The surface grammar of reports such as ‘I have a pain in my leg’ suggests that pains are objects which are spatially located in parts of the body. We show that the parallel construction is not available in Mandarin. Further, four philosophically important grammatical features of such reports cannot be reproduced. This suggests that arguments and puzzles surrounding such reports may be tracking artefacts of English, rather than philosophically significant features of the world.

According to a bodily view of pain, pains are objects which are located in body parts. This bodily view is supported by the locative locutions for pain in English, such as that “I have a pain in my back.” Recently, Liu and Klein (Analysis, 80(2), 262–272, 2020) carry out a cross-linguistic analysis, and they claim that (1) Mandarin has no locative locutions for pain and (2) the absence of locative locutions for pain puts (...) the bodily view at risk. This paper rejects both claims. Regarding the philosophical claim, I argue that a language without locative locutions for pain only poses a limited challenge to the bodily view. Regarding the empirical claim, I identify the possible factors which might have misled Liu and Klein about the locative locutions for pain in Mandarin, and argue that Mandarin has a wide range of locative locutions for pain by conducting a corpus analysis. I conclude that compared to English, Mandarin lends no less, if not more, support to the bodily view of pain. (shrink)

Some philosophers argue that pain is an object located in bodily parts because the locative form of pain report is permissible in English. To examine this argument, Liu and Klein recently argue that the linguistic argument cannot work because the locative form is impermissible in Mandarin. They are wrong, however. I demonstrate that the locative form in Mandarin is not only permissible but also common.

Philosophical orthodoxy holds that pains are mental states, taking this to reflect the ordinary conception of pain. Despite this, evidence is mounting that English speakers do not tend to conceptualize pains in this way; rather, they tend to treat pains as being bodily states. We hypothesize that this is driven by two primary factors—the phenomenology of feeling pains and the surface grammar of pain reports. There is reason to expect that neither of these factors is culturally specific, however, (...) and thus reason to expect that the empirical findings for English speakers will generalize to other cultures and other languages. In this article we begin to test this hypothesis, reporting the results of two cross-cultural studies comparing judgments about the location of referred pains between two groups—Americans and South Koreans—that we might otherwise expect to differ in how they understand pains. In line with our predictions, we find that both groups tend to conceive of pains as bodily states. (shrink)

This paper provides new tools for philosophical argument analysis and fresh empirical foundations for ‘critical’ ordinary language philosophy. Language comprehension routinely involves stereotypical inferences with contextual defeaters. J.L. Austin’s Sense and Sensibilia first mooted the idea that contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from verbal case-descriptions drive some philosophical paradoxes; these engender philosophical problems that can be resolved by exposing the underlying fallacies. We build on psycholinguistic research on salience effects to explain when and why even perfectly competent speakers cannot help making (...) stereotypical inferences which are contextually inappropriate. We analyse a classical paradox about perception, suggest it relies on contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences from appearance-verbs, and show that the conditions we identified as leading to contextually inappropriate stereotypical inferences are met in formulations of the paradox. Three experiments use a forced-choice plausibility-ranking task to document the predicted inappropriate inferences, in English, German, and Japanese. The cross-linguistic study allows us to assess the wider relevance of the proposed analysis. Our findings open up new perspectives for ‘evidential’ experimental philosophy. (shrink)

I argue that pain sensations are perceptual states, namely states that represent (actual or potential) damage. I defend this position against the objection that pains, unlike standard perceptual states, do not allow for an appearance-reality distinction by arguing that in the case of pain as well as in standard perceptual experiences, cognitive penetration or malfunctions of the underlying sensory systems can lead to a dissociation between the sensation on the one hand, and what is represented on the other (...) hand. Moreover, I refute the objection that the allegedly weak correlation between pain and bodily damage forces intentionalist accounts of pain to postulate so many malfunctions (misrepresentations respectively) that such accounts become implausible. I also rebut Murat Aydede’s objection that our linguistic practice supposedly shows that there is a conceptual difference between standard perceptual experiences and pain sensations by challenging Aydede’s premise that we always withdraw standard perceptual reports in case of counterevidence, while we never do that with pain reports. At the end, I propose an explanation as to why we do not express perceptual reports of (potential) bodily damage in objectivist, but in mental terms. (shrink)

