This contribution investigates the role ofcontext in natural-language communication bydifferentiating between linguistic andsociocultural contexts. It is firmly anchoredto a dialogue framework and based on arelational conception of context as astructured and interactionally organisedphenomenon. However, context is not onlyexamined from this bottom-up or microperspective, but also from a top-down or macroviewpoint as pre- and co-supposed socioculturalcontext. Here, context is not solely seen as aninteractionally organised phenomenon, butrather as a sociocultural apparatus whichstrongly influences the interpretation of microsituations.The section, micro building blocks andlocal (...) meaning, argues for a sociopragmaticapproach to natural-language communication thusaccommodating both speech act theory andconversation analysis. It examines the questionof how linguistic and sociocultural contextsare accommodated by the micro building blocksof speech act and turn, and speaker and hearer.The results obtained are systematised in thesection, micro meets macro, and adaptedto the requirements of the dialogue act ofa plus/minus-validity claimbased on thecontextualisation of Jürgen Habermas''sconception of ratification of validityclaimadopted from this theory ofcommunicative action(1987). The definition ofa plus/minus-validity claim is furthersupplemented by the Gricean CooperativePrinciple, the ethnomethodological premise ofaccountability of social action, theconversation-analytic notion of sequentialorganisation and the interpersonal concepts offace and participation format. Validity claimsare discussed from both bottom-up and top-downperspectives stressing the dynamics of contextwith regard to both process and product, andselection and construction. (shrink)

This study examines executive perceptions of business information control. Specifically, the study explores (a) whether executives perceive certain types of information control being practiced within their businesses; and, (b) whether the executives regard such practices as ethical. In essence, the study suggests that both superiors and subordinates selectively practice information control. Even more importantly, however, executives see such practices as ethically acceptable on the part of superiors but as ethically questionable on the part of subordinates. A closer look at the (...) responding executives' profile characteristics – age, gender, education and salary – reveals the complexity of these perceptions. Most importantly, gender and age emerge as two prime factors influencing executive perceptions regarding both the practice and the ethics of information control. Suggestions for future research are included at the end of the article. (shrink)

New forms of information technology, such as email, webpages and groupware, are being rapidly adopted. Intended to improve efficiency and effectiveness, these technologies also have the potential to radically alter the way people communicate in organizations. The effects can be positive or negative. This paper explores how technology can encourage or discourage moral dialogue -- communication that is open, honest, and respectful of participants. It develops a framework that integrates formal properties of ideal moral discourse, based on Habermas' theory of (...) communicative action, with properties of informal communication that help sustain good moral conversations. Ten criteria distilled from these works form the basis of a template that can be used for assessing the positive and negative impacts of emerging information technologies on moral dialogue. (shrink)

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker (...) meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied. (shrink)

Even though it’s based on a bad argument, there’s something to Strawson’s dictum. He might have likened ‘referring expression’ to phrases like ‘eating utensil’ and ‘dining room’: just as utensils don’t eat and dining rooms don’t dine, so, he might have argued, expressions don’t refer. Actually, that wasn’t his argument, though it does make you wonder. Rather, Strawson exploited the fact that almost any referring expression, whether an indexical, demonstrative, proper name, or definite description, can be used to refer to (...) different things in different contexts. This fact, he argued, is enough to show that what refers are speakers, not expressions. Here he didn’t take seriously the perfectly coherent view that an expression’s reference can vary with context. So, he concluded, what varies from context to context is not what a given expression refers to but what a speaker uses it to refer to. Strawson went on to suggest that there are several dimensions of difference between various sorts of referring expressions: degree of dependence on context, degree of “descriptive meaning,” and being governed by a general convention vs. an expressionspecific one. But despite these differences, he insisted that regardless of kind, referring expressions don’t themselves refer — speakers use them to refer. (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 June 2001, the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a revised and expanded version of the Principles of Medical Ethics (last published in 1980). In light of the new and more comprehensive document, the present essay is geared to consideration of a longstanding tension between physician's autonomy rights and societal obligations in the AMA Code. In particular, it will be argued that a duty to treat overrides AMA autonomy rights in social emergencies, even in cases that involve personal risk to (...) physicians (e.g., bioterrorist attack, HIV infection, SARS). The argument will be made by way of the logic and language of the AMA Code through its history, commentaries, and precedents. It also will be shown that there are substantial reasons to believe that the logic of the Code is sound in morally relevant ways. The essay will conclude with some philosophical proposals suggesting a framework for the duty to render aid and the extension of those duties to physicians facing personal risks. (shrink)

