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Switch to: References
Citations of:
The Language Animal: The Full Shape of the Human Linguistic Capacity
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press (2016)
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Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 3, Page 324-346, September 2022. |
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This paper clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between speaking and spoken speech, and the relation between the two, in his Phenomenology of Perception. Against a common interpretation, I argue on exegetical and philosophical grounds that the distinction should not be understood as one between two kinds of speech, but rather between two internally related dimensions present in all speech. This suggests an interdependence between speaking and spoken aspects of speech, and some commentators have critiqued Merleau-Ponty for claiming a priority of speaking over (...) |
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The Radical Enactive/embodied view of Cognition, or REC, claims that all cognition is a matter of skilled performance. Yet REC also makes a distinction between basic and content-involving cognition, arguing that the development of basic to content-involving cognition involves a kink. It might seem that this distinction leads to problematic gaps in REC’s story. We address two such alleged gaps in this paper. First, we identify and reply to the concern that REC leads to an “interface problem”, according to which (...) |
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Situated normativity is the ability of skilled individuals to distinguish better from worse, adequate from inadequate, appropriate from inappropriate, or correct from incorrect in the context of a particular situation. Situated normativity consists in a situated appreciation expressed in normative behaviour, and can be experienced as a bodily affective tension that motivates a skilled individual to act on particular possibilities for action offered by a concrete situation. The concept of situated normativity has so far primarily been discussed in the context (...) |
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Moral distress names a widely discussed and concerning clinician experience. Yet the precise nature of the distress and the appropriate practical response to it remain unclear. Clinicians speak of their moral distress in terms of guilt, regret, anger, or other distressing emotions, and they often invoke them interchangeably. But these emotions are distinct, and they are not all equally fitting in the same circumstances. This indicates a problematic ambiguity in the moral distress concept that obscures its distinctiveness, its relevant circumstances, (...) |
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In this paper I develop a novel account of the phenomenality of language by focusing on characteristics of perceived speech. I explore the extent to which the spoken word can be said to have a horizonal structure similar to that of spatiotemporal objects: our perception of each is informed by habitual associations and expectations formed through past experiences of the object or word and other associated objects and experiences. Specifically, the horizonal structure of speech in use can fruitfully be compared (...) |
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Cognition has traditionally been understood in terms of internal mental representations, and computational operations carried out on internal mental representations. Radical approaches propose to reconceive cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics. An outstanding challenge for such a philosophical project is how to scale-up from perception and action to cases of what is typically called ‘higher-order’ cognition such as linguistic thought, the case we focus on in this paper. Perception and action are naturally described in terms of agent-environment dynamics, but can (...) |
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In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation View’. However The Social Evaluation View faces the opposite challenge of convincingly accommodating shame's ‘value-oriented’ dimension. After rejecting one attempt to chart (...) |
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This article sets in with the question whether current or foreseeable transformer-based large language models (LLMs), such as the ones powering OpenAI’s ChatGPT, could be language users in a way comparable to humans. It answers the question negatively, presenting the following argument. Apart from niche uses, to use language means to act. But LLMs are unable to act because they lack intentions. This, in turn, is because they are the wrong kind of being: agents with intentions need to be autonomous (...) |
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Was macht das Besondere der menschlichen Lebensform aus? Wie können wir es verstehen, dass unsere Art wie alle anderen natürlich evolviert ist und dennoch als einzige Art die Fähigkeit entwickelt hat, unter dem Anspruch der Freiheit und in reflexiver Distanz zu handeln, damit aber die Umwelt auf eine Welt hin zu transzendieren? Jung argumentiert, dass sich diese Fragen nur beantworten lassen, wenn man philosophische, evolutionstheoretische und kognitionswissenschaftliche Ansätze aufeinander bezieht. Der Schlüssel hierfür ist der Begriff der Bedeutung. Alle Lebewesen erfassen (...) |
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The chief problem for the theory of mind is that of presence. In this paper I offer an explanation of this claim, and I indicate how my own “enactive” approach to mind has tried to address this problem. I also argue that other approaches, such as that undertaken by Hutto and Myin, have side-stepped the problem, instead of addressing it; their position opts for reductionism and eliminativism. This essay has two parts. The first is an exposition of the enactive approach, (...) |
