In this paper we investigate the role of performative contradictions in legal discourse. First of all we identify the argumentative roles of performative contradictions and two possible interpretations of them. With this done, we show that one use of performative contradictions can be fruitfully applied in analysing normative speech acts implementing norm enactment, namely, those speech acts that are designed to produce new legal norms. We conclude the paper by showing that our analysis provides strong support for Robert Alexy's claim-to-correctness (...) thesis, according to which speech acts of the norm-enacting kind raise a claim to correctness. (shrink)

The critical commentary on Judith Butler’s Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative focuses primarily on her use of speech-act theory for political purposes. Admitting the limitations of Austin’s work, she introduces an extended supplement to her linguistically based performative theory in Excitable Speech: a discussion of embodied subjectivity presented in ways never before instanced in her work. That is, in this text, she continues to use speech-act theory articulated with Derridean iterability (her usual practice) to ground performativity, while presenting (...) a version of embodiment newly derived from psychoanalysis to establish the political efficacy of the subject. Although this shift has gone unremarked in the literature, Butler herself treats this psychoanalytic dimension as animating the entire argument. This article reviews her logic and the place that psychoanalysis holds in her theory to establish the viability of the embodied political performative and its utility for historicism. (shrink)

Despite his major contributions to phenomenology, the writings on suggestion and hypnosis by Erwin Straus (1891–1975) have been underappreciated. In his German language publications of 1925 and 1927, Straus argues that we cannot elucidate the phenomenon of suggestion solely or even primarily through experimental design, a narrow natural scientific viewpoint, or an emphasis on abnormal or special states of dissociation. In contrast, a phenomenological study that begins with everyday experience demonstrates that suggestion is part of normal experience, and its understanding (...) must include the possibility both of acceptance and of rejection. Straus’s arguments in these essays are enhanced by his later books and articles developing the I-Allon relationship, the process of we-formation, and the distinction of pathic and gnostic moments of sensation and perception. By fully situating the phenomenon within theLebenswelt, Straus’s analysis of suggestion is a major contribution to phenomenology. (shrink)

In the closing episode of Diamela Eltit's 1988 novella The Fourth World, the city of Santiago de Chile—including its inhabitants—goes up for sale. Eltit's investigation of the specter of all‐out commodification illuminates the entwinements of aesthetics and race under finance capitalism. Published at the tail end of the Pinochet dictatorship, the novel makes a poignant contribution to the debate over the “lettered city” in Latin America. Briefly situating The Fourth World in this context and placing it in conversation with current (...) lines of reflection on social identity and the notion of the aesthetic, this article analyzes the novel's implications for a philosophical understanding of the aesthetics–race relation: one, the work attests to an expansive conception of racial identity; two, it comprehends aesthetic agency as a much‐needed and potentially critical site of transformed racial existence; and, three, it calls for multimodal forms of address to counter neoliberal rationality. The article brings out these points through a close reading of passages and by highlighting the novel's decolonial feminist aesthetic. In ending, the article takes note of the new notions of creativity and political participation that arise. (shrink)

Much controversy has emerged on the demarcation between legal positivism and non-legal positivism with some authors calling for a ban on the -as they see it- nonsensical labelling of legal philosophical debates. We agree with these critics; simplistic labelling cannot replace the work of sophisticated and sound argumentation. In this paper we do not use the term ‘legal positivism’ as a simplistic label but identify a specific position which we consider to be the most appealing and plausible view on legal (...) positivism. This is the view advocated by Gardner in his paper 'Legal Positivism: 5½ Myths’, where he carefully scrutinises the most convincing and unifying postulates of legal positivism, which he calls “the thin view”. The study shows that this thin view presupposes an empirical conception of action that is untenable and implausible since it makes acts of engagement with the law unintelligible to an observer of such acts. (shrink)

