Crummell as a function of publicly accessible meaning; he endorses the claim that the content which a word expresses is an idea in the mind of a speaker--what I call the Semantic Identity Thesis. Locke's insight, however, that cognitive meaning and content-bearing linguistic vehicles can be assessed independently provides him with the leverage to treat speaker meaning and symbol meaning as distinct components of a speaker's competence to successfully interpret utterances--what I call the Semantic Distance Thesis. ;Using these accounts to model inferences in communication, I argue that a complete account of interpretation will show how a speaker accesses inferential, conventional and social knowledge. These sorts of knowledge are tied to the prevailing norms emerging from a regulative background for communication within the language use of a speech community. In this way, the slip between conventional meaning and speaker meaning can be understood as structuring the communicative context of vernacular speech, in that social knowledge plays a central role in effective interpretive inference. (shrink)

When a term is used in science, we tend to integrate its origins, functions, and history to see if the term is a scientific one or comes from other fields. The term «empathy» is an example to such a case. This article challenges the widespread view that empathy is the capability of a person to understand emotions and thoughts of others. We will deconstruct the concept of empathy as an academic one by focusing on its limits. We will discuss the (...) possibility of empathy for humans in critically reconstructing the meaning of the word and its meanings from its ancient origins to contemporary research. Our question is centered on cognitive actions that enable empathy as an emotional way of understanding others. Based on our findings, we argue that the concept of empathy is a recently established academic term. As a concept, it matches with some alternative concepts such as apathy and sympathy. In rhetoric, it is the pathos of the speech that affects the speaker by emotions since no specific receptive ability of the speaker is needed. Similarly, when we use the term empathy, we should use it as a category of the sender, not that of the receiver. This concept of logical empathy opposes to the classical view of empathy studies emphasizing that empathy is a receptive category of the receiver. So, empathy is nothing else but the ability to send emotional or intellectual content suitable to a capable receiver. Also, the comparative study in the concept of empathy in Buddhism gives us evidence that empathy is a spiritual or mental concept whose applications are in the area of pre-linguistic states and esoteric contexts. In rhetorical terms we could define it as a persuasive mood of pathos-driven speech. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

This volume unites various contributions reflecting the intellectual interests exhibited by Professor Herman Parret (Institute of Philosophy, Leuven), who has continued to observe, and often critically assess, ongoing developments in pragmatics throughout his career. In fact, Parret's contributions to philosophical and empirical/linguistic pragmatics present substantive proposals in the epistemics of communication, while simultaneously offering meta-comments on the ideological premises of extant pragmatic analyses. In a lengthy introduction, an overview is provided of his achievements in promoting an integrated, "maximalist" pragmatics, (...) as well as of the links between his own work in philosophy of language and in semiotics and aesthetics. The remaining 12 essays address relevant pragmatic themes or look into the relation between pragmatics and neighboring disciplines. They deal with grammatical deixis (Brisard, Ikegami) and mood (van der Auwera & Schalley), performativity (Harnish, Holdcroft), speech-act types and their praxeological dimensions (Roulet, Van Overbeke), Wittgensteinian language games (Marques, Parisi), cultural and intercultural identities (Vandenabeele, Verschueren), and the visual arts (Wildgen). (shrink)

For the past two decades, speech-act theory has been one of the basic tools for studying pragmatics from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. In this paper, I want to discuss certain aspects of the theory with respect to data from early communication in children. My aim will be to show that some of the central assumptions of the speech-act model of utterance comprehension need to be rethought. In the second part of the paper, I will (...) outline a different pragmatic approach to verbal understanding and present a preliminary application of this approach to the developmental data. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough the British Idealists did not provide a systematic account of language as a distinct philosophical phenomenon, language is nonetheless a fundamental element of Idealist social and political philosophy. This is seen mostly in the Idealist treatment of the concept of general will, which resulted in a Hegelian theory of community, constituted by shared understandings and a shared account of the common good and common interest. This article contains analysis of the relations between language and socio-political institutions in British Idealist (...) writings. The narrative focuses on Thomas Hill Green and Bernard Bosanquet – two major political thinkers representing the said philosophical tradition. The argument proceeds as follows: firstly, possible linguistic interpretations of the Idealist philosophical tradition are introduced. Then the author turns to Green’s conception of general will as the foundation of socio-political order and political sovereignty. In the third section, he... (shrink)

