This essay argues that the pervasive twentieth century understanding of meaning — a sign stands for an object — is incorrect. In its place, it offers the following definition, which is framed not in terms of a single relation, but in terms of a relation between two relations : a sign stands for its object on the one hand, and its interpretant on the other, in such a way as to make the interpretant stand in relation to the object corresponding (...) to it own relation to the object. Using this definition, it reanalyzes key concepts and foundational arguments from linguistics so far as they relate to anthropology and psychology. Such terms include: concept, intentional state, motivation, ground, iconicity, speech community, norm, performativity, joint-attention, embodiment, intersubjectivity, agency, role, functionalism, pragmatics, social construction, realism, and natural language. (shrink)

In this original and provocative account of the evolutionary origins of human communication, Michael Tomasello connects the fundamentally cooperative structure of human communication (initially discovered by Paul Grice) to the especially ...

Analyzes the nature of international disagreements and conflict resolution in terms of game theory and non-zero-sum games.

For this second edition, the editors have returned to Austin's original lecture notes, amending the printed text where it seemed necessary.

Little, Brown, 1992 Review by Glenn Branch on Jul 5th 1999 Volume: 3, Number: 27.

This book offers original accounts of a number of central social phenomena, many of which have received little if any prior philosophical attention. These phenomena include social groups, group languages, acting together, collective belief, mutual recognition, and social convention. In the course of developing her analyses Gilbert discusses the work of Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Max Weber, David Lewis, among others.

Herbert Clark argues that language use is more than the sum of a speaker speaking and a listener listening. It is the joint action that emerges when speakers and listeners, writers and readers perform their individual actions in coordination, as ensembles. In contrast to work within the cognitive sciences, which has seen language use as an individual process, and to work within the social sciences, which has seen it as a social process, the author argues strongly that language use embodies (...) both individual and social processes. (shrink)

The article is the first Russian translation of the most well-known piece in conversation analysis, written by the founders of CA Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff and Gail Jefferson. It has become a milestone in the development of the discipline. The authors offer a comprehensive approach to the study of conversational interactions. The approach is based on the analysis of detailed transcripts of the records of natural conversations. The authors show that in the course of the conversation co-conversationalists use a number (...) of techniques to organize the turn-taking. These techniques are combined in four rules: the first option is the transfer of speakership via allocation of the next speaker by the current speaker; if this first option is not realized, turn-taking may happen via the self-selection by one of the participants; if the second option remains unrealized too, the current speaker continues speaking, with all three options being recurrently provided at all next transition relevant places. The result of the operation of these rules is an orderly conversation based on the principle “one speaker at a time.” According to the authors, this model is compatible with obvious observations concerning conversational practices that they make. The authors show that in every conversation there is a turn-taking system in operation, which provides for a flexible adaptation of the every conversation’s structure to any possible topics and any possible speakers’ identities. Such approach considers how the participants in social interactions order their communication with each other, achieving a sense of normally occurring interaction. (shrink)

The renowned philosopher John Searle reveals the fundamental nature of social reality. What kinds of things are money, property, governments, nations, marriages, cocktail parties, and football games? Searle explains the key role played by language in the creation, constitution, and maintenance of social reality. We make statements about social facts that are completely objective, for example: Barack Obama is President of the United States, the piece of paper in my hand is a twenty-dollar bill, I got married in London, etc. (...) And yet these facts only exist because we think they exist. How is it possible that we can have factual objective knowledge of a reality that is created by subjective opinions? This is part of a much larger question: How can we give an account of ourselves, with our peculiar human traits DS mind, reason, freedom, society - in a world that we know independently consists of mindless, meaningless particles? How can we account for our social and mental existence in a realm of brute physical facts? In answering this question, Searle avoids postulating different realms of being, a mental and a physical, or worse yet, a mental, a physical, and a social. There is just one reality: Searle shows how the human reality fits into that one reality. Mind, language, and civilization are natural products of the basic facts of the physical world described by physics, chemistry and biology. Searle explains how language creates and maintains the elaborate structures of human social institutions. These institutions serve to create and distribute power relations that are pervasive and often invisible. These power relations motivate human actions in a way that provides the glue that holds human civilization together. Searle shows how this account illuminates human rationality, free will, political power, and human rights. Our social world is a world created and maintained by language. (shrink)

Although there is no lack of reasons for conversation analysis to be reluctant to adopt a cognitivist idiom and paradigm in studying talk and other conduct in interaction, examination of the literature with an open mind will disclose attentiveness to such themes in the conversation-analytic literature nonetheless. The pursuit of such themes however, cannot be appropriately and successfully conducted under the aegis of currently dominant cognitivist paradigms. One central analytic resource in CA work is the notion of a ‘possible X’, (...) a resource which is here described and exemplified for three discrete ‘values’ of ‘X’. The understanding of how such ‘possible Xs’ could work for participants in interaction invites understanding by analysts by reference to a ‘multiple passes’ model of uptake, a characterization which for now can be no more than metaphoric. Here is a venue at which conversation-analysts and neuro/cognitive analysts might usefully try to work together. (shrink)