It has been noted that certain similarities can be detected between the work of the Bakhtin Circle and the work of Jürgen Habermas. While I do not deny that these sorts of similarities can be detected, I also argue that the insights of the Bakhtin Circle can be used to provide the basis of a critique of Habermas. My specific aim is to show how Habermas perpetuates a ‘stylistic’ approach to discourse theory. ‘Stylistics’, as conceived by the Bakhtin Circle, explores (...) discourse through the dualism of an objectively defined set of linguistic norms that can be appropriated through the creative linguistic competence of individual speakers. On this understanding, individuals within their everyday environment choose elements from objective linguistic norms in order to make sense of their world. However, a stylistic approach to discourse implicitly denigrates the usefulness of everyday utterances because it suggests that, for language to gain normative meaning and understanding, it must always refer back to an objective linguistic system. By using the Bakhtin Circle’s theoretical insights, I flag up several problems that emerge from Habermas’s particular standpoint on stylistics. (shrink)

Four criteria are discussed as important conditions of successful applications in Computer Supported Co-operative Work (CSCW). They are equality, mutual influence, new competence, and double-level language. The criteria originate in the experience of the International Co-operative Movement. They are examined and illustrated withreference to eight contemporary CSCW applications: meeting scheduling and support; bargaining; co-authoring; co-ordination; planning; design support and collaborative design.

Ethicists have long observed that unethical communication may result from texts that contain no overt falsehoods but are nevertheless misleading. Less clear, however, has been the way that context and text work together to create misleading communication. Concepts from linguistics can be used to explain implicature and indirect speech acts, two patterns which, though in themselves not unethical, may allow misinterpretations and, therefore, create potentially unethical communication. Additionally, sociolinguistic theory provides insights into why writers in business and other professions are (...) prone to use these patterns. An analysis of five cases shows that implicature and indirectness are sometimes used intentionally to deceive readers. However, their use may also reflect other motives such as the desire to mitigate negative information or to show deference to an unfamiliar or powerful reader. Although implicature and indirectness are not intended to deceive in these cases, they can lead to a loss of clarity and to subsequent ethical problems when readers misinterpret texts. (shrink)

Organizations routinely make choices when addressing conflicting stakes of their stakeholders. As stakeholder theory continues to mature, scholars continue to seek ways to make it more usable, yet proponents continue to debate its legitimacy. Various scholarly attempts to ground stakeholder theory have not narrowed down this debate. We draw from the work of Juergen Habermas to theoretically advance stakeholder theory, and to provide practical examples to illustrate our approach. Specifically, we apply Habermas’ language-pragmatic approach to extend stakeholder theory by advancing (...) seven sets of normative axioms. We conclude that a deliberative approach, with its focus on the conditions of legitimation and deliberative democracy, has the potential to become a cornerstone of stakeholder theory. The need for global stakeholder discourse and its internalization in corporate structures and institutions is exemplified by a multitude of CSR and stakeholder initiatives that have mushroomed in response to global risk scenarios such as climate change, nuclear warfare, or terrorism. Further research may help to build a functioning global governance system in order to provide guidance for management in the 21st century. (shrink)

Si en Gender Trouble Butler presentaba una propuesta de la teoría de la performatividad de los actos de habla aplicada a la construcción del género, en su último libro, Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, articula una teoría de la performatividad aplicada a la acción colectiva de minorías o poblaciones que son estimadas como “desechables”. El interés de la propuesta que presentamos es analizar cómo la teoría de la performatividad de género se ha ido ampliando a las formas de (...) acción democrática; pasando así de ser una explicación centrada en las posibilidades identitarias de género a explicar las posibilidades para una vida vivible. Es lo que aquí llamamos la ampliación de la performatividad, del caso especial de género al caso general de una vida vivible. (shrink)

My intention in this paper is to propose a conception of metaphorical meaning on which the meaning of a metaphor includes propositional as well as non-propositional features. I will make two general claims on behalf of the proposed account: first, it is intuitive; second, it is of theoretical value. In claiming that the proposed account is of theoretical value, I mean only that its adoption leads to an increased understanding of the nature of metaphor: of metaphorical thought and ofmetaphorical communication (...) in particular. (shrink)