This essay offers a liberal, neo-Millian account of free speech, which attempts to fix some familiar bugs in Mill's account of free speech by focusing primarily on the right of free association, together with the permissibility of imposing restrictions to deal with, as Mill put it, ‘violations of good manners’ and ‘offences against decency’. It also uncovers a number of more conceptual puzzles with free speech. These can be resolved, it is contended, by regarding free speech (...) as a practice. (shrink)

The traditional view of symbol grounding seeks to connect an a priori internal representation or ‘form’ to its external referent. But such a ‘form’ is usually itself systematically composed out of more primitive parts, so this view ignores its grounding in the physics of the world. Some previous work simulating multiple talking/listening agents has effectively taken this stance, and shown how a shared discrete speech code can emerge. Taking the earlier work of Oudeyer, we have extended his model to (...) include a dispersive force intended to account broadly for a speaker’s motivation to increase auditory distinctiveness. New simulations show that vowel systems result that are more representative of the range seen in human languages. These simulations make many profound abstractions and assumptions. Relaxing these by including more physically and physiologically realistic mechanisms for talking and listening is seen as the key to replicating more complex and dynamic aspects of speech, such as consonant-vowel patterning. (shrink)

Recent feminist philosophy of language has highlighted the ways that the speech of women can be unjustly impeded, because of the way their gender affects the uptake their speech receives. In this chapter, I explore how similar processes can undermine the speech of a different sort of speaker: Indigenous communities. This involves focusing on Indigeneity rather than gender as the salient social identity, and looking at the ways that group speech, rather than only individual speech, (...) can be unjustly impeded. To do this, I make use of the notion of ‘discursive injustice’ that has been developed by Quill Kukla, and, with reference to three case studies, show how discursive injustice can effectively derail the speech of Indigenous communities. (shrink)

According to Chomsky and his followers, language as a biological phenomenon is a property of individual minds and brains; its status as a social phenomenon is merely epiphenomenal and not a proper object of scientific study. On a rival view, the individual's biological capacity for language cannot be properly understood in isolation from the linguistic environment, which it both depends on for its operation and—in collaboration with other speakers—builds and shapes for future generations. I argue here for the rival view (...) by demonstrating firstly its greater consonance with several themes in current biological theory, and secondly its ability to answer two well‐known philosophical challenges to generative linguistics due to Quine and Kripke. (shrink)

The role of nonverbal communication in patients with post-stroke language impairment (aphasia) is not yet fully understood. This study investigated how aphasic patients perceive and produce co-speech gestures during face-to-face interaction, and whether distinct brain lesions would predict the frequency of spontaneous co-speech gesturing. For this purpose, we recorded samples of conversations in patients with aphasia and healthy participants. Gesture perception was assessed by means of a head-mounted eye-tracking system, and the produced co-speech gestures were coded (...) according to a linguistic classification system. The main results are that meaning-laden gestures (e.g., iconic gestures representing object shapes) are more likely to attract visual attention than meaningless hand movements, and that patients with aphasia are more likely to fixate co-speech gestures overall than healthy participants. This implies that patients with aphasia may benefit from the multimodal information provided by co-speech gestures. On the level of co-speech gesture production, we found that patients with damage to the anterior part of the arcuate fasciculus showed a higher frequency of meaning-laden gestures. This area lies in close vicinity to the premotor cortex and is considered to be important for speech production. This may suggest that the use of meaning-laden gestures depends on the integrity of patients’ speech production abilities. (shrink)