Can we find necessary and sufficient conditions for a mental state to be a pain state? That is, does pain have a nature? Or is the term ‘pain’ ambiguous? I argue here that our expression ‘pain’ lacks necessary use conditions if one considers a range of contexts. As use conditions constrain the reference class, I argue that ‘pain’ does not refer to a natural category, but binds together a bunch of loosely resembling phenomena. This leads (...) to problems for scientific and clinical discourse. To solve these, a method of explication is suggested, based on a discursive combination between analysis of first-person reports and theories of natural science. Lastly, I consider the ethical implications of this ambiguity that lead to a reformulation of the goal of pain science: Not alleviation of all pains ought to be our goal, but only manipulation of conscious and negatively emotionally charged pains. (shrink)

The free energy principle is notoriously difficult to understand. In this paper, we relate the principle to a framework that philosophers of biology are familiar with: Ruth Millikan’s teleosemantics. We argue that: systems that minimise free energy are systems with a proper function; and Karl Friston’s notion of implicit modelling can be understood in terms of Millikan’s notion of mapping relations. Our analysis reveals some surprising formal similarities between the two frameworks, and suggests interesting lines of future research. We hope (...) this will aid further philosophical evaluation of the free energy principle. (shrink)

Reductionists about dispositions must either say the natural properties are all dispositional or individuate properties hyperintensionally. Lewis stands in as an example of the sort of combination I think is incoherent: properties individuated by modal profile + categoricalism.

We present an ontology of pain and of other pain-related phenomena, building on the definition of pain provided by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Our strategy is to identify an evolutionarily basic canonical pain phenomenon, involving unpleasant sensory and emotional experience based causally in localized tissue damage that is concordant with that experience. We then show how different variant cases of this canonical pain phenomenon can be distinguished, including pain (...) that is elevated relative to peripheral trauma, pain that is caused neuropathically (thus with no necessary peripheral stimulus), and pain reports arising through deception either of self or of others. We describe how our approach can answer some of the objections raised against the IASP definition, and sketch how it can be used to support more sophisticated discrimination of different types of pain resulting in improved data analysis that can help in advancing pain research. (shrink)

Perceptualists say that having a pain in a body part consists in perceiving the part as instantiating some property. I argue that perceptualism makes better sense of the connections between pain location and the experiences undergone by people in pain than three alternative accounts that dispense with perception. Turning to fellow perceptualists, I also reject ways in which David Armstrong and Michael Tye understand and motivate perceptualism, and I propose an alternative interpretation, one that vitiates a (...) pair of objections—due to John Hyman—concerning the meaning of ‘Amy has a pain in her foot’ and the idea of bodily sensitivity. Perceptualism, I conclude, remains our best account of the location of pains. (shrink)

Over the last fifteen years, an ambitious explanatory framework has been proposed to unify explanations across biology and cognitive science. Active inference, whose most famous tenet is the free energy principle, has inspired excitement and confusion in equal measure. Here, we lay the ground for proper critical analysis of active inference, in three ways. First, we give simplified versions of its core mathematical models. Second, we outline the historical development of active inference and its relationship to other theoretical approaches. Third, (...) we describe three different kinds of claim -- labelled mathematical, empirical and general -- routinely made by proponents of the framework, and suggest dialectical links between them. Overall, we aim to increase philosophical understanding of active inference so that it may be more readily evaluated. -/- This the final submitted version of the Introduction to the Topical Collection "The Free Energy Principle: From Biology to Cognition", forthcoming in Biology & Philosophy. (shrink)

Two views on the nature and location of pain are usually contrasted. According to the first, experientialism, pain is essentially an experience, and its bodily location is illusory. According to the second, perceptualism or representationalism, pain is a perceptual or representational state, and its location is to be traced to the part of the body in which pain is felt. Against this second view, the cases of phantom, referred and chronic pain have (...) been marshalled: all these cases apparently show that one can be in pain while not having anything wrong in her body. Pain bodily location, then, would be illusory. I this paper I shall defend the representational thesis by presenting an argument against experientialism while conceding that the appearance / reality distinction collapses. A crucial role in such identification is played by deictics. In reporting that we feel pain here, the deictic directly refers to the bodily part as coinciding with the part as represented. So, pain location is not illusory. The upshot is that the body location is part and parcel of the representational content of pain states, a representation built up from the body map. (shrink)

