This paper explores Stanley Cavell’s notion of ‘passionate utterance’, which acts as an extension of/departure from (we might read it as both) J. L. Austin’s theory of the performative. Cavell argues that Austin having made the revolutionary discovery that truth claims in language are bound up with how words perform, then gets bogged by convention when discussing what is done ‘by’ words. In failing to account for the less predictable, unconventional aspects of language, the latter therefore washes his hands of (...) the expressive passionate aspects of speech. To ignore such aspects is to ignore an important moral dimension of language. Finally, I bring Cavell’s approach to bear on the epistemic criterion, which Michael Hand applies in his paper ‘Should We Teach Homosexuality as a Controversial Issue?’. I suggest that Hand’s approach, by failing to account for the linguistic dimension of truth and the expressive quality that accompanies this dimension, presents an overly narrow conception of moral education. (shrink)

Critical Discourse Analysis, or more popularly known as CDA, reflects the trend on the investigation of ideology and power struggle that is implied in the text and sound of discourse and language. With Norman Fairclough and the group in Lancaster University as the leading theorists of this discipline, this paper deals on extracting the very foundation of its theoretical claims in hope of unearthing the rich philosophical ideations and nuances that may have contributed towards its creation and formation through the (...) years. In this way, this would not only expose its philosophical framework but also would provide its readers and its practitioners a theoretical base and scope of related disciplines for the furthering of their interests and practices. This diachronic sketch legitimizes the claims of CDA as it rests on the more popular and stable conceptual skeleton of the major prominent thinkers of critical theory, poststructuralism, and postmodernism. (shrink)

That uses of language not only can, but even normally do, have the character of actions was a fact largely unrealised by those engaged in the study of language before the present century, at least in the sense that there was lacking any attempt to come to terms systematically with the action-theoretic peculiarities of language use. Where the action-character of linguistic phenomena was acknowledged, it was normally regarded as a peripheral matter, relating to derivative or nonstandard aspects of language which (...) could afford to be ignored. (shrink)

Deliberation often begins with the question ‘What do I want to do?’ rather than the question of what one ought to do. This paper takes that question at face value, as a question about which of one’s desires is strongest, which sometimes guides action. The paper aims to explain which properties of a desire make that desire strong, in the sense of ‘strength’ relevant to this deliberative question. Both motivational force and phenomenological intensity seem relevant to a desire’s strength; however, (...) accounting for the strength of a desire in these terms opens up significant indeterminacy about what we want. The paper argues that this indeterminacy is often resolved simply by posing the question ‘What do I want to do?’ to oneself: there is reason to believe that one’s answer will play a verdictive role, partially determining what the agent most wants. Self-reflective beliefs can play a self-fulfilling role, and surprisingly this seems to follow from basic platitudes about the belief-desire model. (shrink)

The communication process is analysed on the basis of the notions of trust and agency. The aim of the paper is to clarify the role played by causality on the one hand and the role played by logical consequences of assumptions about trust in information sources on the other hand. The first part is informal and the second part refers to the logical framework of modal logic though it requires a quite limited background in this area.

Interaction between adults and infants by nature constitutes a strong powerasymmetry relationship. Based on the assumption that communicative practices with infants are inseparably intertwined with broader cultural ideologies of good child care, this paper will contrast how parents in two distinct socio-cultural communities deal with power asymmetry in interactions with 3-months old infants. The study consists of a microanalysis of videotaped free play mother-infant interactions from 20 middle class families in Muenster, Germany and 20 traditional farming Nso families in Kikaikelaki, (...) Cameroon. Analysis followed a discursive psychology approach. The focus of analysis is on how mothers handle and negotiate power-distance in these interactions and what discursive strategies they draw on. Mothers in both groups used various forms of directives and control strategies. The Muenster mothers, however, mainly used mitigated directives that can be seen as strategies to reduce the competence gap between mother and child, while the Nso mothers mainly used upgraded directives to stress the hierarchical discrepancy between mother and child. The different strategies are discussed in light of the prevailing broader cultural ideologies and the normative orientations that they reflect. Finally, the findings are discussed with regard to possible developmental consequences of these distinct cultural practices for the child. Keywords: power-asymmetry; mother-infant interaction; discursive psychology; culture; Nso farmers; Muenster middle class families. (shrink)