Hate speech is commonly defined with reference to the legal category of incitement. Laws targeting incitement typically focus on how the speech is expressed rather than its actual content. This has a number of unintended consequences: first, law tends to capture overt or obvious forms of hate speech and not hate speech that takes the form of ‘reasoned’ argument, but which nevertheless, causes as much, if not more harm. Second, the focus on form rather than content (...) leads to categorization errors. Hate speech taking the form of ‘reasoned argument’ is often legally characterized as either political or academic debate, and so is deemed both permissible and justified in societies where free speech principles exist. In this paper, I argue that it is important to identify instances of hate speech as hate speech, no matter how articulately or reasonably the speech is expressed. The danger in mischaracterizing an instance of hate speech by calling it academic or political debate is that it risks normalizing the views and sentiments that are expressed and accepting those views as an important part of our political and academic discourses. With reference to Habermas’ account of ‘distorted communication’, I propose different criteria for defining and understanding hate speech and suggest that there might be good reasons for interpreting the concept of incitement more broadly, so as to include these different kinds of it. (shrink)

This book traces the emergence of abstract philosophical thought from the concrete concerns of everyday speech. Studies of Plato and Hegel illustrate the fruits of reflection as well as the perils of alienation that are attached to abstract thought. The book's central concern is the future of philosophy, or what one ought to do to pursue wisdom. Unlike many books which share the same concern, this book returns to the roots of philosophy in search of clues to how to (...) go on. Written in a straightforward style, minimizing the need for technical jargon, this book should be of interest to anyone perplexed about the nature and aims of the philosophical vocation. (shrink)

Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) has grown considerably over the past three decades. One form of SRI, engagement-SRI, is today by far the most practiced form of SRI (in assets managed) and has the potential to mainstream SRI even further. However, lack of formalized engagement procedures and evaluation tools leave the engagement practice too opaque for such a mainstreaming. This article can be considered as a first step in the development of a standard for the engagement practice. By developing an engagement (...) heuristic, this article offers a more transparent engagement dialog. Drawing on Stevenson’s and Austin’s speech-act theories, this article develops a classification of management’s responses to the signaling of allegations and controversies on two dimensions: a factual dimension concerning (dis)agreements on factual claims and an attitudinal dimension concerning (dis)agreements on responsibilities, values, and norms. On the basis of the distinctions this article develops, the authors provide for a synoptic table and offer a next-step heuristic for the engagement process that started with signaling a concern to management. The article uses an engagement logic that, while keeping the exit option for the investor open, allows management to address signaled concerns without having to let down or to opt out at the first setback in the dialog process between investor and investee corporation. (shrink)

What does mean in constitutional First Amendment law and in ordinary language and the philosophy of language? Under what circumstances does intentional action count as speech? Can communication be unintentional? And what follows (in law) from the fact that almost any action can be made expressive?

-/- Hate speech is a concept that many people find intuitively easy to grasp, while at the same time many others deny it is even a coherent concept. A majority of developed, democratic nations have enacted hate speech legislation—with the contemporary United States being a notable outlier—and so implicitly maintain that it is coherent, and that its conceptual lines can be drawn distinctly enough. Nonetheless, the concept of hate speech does indeed raise many difficult questions: What does (...) the ‘hate’ in hate speech refer to? Can hate speech be directed at dominant groups, or is it by definition targeted at oppressed or marginalized communities? Is hate speech always ‘speech’? What is the harm or harms of hate speech? And, perhaps most challenging of all, what can or should be done to counteract hate speech? -/- In part because of these complexities, hate speech has spawned a vast and interdisciplinary literature. Legal scholars, philosophers, sociologists, anthropologists, political theorists, historians, and other academics have each approached the topic with exceeding interest. In this current article, however, we cannot hope to cover how these many disciplines have engaged with the concept of hate speech. Here, we will focus most explicitly on how hate speech has been taken up within philosophy, with particular emphasis on issues such as: how to define hate speech; what are the plausible harms of hate speech; how an account of hate speech might include both overt expressions of hate (e.g., the vitriolic use of slurs) as well as more covert, implicit utterances (e.g., dogwhistles); the relationship between hate speech and silencing; and what might we do to counteract hate speech. (shrink)