The debate over the merits of originalism has advanced considerably in recent years, both in terms of its intellectual sophistication and its practical significance. In the process, some prominent originalists—Lawrence Solum and Jeffrey Goldsworthy being the two discussed here—have been at pains to separate out the linguistic and normative components of the theory. For these authors, while it is true that judges and other legal decision-makers ought to be originalists, it is also true that the communicated content of the (...) constitution is its original meaning. That is to say: the meaning is what it is, not what it should be. Accordingly, there is no sense in which the communicated content of the constitution is determined by reference to moral desiderata; linguistic desiderata do all the work. In this article, I beg to differ. In advancing their arguments for linguistic originalism, both authors rely upon the notion of successful communications conditions. In doing so they implicitly open up the door for moral desiderata to play a role in determining the original communicated content. This undercuts their claim and changes considerably the dialectical role of linguistic originalism in the debate over constitutional interpretation. (shrink)

We provide new findings that add to the growing body of empirical evidence that important epistemic intuitions converge across cultures. Specifically, we selected three recent studies conducted in the US that reported surprising effects of knowledge attribution among English speakers. We translated the vignettes used in those studies into Mandarin Chinese and Korean and then ran the studies with participants in Mainland China, Taiwan, and South Korea. We found that, strikingly, all three of the effects first obtained in the US (...) also emerged in the East Asian cultures we studied. Our findings not only cohere with but also provide—at least moderate—support for the existence of extensive convergences of important epistemic intuitions across cultures. (shrink)

Management of school-related variables and teachers’ job effectiveness in secondary schools in Calabar South Local Government Area, Cross River State was the main thrust of this study. Four research questions were raised, and four hypotheses were formulated to direct the study. The descriptive survey design was adopted for the study while the total population of 208 secondary school teachers in Calabar South Local Government Area were selected for the study using census technique. A questionnaire titled “Management of School Related (...) Variables and Teachers’ Job Effectiveness in Secondary School Questionnaire (MSRVTJESSQ)” designed by the researcher was used as an instrument to collect data from the respondents. The null hypotheses were tested at 0.05 level of significance using Pearson Product Moment Correlation, Independent t-test, and One-Way Analysis of Variance statistical techniques where applicable. It was found that; managing class size, school management style, and school location has a significant influence on teachers’ job effectiveness respectively in Calabar South Local Government Area of Cross River State. It was recommended amongst others that; school principals should ensure that they adopt a more contingent management style where different situations will warrant the use of the different technique; the recommended teacher-pupils’ ratio of 1:35 should be maintained. (shrink)

In this paper, I expand my upon earlier linguistic research (Lian, 2023), which delved into the genre of abstracts from Western philosophical papers. I engage with the philosophical ramifications emanating from the guidelines established for crafting philosophy paper abstracts (Lian, 2023) and underscore their significance in the domain of academic philosophical writing. A pivotal focus of this research is to navigate the intricate philosophical challenges posed by cross-disciplinary investigations bridging applied linguistic statistics with philosophical paper composition, specifically, (...) the nuanced interpretation of linguistic findings in a manner palatable to philosophers. My exploration probes into the dynamics of various concepts within Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), highlighting the complexities in reconciling semantic intuitions related to the notions of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". I delineate three philosophical stances: (1) deferring to scientific authority, (2) recognizing domain-specific terminologies, and (3) interrogating peripheral scientific theories. I posit that these stances significantly influence the ways philosophers engage with and resolve the cross-disciplinary semantic and theoretical contentions stemming from the rhetorical structures of "Method (M)" and "Conclusion (C)". This work proposes avenues to attain either "theoretical coherence" or "disciplinary synthesis", thereby fostering enhanced cross-disciplinary collaboration and fortifying academic discourse across diverse fields. -/- Keywords: Inter-Disciplinary Research (IDR), Applied linguistics, Philosophical writing, Genre Analysis, Rhetorical Moves 本研究將先介紹筆者的語言學碩士論文（連，2023），如何分析《東吳哲學學報》2017年至2021年西方哲學論文摘要語體的修辭語步特徵與提供寫作建議，並試圖從哲學圈內人的角度，對連（2023）的哲學寫作 建議進行批判性的反思，探討哲學教師或新手哲學家可以如何看待華文哲學論文摘要的寫作建議。接著，筆者將問題聚焦在跨領域學科（應用語言學統計結果與哲學論文寫作）之間的哲學問題，即——哲學家應如何看待語言學家 針對哲學論文的研究結果。筆者將考慮領域間研究（IDR）的語言與詞語概念關係。而藉由討論上述跨領域研究中語義直覺分歧的問題，筆者提出了三種可能的哲學態度：(1)服從科學權威、(2)尊重特定領域用詞、(3 )質疑邊緣科學理論。筆者認為，上述三種態度對於哲學家如何看待「方法(M)」和「結論(C)」這兩項跨領域語義概念分歧和可能理論分歧有著重要的影響。筆者希冀藉由提出相關解決方案來尋求「理論統一」或「領域整 合」的可行性，最終得以促進跨領域合作與跨學門間良好學術交流的互動成長。 -/- 關鍵詞：領域間研究（IDR）、應用語言學、哲學寫作、語體分析、修辭語步 . (shrink)