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This interview with Charles Taylor explores a central concern throughout his work, namely, his concern to ‘reenchant’ self and world through a careful examination of value as emanating from the world rather than from ourselves. It focuses especially on the status of his central doctrine of ‘strong evaluation’ against the background of mainstream meta-ethical theories, such as neo-Kantian constructivism and robust realist non-naturalism. Additionally, the relationship between Taylor’s theism and his moral–political philosophy is discussed. A key issue that is examined (...) |
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From folk tales to movies, stories possess features which naturally suit them to contribute to the growth of virtue. In this article I show that the fictional exemplars help the learner to grasp the moral importance of internal states and resolves a tension between existing kinds of exemplars discussed by virtue ethicists. Stories also increase the information conveyed by virtue terms and aid the growth of prudence. Stories can provide virtuous exemplars, inform learners as to the nature of the virtues (...) |
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This paper develops two related theses concerning resentment. The first, which I label the ‘prior norm requirement’, holds that feelings of resentment are grounded in the resenter’s conviction that some portion of their existing normative expectations has been violated. The second holds that resentments can make a rational contribution to the development of new normative expectations, transforming the resenter’s existing normative outlook. Certain expressions of the prior norm requirement in recent theory clash with the notion of norm-creative resentments, portraying resentment (...) |
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Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView. |
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The market failures approach is amongst the most influential theories of business ethics. Its interest within the field is, in large part, a result of its rejection of moralism and any sort of applied ethics approach, favouring, in contrast, a focus on the institutionally embodied goal of economic activity, which it takes to be that of Pareto efficiency. From this articulation of the goal, or purpose, of markets, a set of efficiency imperatives are derived that are taken to comprise the (...) |
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ABSTRACTIn this essay, I review Suits’ classic description of games and cite three kinds of problems—mischaracterizations, omissions, and ambiguities. I build on previous criticisms by myself and others leveled at his definition. However, in contrast to much of this previous work, I will present what I hope is an improved description. The latter part of the essay is devoted to defending this alternate characterization. I conclude by arguing that my revisionist work paradoxically both supports and undermines the merits of Suits’ (...) |
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I explore the place of manners in the moral life, particularly with regard to their role in virtue education and in expressing virtue. The approach developed here is Aristotelian and Confucian in character. I identify and discuss three crucial functions of good manners: (1) they help social life to go well; (2) they often involve ways of showing respect or reverence for that which is respect-worthy or reverence-worthy; and (3) they ennoble our animal nature via an acquired second nature. In (...) |
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My aim in this paper is to show that the natural idea that humiliation is harmful calls explanation and to argue that the most straightforward ways of responding to this explanatory demand fall short in important ways. I end by considering a line of response which I take to be promising, which appeals to our need, as social animals, for interpersonal connection. |
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Background: Metaphors are often used within the context of ethics and healthcare but have hardly been explored in relation to moral reasoning. Objective: To describe a central set of metaphors in one case and to explore their contribution to moral reasoning. Method: Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 16 parents of a child suffering from the neurodegenerative disease CLN3. The interviews were recorded, transcribed, and metaphors were analyzed. The researchers wrote memos and discussed about their analyses until they reached consensus. Ethical (...) |
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A paradox, it is claimed, is a radical form of contradiction, one that produces gaps in meaning. In order to approach this idea, two senses of “separation” are distinguished: separation by something and separation by nothing. The latter does not refer to nothing in an ordinary sense, however, since in that sense what’s intended is actually less than nothing. Numerous ordinary nothings in philosophy as well as in other fields are surveyed so as to clarify the contrast. Then follows the (...) |
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Are computers on the way to acquiring “superintelligence”? Can human deliberation and decision-making be fully simulated by the mechanical execution of AI programmes? On close examination these expectations turn out not to be well-founded, since algorithms do, ultimately, have “heteronomous” characteristics. So-called AI-“autonomy” is a sensor-directed performance automatism, which — compared with the potential for ethical judgment in human “practical reason” — proves to be limited in significant ways. This is shown in some detail with reference to the idea of (...) |
