The literature on epistemic injustice has thus far confined the concept of testimonial injustice to speech expressions such as inquiring, discussing, deliberating, and, above all, telling. I propose that it is time to broaden the horizons of testimonial injustice to include a wider range of expressions. Controversially, the form of communication I have in mind is non-verbal expression. Non-verbal expression is a vital, though often overlooked, form of communication, particularly for people who have certain neurocognitive disorders. (...) Dependency upon non-verbal expression is a common feature of some forms of neurocognitive disorders such as ‘intellectual disabilities’, autism and late-stage dementia. According to the narrow definition of testimonial injustice currently championed in the literature, people who express non-verbally are exempt from testimonial injustice. However, when we consider cases where meaningful communications from non-verbal people are dismissed or ignored in virtue of identity prejudice, there seems to be a distinct testimonial harm at play. Using late-stage dementia as a case study, I argue that the definition of testimonial injustice should be expanded to include all communicative practices, whether verbal or non-verbal, to encompass the epistemic harms inflicted upon some of the most marginalised in our society. (shrink)

The study investigated university workers’ perception of the verbal and non-verbal communication variables that are important to workplace peace. Three research questions were posed. Questionnaires were used for data collection. The analysis was done using simple percentages. The results showed that for verbal communication, participants considered a rich vocabulary and good diction as very important to workplace peace. For non-verbal communication, politeness and words of endearment were rated most important to workplace peace.

Since its inception, a core aspiration of deliberative democracy has been to enable more and better inclusion within democratic politics. In this article, we argue that deliberative democracy can achieve this aspiration only if it goes beyond verbal forms of communication and acknowledges the crucial role of non-verbal communication in expressing and exchanging arguments. The article develops a multidimensional approach to deliberative democracy by emphasizing the visual, sonic and physical dimensions of communication in public deliberation. (...) We argue that non-verbal modes of communication can contribute to public deliberation when they (1) are used as part of reason-giving processes, (2) enable the inclusion of marginalized actors in public debates and (3) induce reflection and encourage new ways of thinking about the public controversies at hand. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This article deals with the communicational aspects of Aristotle’s theory of signification as laid out in the initial chapters of the De Interpretatione (Int.).1 We begin by outlining the reception and main interpretations of the chapters under discussion, rather siding with the linguistic strand. We then argue that the first four chapters present an account of verbal communication, in which words signify things via thoughts. We show how Aristotle determines voice as a conventional and hence accidental medium (...) of signification: words as ‘spoken sounds’ are tokens of thoughts, which in turn are signs or natural likenesses of things. We argue that, in this way, linguistic expressions may both signify thoughts and refer to things. This double account of signification also explains the variety of ontological, logical and psychological interpretations of the initial chapters of Int. (shrink)

In this chapter we argue that emotions are mediated in an incomplete way in online social media because of the heavy reliance on textual messages which fosters a rationalistic bias and an inclination towards less nuanced emotional expressions. This incompleteness can happen either by obscuring emotions, showing less than the original intensity, misinterpreting emotions, or eliciting emotions without feedback and context. Online interactions and deliberations tend to contribute rather than overcome stalemates and informational bubbles, partially due to prevalence of anti-social (...) emotions. It is tempting to see emotions as being the cause of the problem of online verbal aggression and bullying. However, we argue that social media are actually designed in a predominantly rationalistic way, because of the reliance on text-based communication, thereby filtering out social emotions and leaving space for easily expressed antisocial emotions. Based on research on emotions that sees these as key ingredients to moral interaction and deliberation, as well as on research on text-based versus non-verbal communication, we propose a richer understanding of emotions, requiring different designs of online deliberation platforms. We propose that such designs should move from text-centred designs and should find ways to incorporate the complete expression of the full range of human emotions so that these can play a constructive role in online deliberations. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that, in order to account for the apparently substantive nature of definitional disputes, a commitment to what we call ‘Socratic essentialism’ is needed. We defend Socratic essentialism against a prominent neo-Carnapian challenge according to which apparently substantive definitional disputes always in some way trace back to disagreements over how expressions belonging to a particular language or concepts belonging to a certain conceptual scheme are properly used. Socratic essentialism, we argue, is not threatened by the possibility (...) that some apparently substantive definitional disputes may turn out to be verbal or conceptual, since this pluralist strategy, in our view, requires a commitment to more, rather than fewer, essences. What is more, a deflationary, metaphysically ‘light-weight’ construal of the essence-ascriptions in question leads to a peculiar conception of the pursuit of metaphysicians as behaving like deceptive (or self-deceived) grammarians pretending to be scientists. Moreover, this deflationary attitude, we argue, spreads beyond metaphysics and philosophy more broadly to apparently substantive definitional disputes in the sciences as well as other in other disciplines, such as art criticism. (shrink)

It is now over twenty years since Premack and Woodruff posed the question, ‘Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind?’—‘by which we meant’, explained Premack in a later reappraisal, ‘does the ape do what humans do: attribute states of mind to the other one, and use these states to predict and explain the behaviour of the other one? For example, does the ape wonder, while looking quizzically at another individual, What does he reallywant?What does hebelieve?What are hisintentions?'.