The issues addressed in philosophical papers on quotation generally concern only a particular type of quotation, which I call ‘closed quotation’. The other main type, ‘open quotation’, is ignored, and this neglect leads to bad theorizing. Not only is a general theory of quotation out of reach: the specific phenomenon of closed quotation itself cannot be properly understood if it is not appropriately situated within the kind to which it belongs. Once the distinction between open and closed quotation has been (...) drawn and properly appreciated, it is tempting to consider that only closed quotation is relevant to semantics. Open quotation is more a matter of pragmatics: it is a matter of what people do with words, rather than a matter of content and truth-conditions. In this way one can provide the beginning of a justification for the neglect of open quotation in current semantic theorizing. There is some truth in this view, yet the phenomenon of ‘mixed quotation’, investigated at length in this paper, is interesting precisely because it shows that things are not so simple. Important issues concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics will thus be raised. (shrink)

In a series of papers, Sperber provides the following analysis of the phenomenon of ill-understood belief (or 'quasi-belief', as I call it): (i) the quasi-believer has a validating meta-belief, to the effect that a certain representation is true; yet (ii) that representation does not give rise to a plain belief, because it is 'semi-propositional'. In this paper I discuss several aspects of this treatment. In particular, I deny that the representation accepted by the quasi-believer is semantically indeterminate, and I reject (...) Sperber's claim that quasi-belief is a credal attitude distinct from plain belief. (shrink)

In this survey paper, I start from two classical theses of speech act theory: that speech act content is uniformly propositional and that sentence mood encodes illocutionary force. These theses have been questioned in recent work, both in philosophy and linguistics. The force/content distinction itself – a cornerstone of 20‐century philosophy of language – has come to be rejected by some theorists, unmoved by the famous ‘Frege–Geach’ argument. The paper reviews some of these debates.

Issue is taken with Dawkins and Krebs's (1978) conception of communication as being by nature manipulative and with Cronk's proposals concerning the evolution of morality, both of which are grounded in evolutionary biology. An alternative view, which recognizes that which humanity has in common with other species but which emphasizes humanity's distinctiveness, is offered to account for religion and morality.

Moral realism and antirealist-expressivism are of course incompatible positions. They disagree fundamentally about the nature of moral states of mind, the existence of moral states of affairs and properties, and the nature and role of moral discourse. The central realist view is that a person who has or expresses a moral thought is thereby in, or thereby expresses, a cognitive state of mind; she has or expresses a belief that represents a moral state of affairs in a way that might (...) be accurate or inaccurate. The view of antirealist-expressivism is that such a person is in, or expresses, a conative state of mind, one that consists in a certain kind of attitude or motivational stance toward something, such as an action or a person. Realism holds that moral thoughts have truth conditions and that in some cases these truth conditions are satisfied so that our moral thoughts are true. Antirealist-expressivism holds, to a first approximation, that the distinctive moral content of a moral thought does not have truth conditions. (shrink)

This paper revisits the Derrida-Searle debate, an exchange that, unfortunately, did not lead to much, if any, mutual understanding. I will suggest that this failure can be traced back to key features of their respective theories. In that Searle and Derrida use their own theories of speech as resources in trying to understand each other, their unsuccessful communication can be used to reveal a great deal about the limitations of both their theories. My paper tries to draw out these limitations (...) by analyzing specific moments in the debate. I also suggest concrete proposals for overcoming defects in each of the theories, proposals that, arguably, would make some mutual understanding more possible. (shrink)

How can we register the participation of a range of elements, extending beyond the human subject, in the production of HIV events? In the context of proposals around biomedical prevention, there is a growing awareness of the need to find ways of responding to complexity, as everywhere new combinations of treatment, behavior, drugs, norms, meanings and devices are coming into encounter with one another, or are set to come into encounter with one another, with a range of unpredictable effects. In (...) this paper I consider the operation of various framing devices that attribute responsibility and causation with regard to HIV events. I propose that we need to sharpen our analytic focus on what these devices do, their performativity—that is, their full range of worldly implications and effects. My primary examples are the criminal law and the randomized control trial. I argue that these institutions operate as framing devices: They attribute responsibility for HIV events and externalize other elements and effects in the process. Drawing on recent work in science and technology studies as well as queer theory, I set out an analytic frame that marks out a new role for HIV social research. Attentiveness to the performative effects of these devices is crucial, I suggest, if we want better to address the global HIV epidemic. (shrink)

