This work offers a challenge to the orthodox view that descriptive rules are non-normative and passive in their role and usage. It does so by arguing that, although lacking in normativity themselves, descriptive rules can be sources of normativity by way of the normative attitudes that can develop around them. That is, although descriptive rules typically depict how things are, they can also play a role in how things ought to be. In this way, the limited role that this type (...) of rule can play as either a basis for the development of normative reasons, or as explanatory reasons for action is identified and clarified. One desirable outcome of the analysis is a more complete view of what descriptive rules are and how they are utilized by agents. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This study explores the influence of the French Symbolist poet, novelist, and literary critic Remy de Gourmont on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's conception of dissociation. It proposes translatio—the medieval trope describing a transfer of ideas—as a lens through which to read the significance of Gourmont's thought on the New Rhetoric Project. Thus forgoing more traditional comparative approaches such as intertextuality, this study argues that translatio serves here as a particularly valuable conceptual tool: it unveils the evolution of Perelman's (...) thought over time, and Olbrechts-Tyteca's significant contribution to it; it also provides a clearer understanding of the relationship between association and dissociation in the NRP than what is generally understood by scholars of the Traité. More importantly, translatio unveils the features that make their conception of dissociation one of the truly innovative aspects of the NRP. (shrink)

Metaphor and metonymy, on the mental level temporally rather than syntactically or semantically defined, show a close association to healthy and neurotic defense, respectively. When the mind functions optimally, reverberating issues of past and present domains inform each other bidirectionally like source and target of a metaphor. Neurotic defense, metonymically conflating past and present, is mental access barring (negative metonymy). Metaphor and positive metonymy, fundamental to how the mind works, are autopoietic devices organizing creative change. Trauma (lost metaphoricity) results in (...) negative metonymy. During psychoanalysis metonymic defenses and transferences get remetaphorized. Nested mentational configurations emerge sequentially as markers of increased awareness (clinical vignette): negative metonymy (target enigmatic); positive metonymy (accessing target); metaphor (domains seen in terms of each other). (shrink)

ArgumentThe heuristic value of evolutionary biology for economics is still much under debate. We suggest that in addition to analytical considerations, socio-cultural values can well be at stake in this issue. To demonstrate it, we use a historical case and focus on the criticism of biological analogies in the theory of the firm formulated by economist Edith Penrose in postwar United States. We find that in addition to the analytical arguments developed in her paper, she perceived that biological analogies were (...) suspect of a conservative bias – as in social Darwinism. We explain this perception by documenting the broader context of Edith Penrose's personal and professional evolution, from her student days at Berkeley to her defense of Owen Lattimore against McCarthyism. We conclude that in the case under study at least, science and values were certainly intertwined in accounting for her skepticism towards biological analogies – insight we develop in the conclusion about today's relationships between biology and economics. (shrink)

In this work, I argue that creative metaphors are formed when some persistent problem, caused by an inadequacy in preexisting knowledge, descends into the collective unconscious, is reconfigured unconsciously in novel ways, and then reemerges back into consciousness where the impasse is resolved by the metaphorical expression of new knowledge. To develop this position, I (1) review and critique some well-known language-based studies of metaphor, (2) summarize psychoanalytic and depth psychological approaches to the psyche as one way to overcome the (...) shortcomings of the language-based scholarship, (3) relate C. G. Jung's account of the psyche and his related notion of synchronicity to creative metaphors, (4) graft a quantum physics approach to material reality back onto Jung's work as a provisional structure of the collective unconscious, and finally, (5) offer some suggestions about how creative metaphors might work psychologically. (shrink)

Ce Livre de P. Ricoeur constitue, en fait, comme son titre l'indique une prise de position contre ceux qui, à l'instar de J. Derrida, font des concepts philosophiques des métaphores mortes, abolissant ainsi la spécificité du discours philosophique. Á la métaphore morte, «celle qui ne se dit pas, mais qui se dissimule dans la «releve» du concept qui se dit», P. Ricoeur oppose la metaphore vive qu'il définit ainsi: «La métaphore n'est pas vive seulement en ce qu'elle vivifie un langage (...) constitué. La métaphore est vive en ce qu'elle inscrit l'élan de l'imagination dans un « penser plus » au niveau du concept. » Les positions sont done claires: d'un côté, la métaphore morte qui dissout le discours philosophique, et de 1'autre, la métaphore vive qui en constitue le fondement dynamique. (shrink)

What are rules? In this paper I develop a view of regulative rules which takes them to be a distinctive normative kind occupying a middle ground between orders and normative truths. The paradigmatic cases of regulative rules that I’m interested in are social rules like rules of etiquette and legal rules like traffic rules. On the view I’ll propose, a rule is a general normative content that is in force due to human activity: enactment by an authority or acceptance by (...) a community. Rules are unlike orders in being not necessarily communicative, not an expression’s of the giver’s will, not evaluable for sincerity, and in that they have propositional content. And they’re unlike normative truths in that they’re themselves not even truth-evaluable (though their contents are). This is because rules qua things that are in force are not like constatives which have a mind to world direction of fit, but more like performatives. Furthermore, they differ from normative truths in that their normativity is isolated from their background justification and is therefore not dependent on contributory notions like reasons coming together in a weighing explanation. As such, they occupy a middle ground between orders and normative truths, much like in H. L. A. Hart’s opinion law occupies a middle ground between “coercion” and “morality” (Hart 1961/1994). I also illustrate the virtues of this understanding of rules by showing how proper appreciation of how they differ from normative truths helps us defuse a common objection to Hart’s practice theory of rules. (shrink)

This paper analyzes three contrasting strategies for modeling intentional agency in contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and action, and draws parallels between them and similar strategies of scientific model-construction. Gricean modeling involves identifying primitive building blocks of intentional agency, and building up from such building blocks to prototypically agential behaviors. Analogical modeling is based on picking out an exemplary type of intentional agency, which is used as a model for other agential types. Theoretical modeling involves reasoning about intentional agency in (...) terms of some domain-general framework of lawlike regularities, which involves no detailed reference to particular building blocks or exemplars of intentional agency. Given the contrasting procedural approaches that they employ and the different types of knowledge that they embody, the three strategies are argued to provide mutually complementary perspectives on intentional agency. (shrink)

Reason has regularly been portrayed and understood in terms of images and metaphors that involve the exclusion or denigration of some element-body, passion, nature, instinct-that is cast as "feminine." Drawing upon philosophical insight into metaphor, I examine the impact of this gendering of reason. I argue that our conceptions of mind, reason, unreason, female, and male have been distorted. The politics of "rational" discourse has been set up in ways that still subtly but powerfully inhibit the voice and agency of (...) women. (shrink)

This paper aims at expanding theories of metaphorical reasoning to other tropes. Asking why figurative language tends to fall into a limited number of patterns, it first examines approaches that offer an answer – ranging from antique rhetoric theory, Hans Blumenberg, Harald Weinrich, Donald Davidson, and Roman Jakobson to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. By then turning to Giambattista Vico, it puts forth the argument that a limited set of pre-structured ways of embodied reasoning is hard-wired in and enacted by (...) different aspects of children’s ways of playing – and provides the foundation for structures of thinking in the adult life. (shrink)