The issue of advocacy has dominated discussion of the ethical dilemmas facing nurses. However, despite this, nurses seem to be no further towards a solution of how they can be effective advocates for patients without compromising their working identity or facing conflicts of loyalty. This article considers some of the problems around advocacy and, by the use of critical incidents written by nurses involved in a diploma module, attempts to highlight where the problem could lie. A communications model is outlined, (...) using a theoretical framework taken from the work of Jürgen Habermas, and applied to nursing practice. Finally, two examples are given from the research, which illustrate how the model could be used, highlighting the problems and pitfalls that still have to be overcome. The conclusion is a positive one, in that it suggests that advocacy is possible if nurses re-examine their practice in the light of the model proposed. (shrink)

The close connection between language and ideology has long been a recurring subject of study among linguists. Politicians often rely on language manipulation to convey specific messages, discussing topics that seem familiar but may not be fully understood by the audience. This study uses critical discourse analysis to identify the presuppositions and entailments, and thus the ideology, in a speech delivered by the Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi. The speech is an appeal from Modi to the (...) people of India. A closer examination reveals that Prime Minister Modi employed various persuasive strategies to achieve political and ideological goals. The analysis of the selected speech of Shri Narendra Modi for Swachh Bharat mission on Independence Day establishes the social practises followed and the text that influences the people to bring changes in our society. The level of text and the level of context is analysed for linguistic analysis in six categories like phonology, syntax, semantics, conceptual, belief and para linguistics. (shrink)

Language is nothing but human subjects in as much as they speak, say and know. Language is something coming from the inside of the speaking subject manifest in the intentional meaningful purpose of the individual speaker. A language, on the contrary, is something coming from the outside, from the speech community, something offered to the speaking subject from the tradition in the technique of speaking. The speech act is the performance of an intuition by the subject, both individual (...) and social. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2015 Heft: 204 Seiten: 173-237.

Speech acts are a staple of everyday communicative life, but only became a topic of sustained investigation, at least in the English-speaking world, in the middle of the Twentieth Century.[1] Since that time “speech act theory” has been influential not only within philosophy, but also in linguistics, psychology, legal theory, artificial intelligence, literary theory and many other scholarly disciplines.[2] Recognition of the importance of speech acts has illuminated the ability of language to do other things than describe (...) reality. In the process the boundaries among the philosophy of language, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind and even ethics have become less sharp. In addition, an appreciation of speech acts has helped lay bare an implicit normative structure within linguistic practice, including even that part of this practice concerned with describing reality. Much recent research aims at an accurate characterization of this normative structure underlying linguistic practice. (shrink)

Socially Responsible Investment (SRI) has grown considerably over the past three decades. One form of SRI, engagement-SRI, is today by far the most practiced form of SRI (in assets managed) and has the potential to mainstream SRI even further. However, lack of formalized engagement procedures and evaluation tools leave the engagement practice too opaque for such a mainstreaming. This article can be considered as a first step in the development of a standard for the engagement practice. By developing an engagement (...) heuristic, this article offers a more transparent engagement dialog. Drawing on Stevenson's and Austin's speech-act theories, this article develops a classification of management's responses to the signaling of allegations and controversies on two dimensions: a factual dimension concerning (dis)agreements on factual claims and an attitudinal dimension concerning (dis)agreements on responsibilities, values, and norms. On the basis of the distinctions this article develops, the authors provide for a synoptic table and offer a next-step heuristic for the engagement process that started with signaling a concern to management. The article uses an engagement logic that, while keeping the exit option for the investor open, allows management to address signaled concerns without having to let down or to opt out at the first setback in the dialog process between investor and investee corporation. (shrink)