By applying diverse approaches to study the Aztec gods, light can be shed on different aspects of their personalities. In this article the cognitive theory of conceptual blending, developed by Fauconnier and Turner, is applied. In this perspective the functioning of the human mind is viewed as being grounded on the constant blending of mental spaces, a process that, in turn, makes new mental spaces emerge. After briefly reviewing the attempts to apply this theory to the ritual domain in general, (...) I consider two types of Aztec rituals, one dedicated to the rain god Tlaloc, and the other to Xochiquetzal, the goddess of seduction. I show the importance of the compression of time in the blending process that condenses three moments: mythical time, ritual time and the immediate future. The capability of the gods to subvert the lineal passage of time and to compress past, present and future stands out as a one of the chief characteristics highlighting the advantages found by applying Blending-Theory. (shrink)

Reporting on a study of activists living with HIV/AIDS who give testimonials of their experiences with the disease in various educational settings, this article employs the notion of 'haunting' as a means of analyzing the effect of social justice activism in the "aftermath" of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Because of a shift in both the discursive construction of AIDS and the material symptoms of the disease (due to widespread availability of anti-retroviral medication), the signified of AIDS is "out of joint" with (...) the signification of the disease in the public sphere. AIDS, as a social phenomena and a personal, traumatic experience has been rendered spectral through processes of social othering, structural disenfranchisement, and cultural denialism. Most of the presenters included in this study utilize a strategy of "survivorhood" in order to promote prevention and combat stigma. In doing so, they inadvertently buttress dominant discourses that claim that the disease is now "manageable," normalized, and under control. By contrast, one presenter utilizes a completely different performative approach. In order to confront and subvert the "aftermath" discourse and thereby presence the living trauma of AIDS, this presenter embodies the specter of AIDS. As such, his presentation forces the audience to reckon with processes of social exclusion and cultural otherness. (shrink)

This paper operates on the premise that a systematic formulation of ‘radicality’ is a worthwhile and potentially productive exercise within political theory. However, I argue that one continues to find a latent ‘purism’ within contemporary understandings of ‘radicality’, primarily in relation to feminism, but also elsewhere. This manifests itself in the tendency to think ‘radicality’ as a function of the inherent properties of particular types of political spaces and political practices. Within feminism, for example, I argue that the ‘radicality’ of (...) a feminist politics is thought in terms of the extent to which it adheres to a specifically ‘1970s’ feminist model of autonomous mobilization. This perspective suffers from a number of conceptual problems, necessitating a formulation of a more dynamic view of radicality with which to evaluate contemporary political practices. To this end, I seek to cast radicality as a function of equivalence (drawn from Ernesto Laclau) and (especially) imagination drawn from Linda Zerilli's Arendtian-inflected feminist theory. Thinking radicality in these terms, I argue, avoids the latent purism of many existing approaches while enabling a critical engagement sensitive to the context of the practice under investigation. (shrink)

This paper presents the notion that verbal discourse is structured, in form and contents, by metaphorical reasoning. It discusses the concept of “metaphorical network” as a framework for relating the parts of a speech act to each other, since such an act seems to cohere into a meaningful text on the basis of “domains” that deliver common concepts. The basic finding of several research projects on this concept suggest that source domains allow speakers to derive sense from a verbal interaction (...) because they interconnect the topic of discussion to culturally-meaningful images and ideas. This suggests, in turn, that language is intertwined with nonverbal systems of meaning, reflecting them in the contents of verbal messages. Overall, the concept of metaphorical networks implies that human cognition is highly associative in structure. (shrink)

This article tries to bring out the implication of Cavell’s critical comments on Derrida, clustered around Cavell’s charge that deconstruction entails a flight from the ordinary. Cavell’s and Derrida’s different readings of Austin’s ordinary language philosophy provide a common ground for elaborating their respective positions. Their writings are at once the closest but also the most divergent when addressing the moral implication of speech, or more precisely, when addressing their understanding of responsibility and voice. Employing Derrida’s so-called ‘double reading’ as (...) a leitmotif will not only shed light on the moral dimension of deconstruction, but also bring the central target of Cavell’s critique into the open. (shrink)