Most people working on linguistic meaning or communication assume that semantics and pragmatics are distinct domains, yet there is still little consensus on how the distinction is to be drawn. The position defended in this paper is that the semantics/pragmatics distinction holds between encoded linguistic meaning and speaker meaning. Two other ‘minimalist’ positions on semantics are explored and found wanting: Kent Bach’s view that there is a narrow semantic notion of context which is responsible for providing semantic values for a (...) small number of indexicals, and Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s view that semantics includes the provision of values for all indexicals, even though these depend on the speaker’s communicative intentions. Finally, some implications are considered for the favoured semantics/pragmatics distinction of the fact that there are linguistic elements which do not contribute to truth-conditional content but rather provide guidance on pragmatic inference. (shrink)

On a familiar and prima facie plausible view of metaphor, speakers who speak metaphorically say one thing in order to mean another. A variety of theorists have recently challenged this view; they offer criteria for distinguishing what is said from what is merely meant, and argue that these support classifying metaphor within 'what is said'. I consider four such criteria, and argue that when properly understood, they support the traditional classification instead. I conclude by sketching how we might extract a (...) workable notion of 'what is said' from ordinary intuitions about saying. (shrink)

An argument is developed at some length to show that any semantical theory which treats superficially nonperformative sentences as being governed by performative prefaces at some level of underlying structure must either leave those sentences semantically uninterpreted or assign them the wrong truth-conditions. Several possible escapes from this dilemma are examined; it is tentatively concluded that such hypotheses as the Ross-Lakoff-Sadock Performative Analysis should be rejected despite their attractions.

Just why a patient should trust a particular healer isa question that has not been adequately explored inthe literature on healing. This ethnographiccase-report examines the healing performance of achiropractor and proposes that it contains fourintrinsic claims to trustworthiness: he claims to bea qualified and sincere healer who is inpossession of knowledge and techniques that derivetheir power from their truth content and whichempower him to make beneficial changes in thepatient. Taking each claim in turn I described thenature of the claim, how (...) it might be adequatelyvalidated, ways in which his healing performance mightvalidate it and how he might be assisted by thepatient, and how their actual validation may bedistorted by the healer and patient. It is suggestedthat while unusual in many regards, this unorthodoxhealing performance may be a foil by which toexamine other more orthodox healing performances. (shrink)

When managers use moral expressions in their communications, they do so for several, sometimes contradictory reasons. Based upon analyses of interviews with managers, this article examines seven distinctive uses of moral talk, sub-divided into three groupings: (1) managers use moral talk functionally to clarify issues, to propose and criticize moral justifications, and to cite relevant norms; (2) managers also use moral talk functionally to praise and to blame as well as to defend and criticize structures of authority; finally (3) managers (...) use moral talk dysfunctionally to rationalize morally ambiguous behavior and to express frustrations. The article concludes with several practical recommendations. (shrink)

This article looks at the practice of educational questioning using the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans‐Georg Gadamer. It first looks at questions and statements from a hermeneutic perspective, demonstrating some of the differences and similarities between the two. It then details Gadamer's notion of the ‘true question’, asking whether it is possible for teachers to ask ‘true questions’. Then, it turns to some concrete ways to rethink educational questioning. Three themes are proposed, themes to keep in mind when educational questions are (...) used: non‐superficiality, humility, and circuitry. (shrink)