Bodily rhetoric is a burgeoning field, with scholars investing attention to the ways in which non-verbal communication mediates change between individuals and groups in complex scenarios, including political settings. Scenarios in which individuals move together – whether in completely extemporaneous situations or in existing forms such as Contact Improvisation, Argentinian Tango, or Classical Pas de Deux – pose a similarly complex communicative problem. Drawing on the work of Lloyd Bitzer, I demonstrate how rhetorical theory provides methodological insight by (...) which we can better understand the dynamic practice that is always already happening in situations where individuals move together. (shrink)

In the article, the author analyzes the problems of human-computer communication in the context of artificial intelligence, augmented reality and a Turing methodology for comparing the capabilities of artificial and natural intelligence in a dialogue. It is argued that the tool with which the computer and humans communicate is of no less importance than the computer program with which the dialogue is conducted. As an example of the implementation of such visualization, the project “E.LENA” of a digital television anchor (...) created at the Sberbank Robotics Laboratory was considered. The author gives his own version of Turing's specific test to study the features of non- verbal communication interfaces between a person and a computer. The key idea formulated by the author for further discussion is to provide artificial intelligence with visual avatar in order to avoid the alienation of man and computer and the loss of semantic information during its transmission from computer to person. (shrink)

The Philosophy for Children in Schools Project (P4CISP) is a research project to monitor and evaluate the impact of Philosophy for Children (P4C) on classroom practices. In this paper the impact of P4C on the thinking skills of you children aged 10 is examined. Standardised tests indicated the children had below-average reading ages. The pupils were video recorded while engaged in discussion of questions they had formulated themselves in response to a series of texts in preparation for a community of (...) philosophical enquire. Group discussions were analysed, paying attention to verbal and non-verbal communication. We argue that reading scores do not necessarily indicate inability to engage in literate thinking. When dialogic approaches are used and pupils are given opportunities to work in small group to formulate their own questions and evaluate their potential for generating enquiry, they demonstrate their ability to use higher-order language skills. Dialogic approaches can challenge the hegemonic impact of standardised testing that dominates modern schooling A dialogic approach to teaching listens to pupil voice and has the potential to change how adults view children and contribute to an epistemological paradigm shift away from positivism towards dialogism. (shrink)

The field of language evolution has recently made Gricean pragmatics central to its task, particularly within comparative studies between human and non-human primate communication. The standard model of Gricean communication requires a set of complex cognitive abilities, such as belief attribution and understanding nested higher-order mental states. On this model, non-human primate communication is then of a radically different kind to ours. Moreover, the cognitive demands in the standard view are also too high for human infants, who (...) nevertheless do engage in communication. In this paper I critically assess the standard view and contrast it with an alternative, minimal model of Gricean communication recently advanced by Richard Moore. I then raise two objections to the minimal model. The upshot is that this model is conceptually unstable and fails to constitute a suitable alternative as a middle ground between full-fledged human communication and simpler forms of non-human animal communication. (shrink)

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted (...) with three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment. (shrink)

The relationship between animal rights and contractarian theories of justice such as that of Rawls has long been vexed. In this article, I contribute to the debate over the possibility of inclusion of animals in Rawls’s theory of justice by critiquing the rationale he gives for their omission: that they do not possess moral personality. Contrary to Rawls’s assumptions, it appears that some animals may possess the moral powers that comprise moral personality, albeit to a lesser extent than most humans. (...) Some animals can act in pursuit of preferences and desires (and communicate them non-verbally), which might be taken as implicitly selecting a conception of the good; further, scientific research demonstrating inequity aversion and social play behaviors suggests that some animals can have a sense of justice relating to their own social groups. I conclude that Rawls’s theory needs to acknowledge any animals that can be considered to meet the threshold of moral personality, while the concept of moral personality as a range property may also require reconsideration. (shrink)