In this paper, I will explore the concept that healing activities shape the objects of therapy and seek to construct those objects through therapeutic activities. Objects of therapy are the persons, patients, human bodies, diseases, physiological processes and personal suffering—that which clinical medicine constructs through its distinctive formative processes, practices and knowledge. The rationale for choice of philosophical sources namely, Cassirer, Foucault, the anthropological perspective of Good and the sociological account of Frank will be discussed. The claim articulated by Good (...) will be examined and its relationship to culture, illness, medical knowledge, practice, truth, and science. I then focus on Frank's concepts of the patient and the body and how medical knowledge and practices affects it. The concept that the medicalization of the illness narrative silences the patient's voice requiring an ethic of listening will be emphasized, described and further supported by Charon's (2006, Narrative medicine: Honoring the stories of illness. New York, NY: Oxford University Press) and Cassell's (2015, The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine. New York, NY: Oxford University Press) thoughts on narrative of illness in clinical medicine. My position concludes that healing activities construct the objects of therapy: as the medical culture's way of seeking truth; as medicine's way of mediating and organizing forms of reality through culture and symbolic forms; and, as medicine's way of entering the body and constructing the disease. Lastly, I suggest that in spite of the remarkable progress in the control of disease, the failure to address the interpretation of illness meanings is a fundamental flaw in the work of “doctoring.” The experience and meanings of illness are at the centre of clinical practice and is a moral, political, ethical and professional obligation. The person is a cultural construct, a complex and culturally shaped way of experiencing self and other, and cultural “work” is required to constitute the person who is the object of medical attention and it also necessitates the ethic of listening. (shrink)

Received approaches to a unified phenomenon called “language” are firmly committed to a Cartesian view of distinct unobservable minds. Questioning this commitment leads us to recognize that the boundaries conventionally separating the linguistic from the non-linguistic can appear arbitrary, omitting much that is regularly present during vocal communication. The thesis is put forward that uttering, or voicing, is a much older phenomenon than the formal structures studied by the linguist, and that the voice has found elaborations and codifications in other (...) domains too, such as in systems of ritual and rite. Voice, it is suggested, necessarily gives rise to a temporally bound subjectivity, whether it is in inner speech (Descartes' “cogito”), in conversation, or in the synchronized utterances of collective speech found in prayer, protest, and sports arenas world wide. The notion of a fleeting subjective pole tied to dynamically entwined participants who exert reciprocal influence upon each other in real time provides an insightful way to understand notions of common ground, or socially shared cognition. It suggests that the remarkable capacity to construct a shared world that is so characteristic of Homo sapiens may be grounded in this ability to become dynamically entangled as seen, e.g., in the centrality of joint attention in human interaction. Empirical evidence of dynamic entanglement in joint speaking is found in behavioral and neuroimaging studies. A convergent theoretical vocabulary is now available in the concept of participatory sense-making, leading to the development of a rich scientific agenda liberated from a stifling metaphysics that obscures, rather than illuminates, the means by which we come to inhabit a shared world. (shrink)

This article aims to disrupt received views about the significance of J. L. Austin's contribution to philosophy of language. Its focus is Austin's 1955 lectures How To Do Things With Words . Commentators on the lectures in both philosophical and literary-theoretical circles, despite conspicuous differences, tend to agree in attributing to Austin an assumption about the relation between literal meaning and truth, which is in fact his central critical target. The goal of the article is to correct this misunderstanding and (...) to show that Austin is deeply critical of a picture of correspondence between language and the world which nearly half a century after he delivered his lectures continues to structure philosophical discussions of language. (shrink)

In spite of its commercial importance and signs of clear concern in public policy arenas, trade credit has not been subjected to systematic, extended analysis in the business ethics literature, even where suppliers as a stakeholder group have been considered. This paper makes the case for serious consideration of the ethics of trade credit and explores the issues surrounding slow payment of debts. It discusses trade debt as a kind of promise, but—noting that not all promises are good ones—goes on (...) to develop an analysis of the ethics of trade credit grounded in an understanding of its fundamental purpose. Making a distinction between “operating” trade credit and “financial” trade credit, the paper provides an account of the maximum period for which it is appropriate for one company to delay payment to another from which it has purchased goods or services. The concern of commentators and policy makers that companies should not take too long to pay their debts is affirmed, but the understanding of what timely payment means is significantly finessed, with one conclusion being that, if debts have not already been settled according to acceptable standard terms of trade, cash should pass quickly back along the supply chain once the customer in the final product market has paid. The analysis has implications not only for companies that take credit but also for external parties that seek to rate companies or set regulations according to speed of payment—an approach that is shown to be misleadingly simplistic, albeit well intentioned. A corresponding important responsibility for suppliers, not to extend excessive credit, also follows from the analysis developed. Having provided a novel analysis of an important business problem, the paper then discusses some of the related practical issues and makes suggestions for further research. (shrink)