According to one widely held view of metaphor, metaphors are cases in which the speaker (literally) says one thing but means something else instead. I wish to challenge this idea. I will argue that when one utters a sentence in some context intending it to be understood metaphorically, one directly expresses a proposition, which can potentially be evaluated as either true or false. This proposition is what is said by the utterance of the sentence in that context. We don’t convey (...) metaphorical meanings indirectly by directly saying something else. One consequence is that, contrary to what Searle (1993: 110) suggests, we do not arrive at the metaphorical meaning that the speaker intended via a literal interpretation of the sentence the speaker utters. The defense of this view depends on articulating a conception of what is said that is more generous than that allowed for by Searle (1993) and others such as Bach (2001). I hope to motivate this broadened conception of what is said (what I call a contextualist conception of what is said), and to show some of the benefits of adopting a direct expression view of metaphor. (shrink)

This paper presents a framework for the generation of coherent elementary conversational sequences at the speech act level. We will embrace the notion of a cooperative dialogue game in which two players produce speech acts to transfer relevant information with respect to their commitments. Central to the approach is that participants try to achieve some sort of balanced cognitive state as a result of speech act generation and interpretation. Cognitive states of the participants change as a result of the interpretation (...) of speech acts and these changes provoke the production of a subsequent speech act. Describing the properties and the dynamics of the mental constructs that constitute the participants’ cognitive states, such as beliefs and commitments, in relation to the various dialogue contributions is an essential aspect of the game. Although simple in its basic form, the framework enables us to produce abstract conversations with some properties that agree strikingly with coherence structures found in, for instance, Conversation Analysis. (shrink)

This paper compares and contrasts two ways of going on from Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, Austin. The first is Charles Travis'. The second is Stanley Cavell's. Focusing on our concept of propositional knowledge ('knowing that such and such'), I argue that Travis' tendency to think of language and its concepts as essentially in the business of enabling us to represent (describe, think of) things as being one way or another and his consequent neglect of the question of what, (...) in the Austinian sense, is being done with the words have led him to give an inaccurate account of the context sensitivity of 'knowing that'. By contrast, Cavell's treatment of the concept - while fully hospitable to Travis' 'occasion sensitivity' - is attentive to the limitations of the representationalist conception, and takes the question of what is being done with the words, as it relates to the question of the intelligibility of the speaker, as primary. This fundamental difference between Travis and Cavell, I finally suggest, explains the stark contrast between the ways in which each has responded to what he calls 'scepticism'. (shrink)

Vulnerable student voices are a matter for concern in contemporary higher education, but that concern is directed more towards identifying vulnerable groups, and seeking to widen their participation in higher education. It is less to do with the vulnerability of certain modes of voice when students are there. The concept of student voice may be anatomised into three constituent elements: an epistemological voice, or a voice for knowing, a practical voice, or a voice for doing, and an ontological voice, or (...) a voice for being and becoming. A voice for being and becoming is less valued and validated in contemporary higher education, and more vulnerable, than voices for knowing and doing. Developing an ontological voice is deemed less important than developing epistemological or practical voices, yet an ontological voice is fundamental to those two other voices. The concept of vulnerability needs to be extended from referring to certain under‐represented groups in the student body to indicating the strength or weakness of certain modes of the student voice. Vulnerability is not only about the vulnerability of the presenting student, but also about his voice yet to be uncovered. Reinterpreting vulnerability fosters modes of recovering ontological voices at risk of being lost. (shrink)