Urban residents have the potential to play a key role in helping to facilitate ecological resilience of wilderness areas and ecosystems beyond the city by helping ensure the migration of nonhuman climate refugee populations. Three ethical frameworks related to this issue could determine whether we have an ethical duty to help nonhuman climate refugee populations: ethical individualism, ethical holism, and species ethics. Using each of these frameworks could support the stronger view that policy makers and members of the public have (...) a moral duty to mitigate the impacts of climate induced migration, or the weaker claim that these impacts should be taken into account when making land-use and planning decisions in urban contexts. (shrink)

There are many factors that may affect the analysis of ethical problems: the physical acts that occur, the relevant history, verbal communication, contracts, etc. One factor that can be difficult to incorporate is the role that socials norms play. This is because norms can vary widely between societies, and even within societies individuals are not usually consciously aware of the norms that they act upon. This paper examines how norms can effect ethical problems and gives one approach for (...) investigating their effect. (shrink)

Even if the “value-free ideal of science” (VFI) were an unattainable goal, one could ask: can it be a useful fiction, one that is beneficial for the research community and society? This question is particularly crucial for scholars and institutions concerned with research integrity (RI), as one cannot offer normative guidance to researchers without making some assumptions about what ideal scientific research looks like. Despite the insofar little interaction between scholars studying RI and those working on values in science, the (...) overlap of topics and interests make collaboration between the two fields promising for understanding research and its ethics. Here, we identify—for the use of RI scholars—the non-epistemic reasons (societal, political, professional) for and against the VFI considered in the literature. All of these are concerned with the beneficial or detrimental consequences that endorsing the VFI would have on society, policy-making, or the scientific community, with some authors appealing to the same principles to argue for opposite positions. Though most of the reviewed articles do not endorse the VFI, it is generally agreed that some constraints have to be put on the use of non-epistemic values. Disagreement on the utility of the VFI lies both on the different epistemic-descriptive positions taken by different authors, and on the scarcity of relevant empirical studies. Engaging critically with the reasons here identified and more in general with the values in science debate will help the RI community decide whether the VFI should be included in future codes of conduct. (shrink)

Verbal irony constitutes a rough class of indirect intentional communication involving a complex interaction of language-specific and communication-general phenomena. Conversationalists use verbal irony in conjunction with paralinguistic signals such as speech prosody. Researchers examining acoustic features of speech communication usually focus on how prosodic information relates to the surface structure of utterances, and often ignore prosodic phenomena associated with implied meaning. In the case of verbal irony, there exists some debate concerning how these prosodic (...) features manifest themselves in conversation. A form-function approach can provide a valuable tool for understanding speakers' varied vocal strategies in this domain. Here I describe several ways conversationalists employ prosodic contrasts, laughter, and other speech characteristics in their attempts to communicate effectively and efficiently. The presented examples, culled from spontaneous conversation recordings, reveal just a small sample of the enormous variation in delivery styles speakers adopt when communicating with ironic language. (shrink)

A satisfactory theory of linguistic communication must explain how it is that, through the interpersonal exchange of auditory, visual, and tactile stimuli, the communicative preconditions for the acquisition of testimonial knowledge regularly come to be satisfied. Without an account of knowledge-yielding communication this success condition for linguistic theorizing is left opaque, and we are left with an incomplete understanding of testimony, and communication more generally, as a source of knowledge. This paper argues that knowledge-yielding communication should (...) be modelled on knowledge itself. It is argued that knowledge-yielding communication occurs iff interlocutors coordinate on truth values in a non-lucky and non-deviant way. This account is able to do significant explanatory work: it sheds light on the nature of referential communication, and it allows us to capture, in an informative way, the sense in which interlocutors must entertain similar propositions in order to communicate successfully. (shrink)

The article proposes to further develop the ideas of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis by including into evolutionary research an analysis of phenomena that occur above the organismal level. We demonstrate that the current Extended Synthesis is focused more on individual traits (genetically or non-genetically inherited) and less on community system traits (synergetic/organizational traits) that characterize transgenerational biological, ecological, social, and cultural systems. In this regard, we will consider various communities that are made up of interacting populations, and for which the (...) individual members can belong to the same or to different species. Examples of communities include biofilms, ant colonies, symbiotic associations resulting in holobiont formation, and human societies. The proposed model of evolution at the level of communities revises classic theorizing on the major transitions in evolution by analyzing the interplay between community/social traits and individual traits, and how this brings forth ideas of top-down regulations of bottom-up evolutionary processes (collaboration of downward and upward causation). The work demonstrates that such interplay also includes reticulate interactions and reticulate causation. In this regard, we exemplify how community systems provide various non-genetic ‘scaffoldings’, ‘constraints’, and ‘affordances’ for individual and sociocultural evolutionary development. Such research complements prevailing models that focus on the vertical transmission of heritable information, from parent to offspring, with research that instead focusses on horizontal, oblique and even reverse information transmission, going from offspring to parent. We call this reversed information transfer the ‘offspring effect’ to contrast it from the ‘parental effect’. We argue that the proposed approach to inheritance is effective for modelling cumulative and distributed developmental process and for explaining the biological origins and evolution of language. (shrink)