In a recent thought-provoking piece, Peter Roberts argues against the central role of happiness as a guiding concept in education, and argues for more attention to be paid to despair. This does not mean cultivating despair in young people, but allowing them to make sense of their own natural occasional despair, as well as the despair of others. I agree with Roberts about happiness, and about the need for more attention to despair, but I argue that focusing too much on (...) despair is dangerous without paying simultaneous attention to goodness. Roberts argues that students must be helped to face the despair born of the realisation that we can never be sure of the moral grounds on which our actions are based, we can never fully know ourselves, and that education should make us more appreciative of what we don't know. I argue against all three claims: there are some moral truths that we can know; we can know enough of ourselves in certain contexts; education should not only teach intellectual humility, it should also give us confidence in appreciating the sources of meaning that are ordinarily available, e.g. personal relationships. The paper concludes with a response to the objection that my position is little more than old-fashioned moralism and conservatism. (shrink)

In a recent thought-provoking piece, Peter Roberts argues against the central role of happiness as a guiding concept in education, and argues for more attention to be paid to despair. This does not mean cultivating despair in young people, but allowing them to make sense of their own natural occasional despair, as well as the despair of others. I agree with Roberts about happiness, and about the need for more attention to despair, but I argue that focusing too much on (...) despair is dangerous without paying simultaneous attention to goodness. Roberts argues that students must be helped to face the despair born of the realisation that we can never be sure of the moral grounds on which our actions are based, we can never fully know ourselves, and that education should make us more appreciative of what we don't know. I argue against all three claims: there are some moral truths that we can know; we can know enough of ourselves in certain contexts; education should not only teach intellectual humility, it should also give us confidence in appreciating the sources of meaning that are ordinarily available, e.g. personal relationships. The paper concludes with a response to the objection that my position is little more than old-fashioned moralism and conservatism. (shrink)

This essay defends the possibility of preemptive forgiving, that is, forgiving before the offending action has taken place. This essay argues that our moral practices and emotions admit such a possibility, and it attempts to offer examples to illustrate this phenomenon. There are two main reasons why someone might doubt the possibility of preemptive forgiving. First, one might think that preemptive forgiving would amount to granting permission. Second, one might think that forgiving requires emotional content that is not available prior (...) to wrongdoing. If, however, preemptively forgiving is genuinely possible—as this essay hopes to illustrate—then this fact has implications for our understanding of both relational normativity and the nature of forgiveness. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the viability of accounting for presumptions as a subtype of verdictives, within the framework of the Austinian approach to speech acts. The available set of felicity conditions is examined and worked out, in order to try and account in particular for a main feature of presumptions, namely, their function in shifting the burden of proof. In order to extend the Austinian framework as required, the notion of pragmatic presupposition accommodation is shown to (...) be a useful device. (shrink)

This essay provides a critical philosophical assessment of “offensiphobia,” which is the belief that higher educational academic freedom ought to be to some important extent censured because of the mere offensiveness of certain kinds of expressions, whether those expressions are perceived as being racist, sexist, etc., effectively holding that the offensiveness of such expressions is a sufficient condition to justify its prohibition. This paper concisely sets forth the general legal parameters of the United States constitutional First Amendment right to freedom (...) of expression. Subsequently, it follows Joel Feinberg in distinguishing between harms and offenses and explains why the law should only protect against harms and not mere offenses. Following this, logical and moral considerations are brought to bear in order to further assess the implicitly supporting view of offensiphobia that faculty and students in higher educational contexts have a claim right to not be offended correlated with a duty of others to not offend them. For example, the use-mention distinction is discussed in order to explain why linguistic intent is crucial for the determination of what genuinely counts as being racist, sexist or otherwise offensive discourse. In the end, there are a variety of reasons for thinking that there is no moral right to not be offended correlated with a moral duty of others to not offend in higher educational contexts and that the law and public policy ought to track this fact. Without a right to not be offended, those who seek to curtail higher educational academic freedom rights by way of censorship stand on unreasonable ethical grounds to do so, though the law seems to permit private institutions to delimit offensive expressions. Offensiphobia ought to be rejected as it is unsupported by the balance of reason. (shrink)