An examination of the genre of philosophical autobiography sheds light on the role of personal judgment alongside objective rationality in philosophy. Building on Monk's conception of philosophical biography, philosophical autobiography can be seen as any autobiography that reveals some interplay between life and thought. It is argued that almost all autobiographies by philosophers are philosophical because the recounting of one's own life is almost invariably a form of extended speech act of self-revelation. When a philosopher is the autobiographer, this self-revelation (...) illuminates the interplay between thought, life, and personality. Understanding how this works allows us to address three problems of biography raised by Honderich: how to give an account of something as large and complex as a human life; how a life-story is also a judgment; and how we can justify identifying one part of a causal circumstance as 'the cause'. There is also a new ethical problem raised about the autobiographer's right to make public details of a shared private life. (shrink)

Information modeling (also known as conceptual modeling or semantic data modeling) may be characterized as the formulation of a model in which information aspects of objective and subjective reality are presented (the application), independent of datasets and processes by which they may be realized (the system).A methodology for information modeling should incorporate a number of concepts which have appeared in the literature, but should also be formulated in terms of constructs which are understandable to and expressible by the system user (...) as well as the system developer. This is particularly desirable in connection with certain intimate relationships, such as being the same as or being a part of. (shrink)

: The "Home" is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

Classical Athens provides a historical case study of effective joint action by a democratic community, at scale, over time, and across a socially and epistemically diverse population. Athens was concerned both with aggregating diverse knowledge for decision-making and with building common knowledge for coordinated joint action. A preserved prosecution speech delivered in an Athenian treason trial reveals how common knowledge was generated by democratic institutions and employed in legal arguments. Common knowledge facilitated eff ective coordination among citizens through productive alignment (...) cascades. Yet Athenian lawcourt procedures rendered cascading difficult, pointing to an institutionalized awareness that coordination among jurors might violate fairness as equality before the law; such violations threatened democratic values and the equilibrium between elite and non-elite citizens. Common knowledge was promoted by repeated public rituals, public monuments, and public architecture that allowed for the interpresence of large numbers of deliberative and intervisible citizens. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 36.1 (2003) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Did Habermas Cede Nature to the Positivists? Gordon R. Mitchell Jürgen Habermas's "colonization of the lifeworld" thesis (1987, 332-73) posits that many of society's pathologies are due to the tendency of institutions to convert social issues that ought to be sorted out by a debating citizenry into technical problems ripe for resolution by expert bureaucracies, thus pre-empting important public (...) discussion. Habermas has attempted to lay bare the pernicious effects of this colonization process in his analysis of public opinion polling, welfare policy, education, German reunification, immigration, and other social issues (see Habermas 1997, 1994, and 1970; Holub 1992). In each of these contexts, Habermas has publicly challenged the encroachment of scientistic modes of decision-making into spheres where joint communicative action by deliberating citizens would yield more appropriate and legitimate judgments. This critical impulse is also evident in Habermas's methodological reflections on the proper role of academic scholarship, where he has argued vigorously against attempts to graft "objectivating" methods of natural scientific inquiry onto research projects in the social sciences (1971, 304-17).From all of this, one might gather that Habermas's commitment to rolling back the influence of technical forms of reasoning is connected to some intrinsic quarrel he has with the natural sciences. Yet such a sweeping generalization is hard to sustain in light of the fact that Habermas does not oppose technical reasoning per se; he recognizes that the daunting complexity of social life in late capitalism requiresthat certain "steering" tasks be delegated to systems that utilize largely instrumental logics to co-ordinate action. Likewise, he acknowledges that the disciplines of the natural sciences necessarily play important supporting roles in such steering projects.One normative presupposition of Habermas's colonization thesis is that there exists some proper boundary demarcating where the sphere of technical reasoning ends and the realm of communicative rationality begins. [End Page 1] On one side of this boundary, Habermas has provided many details on what he sees as the essential qualities of a properly functioning "public sphere," where "new social movements" continuously reweave the threads of communicative fabric holding society together (1996, 359-87), and where "historico-hermeneutic" academic study reflects on public life, sluicing insight back into the capillaries of democratic deliberations (1987, 374-403).What lies on the other side of the boundary is murkier. The proper role of natural scientific investigation has received relatively scant attention in Habermas's critical theory of society, and this has led to some confusion regarding his account of the natural sciences, as well as debate over whether this account has political purchase. One would think that sympathetic commentators, such as Helen Longino (who bases much of her own coherence theory of scientific truth on Habermas), would have reassuring things to say on this point. Yet her lukewarm assessment that, "in trying to clear a space for an autonomous social and critical theory, [Habermas] has ceded nature to the positivists" (1990, 202), raises questions about the flexibility and scope of Habermas's theory of communicative action as a basis for critique of scientific practice.One way to test Habermas's account of the natural sciences on this count is to put his views in conversation with science studies commentators who share a similar commitment to the idea that dialogue and argumentation are constitutive elements of scientific practice. Such an approach recasts the "ceding to positivism" question into a moment of controversy over the role of dialogue, not only as an essential motor driving the scientific enterprise, but also as a vehicle for democratic decision-making on issues related to the purpose and direction of scientific inquiry in society.Part one of this essay locates discursive norms embedded pragmatically in the notion of scientific objectivity. By bringing a modified version of Habermas's theory of communicative action into conversation with other approaches to science studies that foreground intersubjective dialogue as the key motor driving the scientific enterprise, I develop a foundation for robust criticism of systematically distorted scientific communication. Specific strategies of... (shrink)