This study, by using 142 groups of data from 1990 to 2007 and the method of cross-temporal meta-analysis, researched the changing trend of status of mental health of 108736 members of the Chinese Army along with the change of years. All the data came from 94 related research reports, and all the research reports used SCL-90 (the Symptom Checklist 90) as the testing tool of mental health. The study found that: (1) mental health of members of the Chinese Army (...) steadily improved between 1990 and 2007; (2) during those 18 years, the Interpersonal Sensitivity factor of SCL-90 of Chinese Army members changed most significantly, and the least significantly changed factor was Somatization; (3) Chinese Army members showed evidence of fewest problems on the Photic Anxiety factor, in contrast to the consistent problems indicated by scores on the Obsessive-Compulsive and Interpersonal Sensitivity scales; (4) Chinese Army members from single-child families (N =1,944) showed significant lower evidence of positive mental health than soldiers from multiple child families (N =2,649); (5) The mental health of soldiers from non-agricultural backgrounds (N =7,808) was less positive than that of soldiers from agricultural households(N =11,459); (6) Chinese Army members with senior high school education level (N = 10,189) had less positive mental health than those with junior high school (N = 8,407) or university education (N = 863). (shrink)

Abstract: An indirect report typically takes the form of a speaker using the locution “said that” to report an earlier utterance. In what follows, I introduce the principal philosophical and pragmatic points of interest in the study of indirect reports, including the extent to which context sensitivity affects the content of an indirect report, the constraints on the substitution of co-referential terms in reports, the extent of felicitous paraphrase and translation, the way in which indirect reports are opaque, and the (...) use of indirect reports as pragmatic vehicles for other speech acts such as humor, insult, or irony. Throughout I develop several positions: (i) that a semantic analysis of indirect reports is insufficient, (ii) that the distinction between direct and indirect reports is not clear and that indirect reports are the predominate way of reporting while direct reports may be a para-linguistic variation on them, (iii) that most questions about the semantics and pragmatics of indirect reports will rely on a full understanding of the nature of what is reported and how it gets reported, (iv) that an analysis of reporting requires the pragmatic tools of metarepresentation and a social, inter-personal understanding of relevance and shared knowledge. (shrink)

Introduction Current treatments for pain have limited benefits and worrying side effects. Some studies suggest that pain is reduced when clinicians deliver positive messages. However, the effects of positive messages are heterogeneous and have not been subject to meta-analysis. We aimed to estimate the efficacy of positive messages for pain reduction. -/- Methods We included randomized trials of the effects of positive messages in a subset of the studies included in a recent systematic review of context factors (...) for treating pain. Several electronic databases were searched. Reference lists of relevant studies were also searched. Two authors independently undertook study selection, data extraction, risk of bias assessment, and analyses. Our primary outcome measures were differences in patient- or observer-reported pain between groups who were given positive messages and those who were not. -/- Results Of the 16 randomized trials (1703 patients) that met the inclusion criteria, 12 trials had sufficient data for meta-analysis. The pooled standardized effect size was −0.31 (95% confidence interval [CI] −0.61 to −0.01, p = 0.04, I2 = 82%). The effect size remained positive but not statistically significant after we excluded studies considered to have a high risk of bias (standard effect size −0.17, 95% CI −0.54 to 0.19, P = 0.36, I2 = 84%). -/- Conclusion Care of patients with chronic or acute pain may be enhanced when clinicians deliver positive messages about possible clinical outcomes. However, we have identified several limitations of the present study that suggest caution when interpreting the results. We recommend further high-quality studies to confirm (or falsify) our result. -/- FUNDING -/- Alexander Mebius research has been funded through the ERC grant "Philosophy of Pharmacology: Safety, Statistical Standards, and Evidence Amalgamation" (GA: 639276). (shrink)