This essay provides a critical philosophical assessment of “offensiphobia,” which is the belief that higher educational academic freedom ought to be to some important extent censured because of the mere offensiveness of certain kinds of expressions, whether those expressions are perceived as being racist, sexist, etc., effectively holding that the offensiveness of such expressions is a sufficient condition to justify its prohibition. This paper concisely sets forth the general legal parameters of the United States constitutional First Amendment right to freedom (...) of expression. Subsequently, it follows Joel Feinberg in distinguishing between harms and offenses and explains why the law should only protect against harms and not mere offenses. Following this, logical and moral considerations are brought to bear in order to further assess the implicitly supporting view of offensiphobia that faculty and students in higher educational contexts have a claim right to not be offended correlated with a duty of others to not offend them. For example, the use-mention distinction is discussed in order to explain why linguistic intent is crucial for the determination of what genuinely counts as being racist, sexist or otherwise offensive discourse. In the end, there are a variety of reasons for thinking that there is no moral right to not be offended correlated with a moral duty of others to not offend in higher educational contexts and that the law and public policy ought to track this fact. Without a right to not be offended, those who seek to curtail higher educational academic freedom rights by way of censorship stand on unreasonable ethical grounds to do so, though the law seems to permit private institutions to delimit offensive expressions. Offensiphobia ought to be rejected as it is unsupported by the balance of reason. (shrink)

Publicly-enacted blood extractions in mass Indian political contexts are a noteworthy present-day form of political enunciation in India, for such extractions – made to speak as and on behalf of political subject positions – are intensely communicative. Somewhat akin to the transformative fasts undertaken by Gandhi, such blood extractions seek to persuade from the moral high ground of political asceticism. This essay seeks to shed light on how and why these extractions have become such a means, with a particular focus (...) on blood-based portraiture. What makes such portraits – chiefly of politicians and ‘freedom fighter’ martyrs – interesting from a Strathernian point of view is their immanent persuasive relationality. The insights of Strathern can help us to explicate these objects’ dynamic relational features, while reciprocally, the portraits may help us to illuminate and clarify the very particular and interesting nature of the way Strathern treats images. (shrink)

RÉSUMÉ : Dans son récent recueil d’articles Language, Truth and History, Donald Davidson semble pencher en faveur d’une philosophie du langage mettant l’accent sur la notion de l’intention communicative du sujet parlant; en quoi il se rapproche du point de vue de Paul Grice. Si cela est juste, la pensée de Davidson se serait dégagée de l’approche sémantique formelle qu’il soutenait dans ses Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Dans cet article, je soutiens que, bien qu’il y ait beaucoup de similitudes (...) entre ces deux penseurs, Davidson n’a pas abandonné ses précédentes vues sur le langage. (shrink)

The nature of culture as the symbolic expression of inarticulate matter is explored from a range of different cultural perspectives. Raymond Williams's work on culture, especially his ideas on material and symbolic production, serves to introduce an analysis of matter and its place in cultural production. The mutable nature of matter is explored through the modern physics of quantum theory as well as modern art, especially the work of Jasper Johns. Late‐modern culture is viewed in terms of a mutable space (...) of matter that resists meaning and location. The implications of this resistance for understanding the cultivation of knowledge and subject‐object relations are then pursued in the contexts of art history, the ‘social body’, the society of generalized communication, multi‐media culture, and computerization. (shrink)