Stanley Cavell reflects on the writing of Barbara Cassin in light of his interest in interpreting certain philosophers as "philosophically destructive," where this destructiveness may in fact be understood as philosophically creative. Cavell suggests that the writings of Austin and Wittgenstein may be considered in these terms, and speculates on the potential interest these writers might have for Cassin. Cassin's call for a rethinking of philosophy might be seen as uniquely essential to the practice of Austin and Wittgenstein.

I defend a theory of mental representation that satisfies naturalistic constraints. Briefly, we begin by distinguishing (i) what makes something a representation from (ii) given that a thing is a representation, what determines what it represents. Representations are states of biological organisms, so we should expect a unified theoretical framework for explaining both what it is to be a representation as well as what it is to be a heart or a kidney. I follow Millikan in explaining (i) in terms (...) of teleofunction, explicated in terms of natural selection. -/- To explain (ii), we begin by recognizing that representational states do not have content, that is, they are neither true nor false except insofar as they both “point to” or “refer” to something, as well as “say” something regarding whatever it is they are about. To distinguish veridical from false representations, there must be a way for these separate aspects to come apart; hence, we explain (ii) by providing independent theories of what I call f-reference and f-predication (the ‘f’ simply connotes ‘fundamental’, to distinguish these things from their natural language counterparts). -/- Causal theories of representation typically founder on error, or on what Fodor has called the disjunction problem. Resemblance or isomorphism theories typically founder on what I’ve called the non-uniqueness problem, which is that isomorphisms and resemblance are practically unconstrained and so representational content cannot be uniquely determined. These traditional problems provide the motivation for my theory, the structural preservation theory, as follows. F-reference, like reference, is a specific, asymmetric relation, as is causation. F-predication, like predication, is a non-specific relation, as predicates typically apply to many things, just as many relational systems can be isomorphic to any given relational system. Putting these observations together, a promising strategy is to explain f-reference via causal history and f-predication via something like isomorphism between relational systems. -/- This dissertation should be conceptualized as having three parts. After motivating and characterizing the problem in chapter 1, the first part is the negative project, where I review and critique Dretske’s, Fodor’s, and Millikan’s theories in chapters 2-4. Second, I construct my theory about the nature of representation in chapter 5 and defend it from objections in chapter 6. In chapters 7-8, which constitute the third and final part, I address the question of how representation is implemented in biological systems. In chapter 7 I argue that single-cell intracortical recordings taken from awake Macaque monkeys performing a cognitive task provide empirical evidence for structural preservation theory, and in chapter 8 I use the empirical results to illustrate, clarify, and refine the theory. (shrink)

Online collection of papers by Devitt, Dretske, Guarino, Hochberg, Jackson, Petitot, Searle, Tye, Varzi and other leading thinkers on philosophy and the foundations of cognitive Science. Topics dealt with include: Wittgenstein and Cognitive Science, Content and Object, Logic and Foundations, Language and Linguistics, and Ontology and Mereology.