This paper contains an analysis of performatives with special attention to performatives in the law. It deals with the possibility to recognise performativity by means of a grammatical-syntactic criterion, the self-verifying and norm-promulgating character of legal performatives, an analysis of the effects of performatives by means of causal logic, the different forms of performativity and a theory of promise-performatives.

Today, the notion of identity is usually linked with ethical-political discussions like multiculturalism, gender or sexual diversity, recognition of plurality, etc. Nevertheless, the flourishing of this vision that interprets “identity” mainly in its plural form (as “identities”) contrasts sharply with the sense that “identity” has had during most of the history of philosophy (in which identity was understood in connection with “unity” or “selfsameness”, not with “diversity” or “otherness”). In order to explain the passage from one notion of identity to (...) the other (a passage mainly made in the last third of the 20th century), we will focus on the reflections made by Ludwig Wittgenstein towards the middle of that century. Our contention is that these reflections open the way to a more plural understanding of human identity, against the many interpreters of Wittgenstein that defend the opposite: that he offered a strong notion of common human identity in his writings, a notion based on the idea of “human nature”. In order to sustain our thesis, we will have to give an interpretation of some key terms of Wittgenstein’s philosophy (like “forms of life” or “natural history”) from a pluralistic point of view; this is the only way of understanding to what extent he is a predecessor of contemporary discussions about plural identities. (shrink)

SÍNTESE - a característica adorniana de fogo de artificio revelada pela produção artística moderno- contemporânea é própria de todas as obras de arte de qualquer época. A permanência do fato artístico estará entregue à sua ordem de leitura e execução no tempo. Serão apresentadas as características da razão dominadora, o ponto de vista do Ersatz, a leitura da obra como execução e como recepção.

Whether it seems that you know something depends in part upon practical factors. When the stakes are low, it can seem to you that you know that p, but when the stakes go up it'll seem to you that you don't. The apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes presents a serious challenge to epistemologists who endorse a stable semantics for knowledge attributions and reject the idea that whether you know something depends on how much is at stake. After arguing that (...) previous attempts to meet this challenge fall short, I offer a new solution: the unassertability account. The account starts with the observation that high stakes subjects aren't in an epistemic position to assert. We generally presuppose that knowing is sufficient for epistemically proper assertion, but this presupposition only stands up to scrutiny if we draw a distinction between two notions of epistemic propriety, and we shouldn't expect ordinary speakers to draw it. A subject in a high stakes situation who fails to draw the distinction will be led by the sufficiency claim to treat anything she isn't in a position to assert as something she isn't in a position to know. The sensitivity of epistemically proper assertion to practical factors explains the merely apparent sensitivity of knowledge to stakes. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that an important component of the language-ready brain is the ability to recognize and conceptualize events. By ‘event’, I mean any situation or activity in the world or our mental life, that we find salient enough to individuate as a thought or word. While this may sound either trivial or non-unique to humans, I hope to show that abstracting away events and their participants from the embodied flow of experience is a characteristic unique to humans. (...) This ability is enabled, I will argue, by two critical competencies that act as scaffolds for language-ready thought in the prehuman brain. The first, as argued by Arbib (2006,2012,2016) and others, is a sophisticated system of gesture production and understanding in prehumans, which provided a template for schema-like sequencing and slot-filling of information units. The second involves the integration of multiple modalities of expression in the communicative act, in particular, the alignment of co-gestural speech and co-speech gesture. With such computational facilities, action-based gestures can be abstracted away from their associated objects and become full event representations. This view supports the MSH argument for the emergence of more complex linguistic expressions from initially holophrastic units. In particular, actions can be thought of as protoverbs, which through this process are abstracted to full event descriptions, i.e., verbs. (shrink)