Two main claims are defended in this paper: first, that typical disputes in the literature about the ontology of physical objects are merely verbal; second, that the proper way to resolve these disputes is by appealing to common sense or ordinary language. A verbal dispute is characterized not in terms of private idiolects, but in terms of different linguistic communities representing different positions. If we imagine a community that makes Chisholm's mereological essentialist assertions, and another community that makes (...) Lewis's four-dimensionalist assertions, the members of each community speak the truth in their respective languages. This follows from an application of the principle of interpretive charity to the two communities. (shrink)

This paper explores the significance of intelligent social behavior among non-human animals for philosophical theories of communication. Using the alarm call system of vervet monkeys as a case study, I argue that interpersonal communication (or what I call “minded communication”) can and does take place in the absence of the production and recognition of communicative intentions. More generally, I argue that evolutionary theory provides good reasons for maintaining that minded communication is both temporally and explanatorily prior (...) to the use of communicative intentions. After developing these negative points about the place of communicative intentions in detail, I provide a novel alternative account according to which minded communication is characterized in terms of patterns of action and response that function to coordinate the representational mental states of agents. I show that an account which centers on patterns of representational coordination of this sort is well suited to capture the theoretical roles associated with minded communication and that it does so in a way that provides a good fit with comparative facts about the presence of minded communication among non-human animals. (shrink)

This paper is on the metaphysics and normativity of Jewish identity. It starts with a metaphysical question: “Can a Jewish person become non-Jewish?” This question and the related question “What is Jewishness?” are both ambiguous, because the word “Jewish” is ambiguous. The paper outlines five concepts of Jewishness: halachic, religious, ethnic, and cultural Jewishness, as well as being Jewish in the sense of belonging to the Jewish community. In some of these senses of “Jewish” a Jewish person is always Jewish. (...) In other senses a Jewish person can become non-Jewish. The paper closes with a normative question: Should a person who is Jewish, in the sense of belonging to the Jewish community, become non-Jewish? The paper explains reasons for and against staying in the Jewish community and in doing so highlights a tension, rather than telling anyone how they should identify. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine effective communication management and the performance of tertiary institutions in Cross River State. Three hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The study adopted a correlational design and was conducted using Cross River State College of Education, Akamkpa as case study. A proportionate stratified random sampling technique was used to select 30 per cent each from a total of 176 academic staff and 215 Non-academic staff in the institution. A total of (...) 53 Academic and 66 Non Academic Staff were selected resulting in a sample of 119 participants. A questionnaire titled Effective Communication Management and Performance of Tertiary Institutions Questionnaire (ECMAPOTIQ), was used as the instrument for data was used as the instrument for data collection. The collected data were analysed and the hypotheses were tested using Chi Square test of tested using Chi Square test of independence at .05 level of significance. The findings revealed that effective communication management has a significant relationship with human relationship, work performance and organizational goal attainment. Based on these findings, it was concluded that effective goal attainment. Based on these findings, it was concluded that effective communication leads to good human relationship, promotes work performance and organizational goal attainment. It was recommended among others that educational managers should make efforts to adopt good communication skills to enable them communicate effectively; workers should adopt proper communication strategies if they are to promote good relationship among co-workers and the managers. (shrink)

It is fundamental that, in philosophy, we make sure that we are not mistaking merely verbal disputes, or “conceptual” disputes, for substantive ones. This essay presents a tripartite framework that is useful for clarifying cases where it is difficult to tell whether we are engaged in substantive or non-substantive disputes. For this purpose, the essay offers some combinatorial possibilities between the following levels: verbal, conceptual, and objectual. We need to distinguish whether we are arguing about the world, concepts, (...) or words to avoid talking at cross-purposes and to recognize when our disputes are not worth the time. Distinguishing between these three levels can also throw light and guide research on conceptual engineering, metalinguistic negotiations, metaontology, and so on. (shrink)