How do Language communities generate rules and norms of behavior? How do those norms and rules impact on interpersonal communication and on the Construction of organisations? Such communication implies the testing and comparison of narratives seen as relevant for problem solving in organisations. The Research suggests that reflection rooms are created when persons come together to find responses to Challenges (Called gaps in decision making in Searles Rationality in Action from 2001). The book investigates struggles of narratives over (...) time in the Development of Norwegian fisheries in the 20th Century, testing the relation between the horisontal institution of Language against the hierarchical organization of practical collective activities, in general and in practice in fisheries. (shrink)

Onboard international flights, you may have witnessed the pre-takeoff information/in-flight safety speech by the cabin crew. It is not out of place that they tend to be European in their mode of speaking. However, when on a local flight, the Europeanness of speech still comes out loud. We want to understand why such Europeanised intonation should be and the audience it is meant to serve. Our research leads us to the conclusion that this insensitivity of local airline operators (...) stems from the desire to enjoy some patronage even if their actions inferiorise the community who are the major patronisers of their services. We will also explain why the Europeanisation of speech could lead to safety hazards. This work is inspired by the personal experiences of the researchers and of a few others. (shrink)

Agent Communication Languages (ACLs) have recently acquired a primary role in open multiagent systems, which need a standard communication framework shared by all interacting heterogeneous agents. According to the most important ACL standard proposals so far, agents are supposed to carry out the communication process by performing actions of a specific type, namely, communicative acts, whose semantics is defined in terms of the agents’ mental states. Although following the mainstream guidelines inspired by the Speech Act Theory, (...) our work illustrates an alternative model of agent communication, by shifting the focus from agents’ mental states to their social state. Taking an existing communicative act library, we provide a semantics for a significant set of acts based on the concept of commitment, and prove that our approach tackles some issues that have not been dealt with in an effective way yet and that may have hindered the rise of an universally accepted ACL standard. (shrink)

A brain-computer interface technology that can decode the neural signals associated with attempted but unarticulated speech could offer a future efficient means of communication for people with severe motor impairments. Recent demonstrations have validated this approach. Here we assume that it will be possible in future to decode imagined (i.e., attempted but unarticulated) speech in people with severe motor impairments, and we consider the characteristics that could maximize the social utility of a BCI for communication. As (...) a social interaction, communication involves the needs and goals of both speaker and listener, particularly in contexts that have significant potential consequences. We explore three high-consequence legal situations in which neurally-decoded speech could have implications:Testimony, where decoded speech is used as evidence;Consent and Capacity, where it may be used as a means of agency and participation such as consent to medical treatment; andHarm, where such communications may be networked or may cause harm to others. We then illustrate how design choices might impact the social and legal acceptability of these technologies. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPrevious accounts of International Relations research have extensively focused on deontological ethics in analysing Responsibility to Protect. At the same time, discourse ethics – alo...

Speech acts have sometimes been considered as unembeddable, for principled reasons. In this paper, I argue that speech acts can be embedded under certain circumstances. In particular, I consider denegation and conjunction of speech acts, quantification into speech acts, conditionalization of speech acts, the embedding of speech acts by verbs like say and wonder, speechact-modifying adverbials like frankly, clauses commenting on speech acts, like certain uses of because-clauses, parentheticals, and appositive relative clauses. A (...) crucial distinction is made between speech acts and speech act potentials, linguistic objects that can be used to perform speech acts when applied in a specific communicative situation. I develop a semantic theory in which speech act potentials are captured as semantic functions that change a world-time index, reflecting the nature of speech acts as events that happen in the world. As index changers, speech act potentials become nearly regular semantic objects, with a proper semantic type on which other semantic objects can operate on. In this way, speech acts (or rather, speech-act potentials) become part of the recursive structure of language. (shrink)

Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. (...) On this account then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

Argues that rebuilding ethical communities will require a cultural reorientation from visually dominated to oral/aural experience and develops a speech-based conception of moral place that can set limits on the actions of individuals and communities.