In the philosophy of technology after the empirical turn, little attention has been paid to language and its relation to technology. In this programmatic and explorative paper, it is proposed to use the later Wittgenstein, not only to pay more attention to language use in philosophy of technology, but also to rethink technology itself—at least technology in its aspect of tool, technology-in-use. This is done by outlining a working account of Wittgenstein’s view of language and by then applying that account (...) to technology—turning around Wittgenstein’s metaphor of the toolbox. Using Wittgenstein’s concepts of language games and form of life and coining the term ‘technology games’, the paper proposes and argues for a use-oriented, holistic, transcendental, social, and historical approach to technology which is empirically but also normatively sensitive, and which takes into account implicit knowledge and know-how. It gives examples of interaction with social robots to support the relevance of this project for understanding and evaluating today’s technologies, makes comparisons with authors in philosophy of technology such as Winner and Ihde, and sketches the contours of a phenomenology and hermeneutics of technology use that may help us to understand but also to gain a more critical relation to specific uses of concrete technologies in everyday contexts. Ultimately, given the holism argued for, it also promises a more critical relation to the games and forms of life technologies are embedded in—to the ways we do things. (shrink)

In this essay we reflect critically on how animal ethics, and in particular thinking about moral standing, is currently configured. Starting from the work of two influential “analytic” thinkers in this field, Peter Singer and Tom Regan, we examine some basic assumptions shared by these positions and demonstrate their conceptual failings—ones that have, despite efforts to the contrary, the general effect of marginalizing and excluding others. Inspired by the so-called “continental” philosophical tradition , we then argue that what is needed (...) is a change in the rules of the game, a change of the question. We alter the normative question from “What properties does the animal have?” to “What are the conditions under which an entity becomes a moral subject?” This leads us to consider the role of language, personal relations, and material-technological contexts. What is needed then in response to the moral standing problem, is not more of the same—yet another, more refined criterion and argumentation concerning moral standing, or a “final” rational argumentation that would be able to settle the animal question once and for all—but a turning or transformation in both our thinking about and our relations to animals, through language, through technology, and through the various place-ordering practices in which we participate. (shrink)

Chryses' supplication of Agamemnon at the beginning of the Iliad is anomalous in three interconnected ways: neither the language nor the gestures is typical of supplications in the Iliad, and there is no mention of the family of the person supplicated. These apparent difficulties, however, allow Chryses' supplication to play its role in the economy of the narrative. In some ways Chryses' supplication matches Priam's supplication of Achilles, since in both incidents a father asks for the return of his child. (...) But in other ways Chryses' supplication does not match this or other typical supplications in the epic. Chryses' supplication is described by the narrator with the verb λίσσομαι but most of the uses of λίσσομαι occur in situations which are not strong supplications. In general, supplication is characterized by the verbs γουνοῦμαι and γουνάζομαι often coupled with the action of grasping the knees, but Chryses does not use submissive language and gestures. Chryses, like Achilles, can invoke divine aid when he is wronged. If Chryses' speech act had not been a supplication, the parallel with Priam's situation would be impossible, but if it had been typical, then the parallel with Agamemnon's treatment of Achilles would be impossible. Moreover, the lack of an appeal to familial pity may be interpreted as a subtle allusion to the story of the sacrifice of Iphigeneia at Aulis and as a comment on the characterization of both Chryses and Agamemnon; and the lack of the language or gestures of submission allows Achilles to interpret and to re-interpet this first event, to place himself in two different roles, the supplicant and the supplicated, as his own understanding of the events of the story grows and deepens. (shrink)

Analysis of the nature of voting is fundamental to an understanding of the nature and value of democracy. Three questions ought to be distinguished concerning voting. First, how are we to conceive of the activity of voting? What is its nature? Second, what is it that people aim at when they vote? What are the grounds on which people vote, the reasons with which they justify their vote? And third, what ought people to aim at when they vote? What are (...) the relevant grounds for voting in one way or another? These last are explicitly normative questions. At times individuals vote on the basis of concerns which are not appropriate to the issues involved. The first question is not a question of psychology or of value; it is a metaphysical question. What is the nature of voting? How is it possible to count votes? Two answers are widely given in the literature. The first is that voting consists in the expression of preference. On this kind of view, either a vote is a preference or it is a fairly direct and unambiguous expression of the preference of the voter. (shrink)