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This essay concentrates on philosophizing that happens outside and in addition to planned philosophical discussions, philosophizing that comes alive in practice, that is intensified in children’s encounters with the world, with others, with language, in play. It contemplates how adults, educators and parents encounter children and are affected by children’s philosophical explorations. What is the role of the adult in children’s philosophical questioning? How can we respond to children’s philosophizing? What does it mean to do so? The essay explores philosophical (...) |
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Currently, Nursing Education draws on a commonly taken‐for‐granted folk psychology of a representational view of how the mind works and how human beings learn. Descartes' representational view of the mind strongly influences pedagogies, theories of learning, curricula, and approaches to testing nursing knowledge and more broadly in academia. A representational view of the mind holds that perception occurs in the mind only through representations in the mind through ideas, concepts, templates and schema. Situated, embodied, and socially embedded cognition is presented (...) |
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We are social animals that seek to connect with others of our kind. This common thought stands in need of elaboration. In this article, I argue for three theses. First, that we pursue certain forms of communicative interaction for their own sake insofar as they are ways of connecting with another. Second, that interpersonal connection is a metaphysically primitive emotional relation which resists reductive analysis in terms of the states of individuals. And finally, that our desire for interpersonal connection has (...) |
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Within his earliest contributions to the human sciences, Charles Taylor challenged dominant behavioral views by advancing a hermeneutical conception of human agency. For Taylor, persons continually... |
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In this paper, I examine the divide between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’ approaches to metaphysics by reconstructing a three-cornered debate between naturalists, hermeneutists, and pragmatists on the issue of how to understand the relationship between ethics and ontology. Taking my cue from the dominant naturalistic debates in Anglo-American ethics, I continue to discuss in more detail the positions of Hilary Putnam and Charles Taylor in the light of these debates. More particularly, I investigate Putnam’s wholesale rejection of Ontology with a capital (...) |
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In his critique of the therapeutic, Taylor argues that therapy fails to engage with the ethical and spiritual significance of human suffering. Therapy’s denial of ethics is representative of a wide... |
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This paper provides an interpretation of the existential conception of selfhood that follows from Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception. On this view, people relate to themselves not by “looking within” in acts of introspection but, first, by “looking without” at the field of solicitations in which they are immersed and, eventually, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, by “making explicit” the “melodic unity” or “immanent sense” of their behavior. To make sense of this, I draw out a distinction latent in Merleau-Ponty’s view between a (...) |
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The ‘Toward a Science of Consciousness’ conference – which has now become ‘The Science of Consciousness’ conference – recently (June 5-10, 2017) took place instead at the receptive venue of the Hyatt Regency in La Jolla, California. It was well-planned and organized, which is extraordinary considering that it had to be organized all over again within a month or two when the original Shanghai location was cancelled. Things ran smoothly at La Jolla and it was well attended for an odd-year, (...) |
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Journal of Philosophy of Education, EarlyView. |
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There are two widespread beliefs about the use of metaphors in clinical medicine. The first is that military metaphors are harmful to patients and should be discouraged in medical practice. The second is that the metaphors of clinical practice can be judged by and standardized in reference to neutral criteria. In this article, I evaluate both these beliefs, exposing their shared flawed logic. This logic underwrites the false empiricist assumptions that metaphorical language and literal language are fundamentally distinct, play separate (...) |
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This article explores how the thought that language is expressive, in the sense of bearing emotional or affective meaning, can be made sense of, with particular attention to two authors for whom this thought plays an important role. It begins by introducing the idea of language being “expressive” and using Charles Taylor's work to consider its potential interest, before showing how the expressiveness of language might be accounted for by a position that seems particularly suited to this task, namely Merleau‐Ponty's (...) |
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The introduction argues that nothing could be more natural than the phenomenological treatment of language; after all, its breakthrough in method consists in a renewed appreciation for the power of speech to unlock the truth of things. Interest in the phenomenology of language has increased in the last two decades due to the publication of new phenomenological texts and due to dialogue with other disciplines and approaches. At the same time, the phenomenological contribution cannot be fully appreciated apart from its (...) |