Simple claims with the verb ‘seem’, as well as the specific sensory verbs, ‘look’, ‘sound’, etc., require the speaker to have some relevant kind of perceptual acquaintance (Pearson, 2013; Ninan, 2014). But different forms of these reports differ in their perceptual requirements. For example, the copy raising (CR) report, ‘Tom seems like he’s cooking’ requires the speaker to have seen Tom, while its expletive subject (ES) variant, ‘It seems like Tom is cooking’, does not (Rogers, 1972; Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012). (...) This contrast has led some theorists to hold that the matrix subject in CR constructions is uniformly interpreted as the perceptual source (p-source) (Asudeh and Toivonen, 2012; Rett and Hyams, 2014). Others, based on examples of CR reports that seem not to require perception of the referent of the matrix subject, have taken the p-source interpretation instead to be non-uniform across CR reports (Landau, 2011; Doran, 2015). We reconsider these theoretical approaches to copy raising in light of new experimental work probing the sensitivity of these requirements to the matrix verb, the embedded ‘like’-clause, and the context. While we find some motivation for a non-uniform p-source analysis, it comes from importantly different cases than those others have relied on. Furthermore, our findings cast doubt on the prevalent assumption that the perceptual requirements of CR reports are to be captured solely by the presence or absence of the p-source interpretation. We suggest that the data motivating a non-uniform p-source view are better captured by an alternative approach, which makes use of a more minimal evidential source role, in place of the perceptual source role. We close by considering the relationship between English copy raising and evidential constructions cross-linguistically. (shrink)

This work proposes that pain meets the requirements of being characterized as a secondary quality, as it covers, like a color, a determined extension. The argument seeks to establish a literal pain-color analogy through an inquiry into the intensity and location of the pain. From the classic intensity/location relationship reported by patients with acute appendicitis, three degrees of pain are distinguished: mild, moderate, and severe. The objective is only achieved by examining the Body’s extensional (...) determinations (primary quality) insofar as each of these degrees of pain covers three particular measures. Once these three measures have been explored according to the perforation process (tissue damage), the work ends by identifying pain as a transcendent moment. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Reuter, Seinhold and Sytsma put forward an implicature account to explain the intuitive failure of the pain-in-mouth argument. They argue that utterances such as ‘There is tissue damage / a pain / an inflammation in my mouth’ carry the conversational implicature that there is something wrong with the speaker’s mouth. Appealing to new empirical data, this paper argues against the implicature account and for the entailment account, according to which pain reports using locative (...) locutions, such as ‘There is a pain in my mouth’, are intuitively understood as entailing corresponding predicative locutions, such as ‘My mouth hurts.’ On this latter account, the pain-in-mouth argument seems invalid because the conclusion is naturally understood as entailing something which cannot be inferred from the premisses. Implications for the philosophical debate about pain are also drawn. (shrink)

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions in each (...) context in the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don’t. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Linguistic data are commonly considered a defeasible source of evidence from which it is legitimate to draw philosophical hypotheses and conclusions. Traditionally epistemologists have relied almost exclusively on linguistic data from western languages, with a primary focus on contemporary English. However, in the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in cross-linguistic studies in epistemology. In this entry, we provide a brief overview of cross-linguistic data discussed by contemporary epistemologists and the philosophical (...) debates they have generated. (shrink)