Taking inspiration from Searle’s ‘The Logic of Fictional Discourse’, this essay presents an argument against different versions of the so-called ‘speech act theory of fiction’. In particular, it argues that a Uniformity Argument may be constructed, which is additional to the Determination Argument commonly attributed to Searle, and which does not rely on his presumably controversial Determination Principle. This Uniformity Argument is equally powerful against the ‘Dedicated Speech Act’ theories that Searle originally targeted, and the more recent, Grice-inspired versions of (...) speech-act approaches to fictional discourse. (shrink)

This research looks into absurdity focusing on its etymology as well as its relationship with the concepts "sense" and "meaning", looks into the concepts of "context" and "decontextualization" so as to understand the nature of absurd decontextualization. Considering the different meanings of absurdity in literature, philosophy and humour, this research is also meant to provide a breakdown of the architecture of nonsense.

This paper proposes an understanding of literary narrative as a form of social cognition and situates the study of such narratives in relation to the new comprehensive approach to human cognition, enaction. The particular form of enactive cognition that narrative understanding is proposed to depend on is that of participatory sense-making, as developed in the work of Di Paolo and De Jaegher. Currently there is no consensus as to what makes a good literary narrative, how it is understood, and why (...) it plays such an irreplaceable role in human experience. The proposal thus identifies a gap in the existing research on narrative by describing narrative as a form of intersubjective process of sense-making between two agents, a teller and a reader. It argues that making sense of narrative literature is an interactional process of co-constructing a story-world with a narrator. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centered approaches that have dominated both structuralist and early cognitivist study of narrative, as well as pragmatic communicative ones that view narrative as a form of linguistic implicature. The interactive experience that narrative affords and necessitates at the same time, I argue, serves to highlight the active yet cooperative and communal nature of human sociality, expressed in the many forms than human beings interact in, including literary ones. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the concept of ‘presupposition’, specifically as it is applied in critical approaches to discourse analysis such as Critical Discourse Analysis or Societal Pragmatics, and proposes a systematisation of a socio-cognitive approach to the concept. Presupposition analysis is crucial for uncovering naturalised ideologies underlying discourse, and examining manipulative functions of discourse, especially strategies making it socially or cognitively harder to challenge ideological assumptions. However, the way presupposition is analysed in current critical discourse analysis is not methodologically (...) consistent and not necessarily theoretically consistent with an understanding of discourse as socio-cognitively grounded social practice. I demonstrate this through a brief overview of the two main current approaches to presupposition in discourse analysis – the truth conditional and the socio-cognitive one. I propose examining presupposition on different levels of analysis, ranging from lexical-item triggered presuppositions to discourse presuppositions and mutually presupposed pragmatic competence. (shrink)

It is argued that conceptual analysis as practiced by the philosophers of ordinary language, is an empirical procedure that relies on a version of Garfinkel's ethnomethodological experiment. The ethnomethodological experiment is presented as a procedure in which the existence and nature of a social norm is demonstrated by flouting the putative convention and observing what reaction that produces in the social group within which the convention is assumed to operate. Examples are given of the use of ethnomethodological experiments, both in (...) vivo and as a thought experiment, in order to demonstrate the existence of otherwise invisible conventions governing human social behavior. Comparable examples are cited from the writings of ordinary language philosophers of ethnomethodological thought experiments designed to demonstrate the existence of linguistic conventions. (shrink)

My point in this paper is to focus on some details of Alfred Tarski’s writing that in my opinion have not been aptly represented — or aptly rejected — in Richard Montague’s grammar and to agree with those who share Tarski’s view that human language is something uncapturable. The paper consists of two parts, concerning 1) some attempts to formalize the non-declarative utterances, and 2) the limitations of T-scheme and of Montague grammar.

In some texts concerning logic the reader faces unexpected problems, namely: 1) incongruities between the commentary and logical solutions offered and 2) mistakes concerning external facts.