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This article investigates the politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism. It turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge liberal and more critical perspectives. Without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects, the revisitation of secularism remains deficient, leaving the liberal politics of translation exclusionary and that of their critics ineffective. Pointing to the resources Derrida offers for a deeper understanding of the nature, political stakes, and implications of translation, this article (...) |
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In the corpus of phenomenological philosophy (as far as it is influenced by the works of Jacob von Uexküll and the debate of phenomenologists with philosophical anthropologists such as E. Cassirer, F. J. J. Buytendijk, and A. Portmann), we find the allegation that one of the fundamental differences between human and non-human animals is that while the non-human animal has a species-specific umwelt, humans have access to (a certain idea of) welt. In this sense, Heidegger speaks of the animal as (...) |
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The ideal of authenticity that developed in the Romantic era emphasized that both individuals and places find their own authentic process for cultivating their identity and humanity, a notion that has become controversial in modern philosophy. This article will explore the concepts of authenticity and place and discuss their relevance for Bildung theory today. Based on the works of Charles Taylor, we will argue that Bildung can be seen as constituted by and constitutive of language and moral spaces that go (...) |
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Engaging with the literature on transformative conceptions of rationality, I argue for the following position on the way reason transforms human cognition: when the capacity for knowing that one ought to do something is directed at one's own speech acts, an initially domain‐specific and practical grasp of genus/species relations – manifest in the ability to select among the various permitted ways to do as one judges one ought – becomes a mechanism through which the reflective study of genus/species relations hones (...) |
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The as-structure provided by language, even in the sciences, is always constitutive of experience and never merely designative. “From Saying…it comes to pass that the World is made to appear” (Heidegger 1971 [1957]: 101). |
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In Chapter 8 of The Language Animal, Charles Taylor claims that narratives are unsubstitutable for an appropriate understanding of social life and ‘human affairs’ in general. In order to identify open questions in his argumentation as well as unwanted consequences of his outlook, I proceed in three consecutive steps. I first problematize Taylor’s distinction between laws and stories, then go on to address his intentional blurring of stories and histories, and finally suggest that the concept of genealogy might be a (...) |
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This article discusses the very common moral guideline “Punch up, do not kick down.” Our approach is based on humanistic ethics, and through rigorous philosophical analysis, we will show that while the guideline is commendable and well-intentioned, it does not work as a universal rule and should not be used as an ideological tool. Due to the complexity of our social reality and the fluid nature of hierarchies, there may be cases when punching up is problematic, and kicking down is (...) |
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Les êtres humains tracent les contours de leur vie individuelle, sociale et politique dans un réseau de langage. L’utilisation de la langue préside à tout ce qu’ils font, à la manière dont ils agissent et pensent. Charles Taylor explore ces dimensions anthropologiques du langage. Cet article traite de trois différents aspects de cette anthropologie fondée sur le langage et met à l’épreuve les considérations de Taylor à l’aide de trois questions distinctes touchant à la relation entre le langage et la (...) |
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InThe Language Animal, Charles Taylor’s struggle to provide a theoretical framework for his narration of the self finally becomes obvious. About 30 years after he wrote his great and fascinatingSources of the Self, Taylor closes the gap between the self as a radical being-in-the-world and its analytical premises. Even if the main topic of Taylor’s new book may seem to be only a comparison of what he calls ‘HHH-theory’ and ‘HLC-theory,’ there are two other authors, the combination of whose ideas (...) |
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On note, dans certains courants de la philosophie contemporaine, un intérêt croissant pour les aspects passifs et réceptifs de la condition humaine. Cet intérêt s’accompagne souvent d’une critique selon laquelle la philosophie «occidentale» négligerait à tort ces aspects en raison d’un «biais d’agentivité». Cette critique a également été émise à l’endroit de la philosophie de Charles Taylor. J’entends montrer ici que cette critique, bien qu’elle ait en principe une certaine force, ne peut raisonnablement s’appliquer dans le cas de Taylor. J’analyserai (...) |
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This paper is a reconstruction of Walter Benjamin's philosophy of language, especially as it expressed in 1916's “On Language as Such and the Language of Man”. I read Benjamin's theory as a contribution to what Charles Taylor has called the “expressivist” tradition that includes eighteenth century thinkers like J.G. Herder and J.G. Hamann. Hamann's work and his interpretation of the theological concept of condescension are of particular importance. Although Benjamin's views are often regarded as impenetrable or mystical, they are relevant (...) |
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