Frege-Geach worries about embedding and composition have plagued metaethical theories like emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. The sharpened point of such criticism has come to focus on whether negation and inconsistency have to be understood in descriptivist terms. Because they reject descriptivism, these theories must offer a non-standard account of the meanings of ethical and normative sentences as well as related semantic facts, such as why certain sentences are inconsistent with each other. This paper fills out such a solution to the (...) negation problems, following some of the original emotivist ideas about the interplay of interests in conversation. We communicate both to share information and coordinate our actions, and we use distinctively normative language like deontic ‘must’ and ‘may’ to negotiate what people are to do. The kinds of disagreement involved in such negotiation can illuminate the issues with negation and inconsistency. This paper outlines a dynamic semantic system in which these ideas can bear fruit, developing the scorekeeping model of conversation. The result is clarification about what Frege-Geach worries can mean for nondescriptive semantics. (shrink)

I argue for the Cooperative Warrant Thesis (CWT), according to which the determinants of testimonial contents in communication are given by the practical requirements of cooperative action. This thesis distances itself from conventionalist views, according to which testimony must be strictly bounded by conventions of speech. CWT proves explanatorily better than conventionalism on several accounts. It offers a principled and accurate criterion to distinguish between testimonial and non-testimonial communication. In being goal-sensitive, this criterion captures the role of weak (...) and robust cooperation in determining the contents to which speakers testify or fail to testify. And, finally, it yields a principled explanation of why testimony entails the epistemic commitments that distinguish it as an epistemic source. (shrink)

The chapter discusses two points of intersection between the communication of science-based information about risk and philosophical ethics. The first is a logically unnecessary bias toward consequentialist ethics, and a corresponding tendency to overlook the significance of deontological and virtue based ways to interpret the findings of a scientific risk analysis. The second is a grammatical bias that puts scientific communicators at odds with the expectations of a non-scientific audience.

Humankind is currently confronted with a critical challenge that determines its very existence, not only on an individual, racial, or national level but as a whole species: the fight against climate change and environmental degradation. To win this battle, humanity needs innovations and non-linear thinking. Nature has long been a substantial information source for unthinkable discoveries that save human lives. The paper suggests that by understanding the nature, emergence, and mechanism of serendipity, the survival skill of humans, humanity can capitalize (...) on it to learn from nature and generate nature-based innovations that can address the climate and environmental degradation crises. In the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) proliferation, AI will be a vital tool providing navigational and useful information to leverage the power of serendipity in climate and sustainability science. However, an eco-surplus culture that incorporates core values pertaining to nature and sees environmental sustainability as the conscience of the times needs to be built to direct and control the immense power of AI-leveraged serendipity. Insights applied in this paper are drawn from the book titled “A New Theory of Serendipity: Nature, Emergence and Mechanism”. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being (...) in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

This article argues against the concept of integration as the main mechanism allowing various sociocultural groups to live together and instead proposes ‘radical inclusivity’ as a better, less oppressive model of a pluralistic society. Through analytical and reflective research on the non-cohesion-based approach to integration or inclusion, this article is devoted to examining the affordances and limitations of integration through various forms of spatial interventions. As an example, we will discuss the Ellesmere Green Project in Sheffield (UK) as a typical (...) small urban regeneration executed in a highly diverse part of Sheffield. This piece aims to bring forward the significance of moving beyond the community-as-cohesion model in urban politics and planning for integration. (shrink)

In this article, we describe a project in which philosophy, in combination with methods drawn from mental modeling, was used to structure dialogue among stakeholders in a region-scale climate adaptation process. The case study we discuss synthesizes the Toolbox dialogue method, a philosophically grounded approach to enhancing communication and collaboration in complex research and practice, with a mental modeling approach rooted in risk analysis, assessment, and communication to structure conversations among non-academic stakeholders who have a common interest in (...) planning for a sustainable future. We begin by describing the background of this project, including details about climate resiliency efforts in West Michigan and the Toolbox dialogue method, which was extended in this project from academic research into community organization involving the West Michigan Climate Resiliency Framework Initiative. This extension involved application of several methods, which are the focus of the Methods section. We then present and discuss preliminary results that suggest the potential for philosophical dialogue to enhance mutual understanding in complex community initiatives that focus on sustainable responses to climate change. Overall, the article supplies a detailed, instructive example of how philosophy can support policy-relevant decision-making processes at the community level. (shrink)

Philosophers of language are increasingly engaging with derogatory terms or slurs. Only few theorists take such language as a starting point for addressing puzzles in philosophy of language with little connection to our real-world problems. This paper aims to show that the political nature of derogatory language use calls for non-ideal theorising as we find it in the work of feminist and critical race scholars. Most contemporary theories of slurs, so I argue, fall short on some desiderata associated with a (...) non-ideal approach. They neglect crucial linguistic or political aspects of morally and politically significant meaning. I argue that a two-stage project is necessary to understand the perniciousness of slurs: accounting for the derogatory content of derogatory terms in general and, additionally, explaining the communicative function of slurs more specifically. I end by showing how inferentialism is well-suited to account for the content of derogatory terms whilst allowing for further explanations of the communicative functions of slurs. (shrink)

Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person’s abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response—as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept to be (...) abstract, we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness—termed Trial Concreteness—that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments. (shrink)

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being (...) in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature –change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative. (shrink)

In Philosophy for Children (P4C), consensus-making is often regarded as something that needs to be avoided. P4C scholars believe that consensus-making would dismiss P4C’s ideals, such as freedom, inclusiveness, and diversity. This paper aims to counteract such assumptions, arguing that P4C scholars tend to focus on a narrow, or universal, concept of “consensus” and dismiss various forms of consensus, especially what Niemeyer and Dryzek (2007) call meta-consensus. Meta-consensus does not search for universal consensus, but focuses on the process by which (...) people achieve various non-universal forms of consensus, such as agreement on the value of opponents’ normative view or agreement on the degree to which they accept opponents’ view. This paper argues that such meta-consensus is a key part of what Clinton Golding (2009) calls “philosophical progress,” which is the essential element that makes inquiry philosophical. In other words, without meta-consensus and philosophical progress, inquiry ends in merely conversation or antagonistic talk. Drawing on the example of P4C conducted with Japanese students, this paper shows how meta-consensus is achieved in the community of philosophical inquiry and how it contributes to make inquiry philosophical. (shrink)

For four decades Ifeanyi Menkiti has addressed the question of which sort of community constitutes personhood from a characteristically African perspective. In this chapter, I critically discuss the conceptions of how one acquires personhood through community that Menkiti has advanced, in search of the one that would most enable him to avoid prominent moral objections made to his views over the years. In particular, his account of personhood has been criticized for insufficiently accommodating individual difference, most recently in respect of (...) gender and sexuality. I draw on the resources in Menkiti’s work for rebutting this line of criticism, but contend that, even if he can avoid that one, another, new objection looms large: because of Menkiti’s claim that reciprocity is central to community, he is committed to the view that human infants and mentally incapacitated adults lack moral standing, in the way he explicitly believes animals lack it. After showing that, according to Menkiti’s strongest conception of personhood, one counterintuitively cannot acquire it in the course of interacting with any non-persons, I articulate an alternative conception of how to understand the role of community in acquiring personhood that avoids this problem as well as the other ones discussed. (shrink)

Communication problems not only every year arouse more and more interest among people of different ages, diffrent professions and education, but, above all, are a necessary component of the professional competence of specialists in all areas of their activity. In 1941, Fethullah Gülen, an Islamic scholar and Turkish public figure, said that "thanks to advances in communications and transport, one of the driving forces of globalization, the distances between countries and peoples are rapidly blurring". But during communication, a (...) person commits many mistakes and stupidities. Foolishness is visible in those moments when a person should be silent, and he speaks, or when it is necessary to speak, and he is silent, - Zufar Fatkudinov said. The same thing happens in entrepreneurial communications. Business communications are a set of contacts in the business environment that each firm establishes and reproduces in the process of carrying out entrepreneurial actions, participation in business relations. Business communications are interfirm or intrafirm in nature. Business communications should be distinguished from ordinary communication. They represent ways of organizing the interaction of business entities with their intra-firm and inter-firm environment, during which all parties of the interaction strive to defend their interests in business. The materials of this book can be used in the study of the disciplines "Ethics of business relations", "Business communication", "Psychology of business communication", "Psychology of management" in higher and secondary educational institutions. The textbook is practically oriented: at the end of each chapter there are control questions and tasks, as well as literature for independent study. (shrink)

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) and community engaged research (CEnR) are key to promoting community and patient engagement in actionable evidence-based strategies to improve research for health equity. Rapid growth of CBPR/CEnR research projects have led to the broad adoption of partnering principles in community-academic partnerships and among some health and academic organizations. Yet, transformation of principles into best practices that foster trust, shared power, and equity outcomes still remain fragmented, are dependent on individuals with long term projects, or are non-existent. (...) This paper describes how we designed our Engage for Equity PLUS intervention that leverages the leadership and membership of champion teams (including community-engaged faculty, community partners and patient advocates) to improve organizational policies and practices to support equity based CBPR/CEnR. (shrink)

Identification of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) has been significantly enhanced due to the rapid advancement in sequencing technologies. On the other hand, semantic annotation of ncRNA data lag behind their identification, and there is a great need to effectively integrate discovery from relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a precisely defined ncRNA controlled vocabulary, which can fill a specific and highly needed niche in unification of ncRNA biology.