This article finds little to disagree with in Neurophilosophy The sole area of disagreement is with Professor Churchland's attitude to common?sense psychology. Unfortunately, though, the author has already attempted to describe what should be the proper view of common?sense psychology in an earlier article in this very journal. Therefore the present article tries to build on the earlier one, advocating an instrumentalist constraal of many ordinary?language mental terms ? a construal with which Professor Churchland is unlikely to agree, but which, (...) if she did agree, would give her further ammunition with which to beat her opponents. The other main strand of this article suggests that Aristotle has anticipated Professor Churchland (and also most other theoreticians of psychology and physiology), and so, willy?nilly, we are ? correctly ? returning to an Aristotelian picture of human capacity and activity. (shrink)

In Part I, I consider the normal contexts of assertions of belief and declarations of intentions, arguing that many action-guiding beliefs are accepted uncritically and even pre-consciously. I analyze the function of avowals as expressions of attempts at self-transformation. It is because assertions of beliefs are used to perform a wide range of speech acts besides that of speaking the truth, and because there is a large area of indeterminacy in such assertions, that self-deception is possible. In Part II, I (...) analyze the conditions of self-deception, and discuss the grounds on which it is regarded as irrational, even when particular instances may be beneficial. I consider some of the classical analyses of the motives for self-deception, and attempt to give an account of the occasions in which it is likely to occur. In the final section, I discuss the complex organization of the self that is presupposed by the phenomena of self-deception. (shrink)

I argue that indirect quotation in the first person simple present tense (self-quotation) provides a class of infallible assertions. The defense of this conclusion examines the joint descriptive and constitutive functions of performative utterances and argues that a parallel treatment of belief ascription is in order. The parallel account yields a class of infallible belief ascriptions that makes no appeal to privileged modes of access. Confronting a dilemma formulated by Crispin Wright for theories of self-knowledge gives an epistemological setting for (...) the account of infallible belief ascription. (shrink)

Pain is not a primitive sensory event but rather a complexperception and a process by which a person interacts with theinternal and external environments, constructs meaning, andengages in action. Because folk beliefs are central to meaning,folk concepts of pain play multiple causal roles in a painpatient's interaction with health care providers and others.In every case, the notion of pain is linked to a goal-directedbehavior that is useful to the person. The wide variation inconcepts of pain across individuals suffering with painunderscores (...) the richness and complexity of the pain experience.In some cases involving chronic pain, the patient may form amaladaptive cluster of behaviors around the concept of pain.Patient beliefs and expectations are an important part of manychronic pain syndromes, and patients can benefit fromintervention directed at revising the individual's folk model of pain. Memetics offers a framework for identifying the memesthat patients hold and determining whether patient memes fitor clash with provider memes. (shrink)

This essay is a critical examination of how Edmund Husserl, in his appropriation of Franz Brentano’s concept of intentionality into his phenomenology, deals with the very issues that shaped Brentano’s theory of intentionality. These issues concern the proper criterion for distinguishing mental from physical phenomena and the right explanation for the independence of the intentionality of mental phenomena from the existence or non-existence of their objects. Husserl disagrees with Brentano’s views that intentionality is the distinguishing feature of all mental phenomena (...) and that the mental status of intentional objects is what explains the said independence. The crucial concept in Husserl’s theory of intentionality is the noema of consciousness, which functions in the same way as Gottlob Frege’s sense in his theory of semantics. This essay argues that Husserl’s alternative solutions to the problems of Brentano run in conflict either with the desired rigor of his phenomenology or with the actual workings of language. (shrink)