Paraconsistent logics may be viewed as one of the last elementsin a series of rapid developments in science in the 19th and early 20th c.,triggered by the appearance of non-Euclidean geometries. The philosophyof conventionalism, which gave a metatheoretical framework to the basicchanges involved, may also help in evaluating the truth import of logic and in determining its relation to ontology.

This paper reviews Deleuze’s theory of language in Logic of Sense, and Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of language in A Thousand Plateaus. In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this flattened ontology of surfaces is incommensurable with the ontology of depth used in conventional humanist qualitative methodology and recommends beginning new empirical inquiry with a concept instead (...) of with method and methodology. (shrink)

I argue that linguistic meanings are instructions to build monadic concepts that lie between lexicalizable concepts and truth-evaluable judgments. In acquiring words, humans use concepts of various adicities to introduce concepts that can be fetched and systematically combined via certain conjunctive operations, which require monadic inputs. These concepts do not have Tarskian satisfaction conditions. But they provide bases for refinements and elaborations that can yield truth-evaluable judgments. Constructing mental sentences that are true or false requires cognitive work, not just an (...) exercise of basic linguistic capacities. (shrink)

Our target article proposed that language production and comprehension are interwoven, with speakers making predictions of their own utterances and comprehenders making predictions of other people's utterances at different linguistic levels. Here, we respond to comments about such issues as cognitive architecture and its neural basis, learning and development, monitoring, the nature of forward models, communicative intentions, and dialogue.

Currently, production and comprehension are regarded as quite distinct in accounts of language processing. In rejecting this dichotomy, we instead assert that producing and understanding are interwoven, and that this interweaving is what enables people to predict themselves and each other. We start by noting that production and comprehension are forms of action and action perception. We then consider the evidence for interweaving in action, action perception, and joint action, and explain such evidence in terms of prediction. Specifically, we assume (...) that actors construct forward models of their actions before they execute those actions, and that perceivers of others' actions covertly imitate those actions, then construct forward models of those actions. We use these accounts of action, action perception, and joint action to develop accounts of production, comprehension, and interactive language. Importantly, they incorporate well-defined levels of linguistic representation. We show how speakers and comprehenders use covert imitation and forward modeling to make predictions at these levels of representation, how they interweave production and comprehension processes, and how they use these predictions to monitor the upcoming utterances. We show how these accounts explain a range of behavioral and neuroscientific data on language processing and discuss some of the implications of our proposal. (shrink)

We propose a view of embodied representations that is alternative to both symbolic/linguistic approaches and purely sensorimotor views of cognition, and can account for procedural and declarative knowledge manipulation. In accordance with recent evidence in cognitive neuroscience and psychology, we argue that anticipatory and simulative mechanisms, which arose during evolution for action control and not for cognition, determined the first form of representational content and were exapted for increasingly sophisticated cognitive uses. In particular, procedural and declarative forms of knowledge can (...) be explained, respectively, in terms of on-line sensorimotor anticipation and off-line simulations of potential actions, which can give access to tacit knowledge and make it explicit. That is, mechanisms that evolved for the on-line prediction of the consequences of one's own actions (i.e. forward models) determine a (procedural) form of representation, and became exapted for off-line use. They can therefore be used to produce (declarative) knowledge of the world, by running a simulation of the action that would produce the relevant information. We conclude by discussing how embodied representations afford a form of internal manipulation that can be described as internalized situated action. (shrink)

I was thinking about my philosophical work and saying to myself: ‘I destroy, I destroy, I destroy…’Context: The ‘linguistic turn’ of Western philosophy ; and correlatively, the decline of universalist discourses. The weariness with regard to ‘theory’, and the miserable slackening that goes along with it. The time has come to philosophize.…there is no danger of philosophy's ‘coming to an end’. Religion did not come to an end in the Enlightenment, nor painting in Impressionism. Even if the period from Plato (...) to Nietzsche is encapsulated and ‘distanced’ in the way Heidegger suggests, and even if twentieth‐century philosophy comes to seem a stage of awkward transitional backing and filling, there will be something called ‘philosophy’ on the other side of the transition. (shrink)