According to the Behavioral View of consent, consent must be expressed in behavior in order to release someone from a duty. By contrast, the Mental View of consent is that normatively efficacious consent is entirely mental. In previous work, I defended a version of the Behavioral View, according to which normatively efficacious ‘consent always requires public behavior, and this behavior must take the form of communication in the case of high-stakes consent’. In this essay, I respond to two arguments (...) by proponents of the Mental View. First, Larry Alexander, Heidi Hurd and Peter Westen have argued that my view has mistaken implications concerning the culpability of different actors. I counter that my version of the view does not have these implications, as it leaves us free to draw moral and legal distinctions between different offences involving non-consensual behavior. Second, Larry Alexander and Kimberly Ferzan have argued for an analogy between consent and abandonment: on the grounds that the normative power to abandon resides in one’s will, Alexander and Ferzan concludes consent does too. I counter that abandonment requires behavior, and call into question the assumption that the ethics of property have much to teach us about the ethics of sexual consent. (shrink)

In recent years, sequencing technologies have enabled the identification of a wide range of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs). Unfortunately, annotation and integration of ncRNA data has lagged behind their identification. Given the large quantity of information being obtained in this area, there emerges an urgent need to integrate what is being discovered by a broad range of relevant communities. To this end, the Non-Coding RNA Ontology (NCRO) is being developed to provide a systematically structured and precisely defined controlled vocabulary for the (...) domain of ncRNAs, thereby facilitating the discovery, curation, analysis, exchange, and reasoning of data about structures of ncRNAs, their molecular and cellular functions, and their impacts upon phenotypes. The goal of NCRO is to serve as a common resource for annotations of diverse research in a way that will significantly enhance integrative and comparative analysis of the myriad resources currently housed in disparate sources. It is our belief that the NCRO ontology can perform an important role in the comprehensive unification of ncRNA biology and, indeed, fill a critical gap in both the Open Biological and Biomedical Ontologies (OBO) Library and the National Center for Biomedical Ontology (NCBO) BioPortal. Our initial focus is on the ontological representation of small regulatory ncRNAs, which we see as the first step in providing a resource for the annotation of data about all forms of ncRNAs. The NCRO ontology is free and open to all users. (shrink)

The paper presents an inferential model of explicit communication based on the speaker’s interests and the addressee’s beliefs. After the introduction, the paper sets out some notions concerning explicit communication within the frameworks of truth-conditional pragmatics and relevance theory. The third section describes the phenomenon of semantic underdeterminacy, and the fourth section introduces non-demonstrative inferences in communication. The fifth section presents the model. The main notions involved are the speaker’s intended meaning and the addressee’s intended meaning. The (...) former notion is centered on the speaker’s interest in situation: a speaker intends the meaning of an utterance on the basis of a partial order of preference with respect to a set of contextually plausible meanings. The latter notion is centered on the addressee’s communicative inference, which is based on the addressee’s belief about the speaker’s interest. The paper takes the notion of interest from cognitive social theory, the notion of meaning from semantics, and the notion of explicit meaning from pragmatics; and it uses the notion of communicative inference for explicit meaning in partial accordance with relevance theory. In the sixth section, the paper argues in favor of the inferential approach compared with the associative approach in determination of “what is said.” The paper’s method is conceptual analysis of declarative utterances used in communicative situations. The main finding of the paper has been to show that, in contextual underdeterminacy cases, speaker’s interest is a determining factor in communicative processes. Keywords: states of affairs; truth-conditions; semantic underdeterminacy; contextual underdeterminacy; speaker’s interest; goal-conditions; speaker’s intended meaning; addressee’s belief; communicative inference; addressee’s intended meaning; shared intended meaning; explicit communication. (shrink)

In this work, we focus on the philosophical aspects and technical challenges that underlie the axiomatization of the non-Kolmogorovian probability framework, in connection with the problem of quantum contextuality. This fundamental feature of quantum theory has received a lot of attention recently, given that it might be connected to the speed-up of quantum computers—a phenomenon that is not fully understood. Although this problem has been extensively studied in the physics community, there are still many philosophical questions that should be properly (...) formulated. We analyzed different problems from a conceptual standpoint using the non-Kolmogorovian probability approach as a technical tool. (shrink)