Memory is fleeting. New material rapidly obliterates previous material. How, then, can the brain deal successfully with the continual deluge of linguistic input? We argue that, to deal with this “Now-or-Never” bottleneck, the brain must compress and recode linguistic input as rapidly as possible. This observation has strong implications for the nature of language processing: (1) the language system must “eagerly” recode and compress linguistic input; (2) as the bottleneck recurs at each new representational level, the language system must build (...) a multilevel linguistic representation; and (3) the language system must deploy all available information predictively to ensure that local linguistic ambiguities are dealt with “Right-First-Time”; once the original input is lost, there is no way for the language system to recover. This is “Chunk-and-Pass” processing. Similarly, language learning must also occur in the here and now, which implies that language acquisition is learning to process, rather than inducing, a grammar. Moreover, this perspective provides a cognitive foundation for grammaticalization and other aspects of language change. Chunk-and-Pass processing also helps explain a variety of core properties of language, including its multilevel representational structure and duality of patterning. This approach promises to create a direct relationship between psycholinguistics and linguistic theory. More generally, we outline a framework within which to integrate often disconnected inquiries into language processing, language acquisition, and language change and evolution. (shrink)

ABSTRACT:Sustainability standards are important governance tools for addressing social and environmental challenges. Yet, such tools are often criticized for being either too open-ended or too restrictive, thereby failing to contribute significantly to the development of sustainable practices. Both dimensions of the critique, however, miss the point. While all standards in principle combine elements of openness and closure, both of which are necessary to keep the sustainability agenda relevant and adaptive, sustainability standards often operate in contexts that favor closure. In this (...) article, we draw on a research tradition that views communication as constitutive of organization to emphasize the significance of communicative mechanisms that stimulate organizational openness in the application of standards. With the notion of “license to critique,” we present a managerial philosophy designed to involve managers and employees, mobilize and develop their knowledge about sustainability and bring it forward for the benefit of both the organization and the environment. (shrink)

Many scholars assume a connection between the evolution of language and that of distinctively human group-level morality. Unfortunately, such thinkers frequently downplay a central implication of modern Darwinian theory, which precludes the possibility of innate psychological mechanisms evolving to benefit the group at the expense of the individual. Group level moral regulation is indeed central to public life in all known human communities. The production of speech acts would be impossible without this. The challenge, therefore, is to explain on a (...) Darwinian basis how life could have become subject to the rule of law. Only then will we have an appropriate social framework in which to contextualize our models of how language may have evolved. (shrink)

Human rights, a language that keeps public order, is realised in ordinary life by language characteristics according to social rules. Despite this fact, research that considers the linguistic features of human rights relating to its use and effects in terms of the kingdom of God in the present world seems to have not been attempted or seldom attempted. Thus, this article proposes to examine the language of human rights by means of Speech Act Theory. The approach is predicated upon the (...) language use as performative acts. The approach shows the language of human rights with performative language by seeking to uncover the operation and effects of language of rights in real-life situations. The thrust of this article implies how we can explain the semantics of human rights and execute them in ordinary life in terms of God’s kingdom. (shrink)

Reasoning in medicine requires the critical use of a clinical methodology whose validity must be evaluated as well as its limits. In the last decade, an increasing amount of evidence has shown severe limitations and flaws in the conduct of prognostic studies. The main reason behind this fact is that prognostic judgments are at high risk of error. In this paper we investigate the pragmatic and illocutionary aspects of different forms of linguistic acts and judgments involved in clinical practice. More (...) specifically, we analyze the role of uncertainty with regard to ‘particular’ clinical judgments and its relation with ‘general’ evidence. Focusing on how prognostic judgments are formulated and justified, our main purpose is to highlight the explication, the structure and the limits of prognosis from a linguistic and epistemological perspective. (shrink)

The 2015 judgment of the Namibia Supreme Court in Government of the Republic of Namibia v LM and Others set an important precedent on informed consent in a case involving the coercive sterilisation of HIV-positive women. This article analyses the reasoning and factual narratives of the judgment by applying Neil Manson and Onora O’Neill’s approach to informed consent as a communicative process. This is done in an effort to understand the practical import of the judgment in the particular context of (...) resource constrained public healthcare facilities through which many women in southern Africa access reproductive healthcare. While the judgment affirms certain established tenets in informed consent to surgical procedures, aspects of the reasoning in context demand more particularised applications of what it means for a patient to have capacity and to be informed, and to appropriately accommodate the disruptive role of power dynamics in the communicative process. (shrink)