Despite the fact that US presidential candidates commonly position themselves as Washington outsiders, this broadly populist positioning has thus far been significantly undertheorized. On the one hand, scholars of political representation have explored how politicians connect with political audiences; on the other, populism research has focused on the construction, mainstreaming and appeal of populist performances. A detailed theorization of the paradoxical performative operation by which self-styled political outsiders come to be more effective in connecting with political audiences than accomplished politicians (...) has yet to be undertaken. This article explores the performativity of outsider positioning, paying particular attention to its effect on perceptions of legitimacy. The article investigates legitimacy as a complex and paradoxical performative phenomenon that involves multiple competing sources of agency. The case is made that, by discouraging the perception of the political system as a unified whole, populist-style performances by mainstream politicians undermine institutional legitimacy. In a way that is at odds at odds with the cooperative demands inherent in the US federal government, these performances encourage the perception that the self-styled outsider is engaged in a strictly competitive zero-sum game with the institutional structure and its representatives. (shrink)

Como el título indica, el texto que aquí presento tiene como tema central el problema del "actuar humano", viejo tema de la filosofía práctica en la nomenos vieja distinción aristotélica. Nos proponemos, sin embargo, abordarlodesde dos perspectivas contemporáneas entre las que hemos encontrado notables puntos de convergencia que quisiera someter a discusión aquí conustedes: la fenomenología de la acción de H. Arendt y el análisis del lenguaje ordinario en la perspectiva de los "speech acts" de Austin y Searle.

I argue that Giorgio Agamben employs two, contradictory theories of the state in his works. Earlier works, such as "The Coming Community" and "Means without End", suggest that the state today functions as an aspect of the society of the spectacle where spectacle is the logical extension of the commodity form under late capitalism. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determined character to the state and a determining power to the economic forces of capitalism that conditions particular forms of (...) the state. Later work, such as "Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life" and " State of Exception", are preoccupied with the logic of juridical sovereignty and the increased frequency of states of emergency. This part of Agamben's work attributes a determining strength to the state under current conditions. Although his earlier work provides a more coherent narrative of how it is possible to move from contemporary society to ideal community, it does not provide the theory of political action necessary to overcome the power of the state he describes when he theorizes the state in "Homo Sacer" and " State of Exception". None of the three possibilities of political action present in his later works provides passage beyond state sovereignty without violating his philosophical commitments. (shrink)

Resumen: En este artículo se aborda el argumento elaborado por Ludwig Wittgenstein en las Philosophische Untersuchungen acerca de la imposibilidad de un lenguaje privado. El objetivo de dicho abordaje reside en la presentación de una serie de argumentos, reconstruidos a partir de la pragmática trascendental del lenguaje, que demuestran también de una manera acabada la imposibilidad de concebir un lenguaje semejante. La importancia de los razonamientos de la pragmática trascendental consiste en que explicitan una forma de tener en cuenta el (...) propio proceso argumentativo que está ausente en los planteos de Wittgenstein. Así, luego de presentar la importancia y las particularidades del argumento de Wittgenstein se desarrolla la interpretación que es posible esgrimir desde la pragmática, así como una distinción que debe establecerse cuando se abordan cuestiones referidas al lenguaje. Por último se extraen algunas conclusiones.: This article addresses the argument developed by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Philosophische Untersuchungen about the impossibility of a private language. The objective of this approach is to present a series of arguments, reconstructed from the point of view of transcendental pragmatics of language, which also demonstrate in a finished way the impossibility of such a language. The importance of the transcendental pragmatics reasonings is that they explicitly state a way of considering the very process of argumentation that is absent in Wittgenstein’s statements. After presenting the importance and particularities of Wittgenstein’s argument, the interpretation that can be employed from pragmatics is developed, as well as a distinction that must be made when dealing with issues related to language. Finally, some conclusions are drawn. (shrink)