Does utterance understanding require reliable (i.e. non-lucky) recovery of the speaker’s intended proposition? There are good reasons to answer in the affirmative: the role of understanding in supporting testimonial knowledge seemingly requires such reliability. Moreover, there seem to be communicative analogues of Gettier cases in which luck precludes the audience’s understanding an utterance despite recovering the intended proposition. Yet, there are some major problems with the view that understanding requires such reliability. Firstly, there are a number of cases in which (...) understanding seems to occur in a lucky way. In light of these cases I argue that we need to narrow down the precise sense in which understanding precludes luck – the anti-luck condition attached to linguistic understanding is importantly different to anti-luck conditions typically applied to knowledge. Secondly, Megan Hyska has recently argued that, assuming understanding precludes luck, we get a communicative analogue of the value problem for knowledge. i.e. why is it better to meet the other conditions for understanding in a reliable way than in a lucky way? It is natural to assume that we can simply port over our favoured responses to the epistemic value problem in response to Hyska’s challenge. I argue that, due to the difference between epistemic and communicative luck (discussed in response to the first problem), this cannot be done. The epistemic and communicative value problems will require different solutions. I close by sketching the beginnings of an alternative answer to the value problem for communication. (shrink)

A speaker can express the same thought, true under the same conditions, while using different expressions and grammatical constructions. According to Frege, these are differences in colourings. Colourings may convey additional contents; in that, they resemble Gricean conventional implicatures. Sander (2019) argues that Gricean implicatures do not subsume the category of colourings, as some colourings do not communicate their content. I show that this argument relies on a notion of communication focused on the speaker's intentions. But a notion of (...) communicative intentions where a speaker is responsible for the intentions her audience ascribes her possible. Under this notion, since so-called non-communicative colourings trigger specific inferences, a speaker who uses them communicates these inferences. Therefore, I vindicate the communicative role of colourings with content. (shrink)

During the Covid-19 pandemic we increasingly turned to technology to stay in touch with our family, friends, and colleagues. Even as lockdowns and restrictions ease many are encouraging us to embrace the replacement of face-to-face encounters with technologically mediated ones. Yet, as philosophers of technology have highlighted, technology can transform the situations we find ourselves in. Drawing insights from the phenomenology of sociality, we consider how digitally-enabled forms of communication and sociality impact our experience of one another. In particular, (...) we draw attention to the way in which our embodied experience of one another is altered when we meet in digital spaces, taking as our focus the themes of perceptual access, intercorporeality, shared space, transitional spaces, and self-presentation. In light of the way in which technological mediation alters various dimensions of our social encounters, we argue that digital encounters constitute their own forms of sociality requiring their own phenomenological analysis. We conclude our paper by raising some broader concerns about the very framework of thinking about digitally and non-digitally mediated social encounters simply in terms of replacement. (shrink)

A central tenet of medical ethics holds that it is permissible to perform a medical intervention on a competent individual only if that individual has given informed consent to the intervention. However, in some circumstances it is tempting to say that the moral reason to obtain informed consent prior to administering a medical intervention is outweighed. For example, if an individual’s refusal to undergo a medical intervention would lead to the transmission of a dangerous infectious disease to other members of (...) the community, one might claim that it would be morally permissible to administer the intervention even in the absence of consent. Indeed, as we shall discuss below, there are a number of examples of public health authorities implementing compulsory or coercive measures for the purposes of infectious disease control (IDC). The plausibility of the thought that non-consensual medical interventions might be justified when performed for the purpose of IDC raises the question of whether such interventions might permissibly be used to realize other public goods. In this article we focus on one possibility: whether it could be permissible to non-consensually impose certain interventions that alter brain states or processes through chemical or physical means on serious criminal offenders. We shall suggest that some such interventions might be permissible if they safely and effectively serve to facilitate the offender’s rehabilitation and thereby prevent criminal recidivism. (shrink)

This article concentrates on a couple of semiotic approaches working out, on the one hand, the mediated character of reducing interpretative trajectories to the actual translation into the language of narratives (A. J. Greimas) or the language of textuality (F. Rastier), and, on the other, the direct, apparently unmediated passage to the visceral physicality of the verbal signifying system, which make semantic and syntactic components perfunctory to interpretation in a way (J. Kristeva). Greimassian universal narrative grammar dismantles signifying units, (...) navigating in the network of narrative utterances. Rastier's approach structures textual artifacts by unearthing semantic constituents crucial for semiotic analysis. Kristeva examines what is behind the curtain instead of sorting out the significance of the text's content as a special category and the possibility of procedure allowing its interpretation. These three authors are compared in the context of two approaches that come to grips with the author/reader pair. (shrink)