Architecture and Deconstruction Case of Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi -/- Introduction Towards deconstruction in architecture Intensive relations between philosophical deconstruction and architecture, which were present in the late 1980s and early 1990s, belong to the past and therefore may be described from a greater than before distance. Within these relations three basic variations can be distinguished: the first one, in which philosophy of deconstruction deals with architectural terms but does not interfere with real architecture, the second one, in which (...) a collaboration between Jacques Derrida and a group of architects interested in his concepts is commenced, and the third one, in which completed or only designed objects or new concepts of deconstruction created by architects gain their supremacy over philosophy. The following book analyses these three possible ways, first of all with the reference to Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi. -/- Peter Eisenman -/- Misreading… and Other Errors -/- The issue of relations between Peter Eisenman’s work and philosophy of deconstruction may be referred to his activity more than ten years preceding his direct collaboration with Jacques Derrida (in 1985) and organisation of the exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture at Museum of Modern Art in New York (in 1988). As soon as at the stage of designing the first houses (House I-III, 1967-1970), which almost entirely inscribed in formalistic aesthetics of Modernism, the architect analysed the problem of architecture dependence on its assumptions. All his later designs may be treated as consequence of this initial interest in relations between practice and theory, and at the same time as an introduction to manipulations later on led at the level of metaphysics of architecture. Beginning with the issue of presence, considered in comments to House VI (1972), the number of ideas having their analogies in philosophy of deconstruction increased. The text entitled The End of the Classical: The End of the Beginning, The End of the End (1984), in which Eisenman criticised questions of representation in architecture, its delusive strive for truth and comparably unattainable attempts at ultimate definition of elementary rules, should be acclaimed the breaking point. This attitude was extended by numerous strategies disturbing architecture rules defined at metaphysical level in an essay Moving Arrows, Eros, and Other Errors: an Architecture of Absence (1986). The issue of Eisenman’s passage from formalism to deconstruction has already been much discussed in the literature (Rosalind Krauss, Thomas Patin among others), still it should be mentioned that the threads similar to Derrida’s concept included in Eisenman’s writing reveal untranslatability of architecture and philosophy. -/- Choral Works or Separate tricks -/- In 1985-1986 a series of seven disputes between Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman took place. The pretext for them were designs concerning Parc de la Villette in Paris. The situation of many months of collaboration between a notable philosopher of the second half of the 20th c. and an architect that already had a huge theoretical oeuvre, ended up with a publication of a large volume entitled Chora L Works and it became at the same time a vast study area for historians of contemporary architecture and philosophers. Derrida’s contribution to concept works were his considerations over the idea of chôra, the properties related to this concept were about to be reflected in shapes of the park. Therefore, Chora L Works became an example of the abilities of contemporary art, both in its capability of translation from philosophical ideas to artistic forms and its resistance to tradition of representing in architecture some phenomena and values originating outside this discipline. In the final period of their collaboration both interlocutors started to polemicise with each other more decidedly, what became a separate part of their thought exchange. The exchange of letters between Derrida and Eisenman at the turn of 1989 ended up the period of their direct contacts, nevertheless, at this time precisely a large group of experts in issues of deconstruction joined the discussion and extended the revealed in the former dispute problems into more than ten years of further considerations and publications. Except for a long text by Jeffrey Kipnis, who had participated in the meetings of the philosopher and the architect, there appeared also comments of researchers of artistic theories (K. Michael Hays, Thomas Patin), philosophers (Andrew Benjamin), and even experts in Greek literature (Maria Theodorou or Ann Bergren). Following these debates a contemporary reflection on architecture has saturated with indeed numerous concepts originating in philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Architecture which imitates mute philosophy -/- The series of Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman meetings, which took place in the period of 1985-1987, induced many authors to make comments. Some of them (Jeffrey Kipnis, Ann Bergren, Maria Theodorou) developed the subject of chôra which was introduced to the discussion by Derrida. The problem that was about to be solved was the question of tying up the concept of chôra with architecture, including Eisenman’s architecture and the series of meetings within frames of Chora L Works project. Kipnis on this occasion paid attention to chôra and its character of anachronia which infects any being created within chôra. In other words any event has its counterpart (analogon) in another, earlier event. He demonstrated the similarity of structure of many events and statements from the times of Derrida and Eisenman’s meetings to the almost identical behaviour of figures in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. The loss of beginning present in this phenomenon was appropriate to both features of chôra and the effects of typical analyses of philosophy of deconstruction. Bergren’s analyses focused on accentuating gender of chôra, which, according to this author, had been neglected hitherto in discussions. She collated chôra descriptions with characteristics of women in myths, early Greek epic and philosophy and she arrived at a conclusion that chôra has features of a single woman and a married one at the same time. And yet Theodorou’s studies showed that in the Homeric epics chôra is not treated as an idea but is related with single things and events. The other part of the comments (represented by Andrew Benjamin and K. Michael Hays’ utterances) concerns Eisenman’s attitude to tradition which was treated as a variety of iteration understood philosophically. Benjamin commenced his considerations at the point of closeness between a definition of tradition and a concept of chôra understood as perpetuation (placement). A problematic issue was for him Eisenman’s complex relation to tradition based on its contest and affirmation at the same time. Overcoming the simple subordination to tradition – according to Benjamin – was based on awareness of the role of repetition in culture not known before. Hays made an attempt to explain the pleasure and torment of repetition with the support of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes’ concepts. According to Hays repetitions are attempts of a single being to a certain primal state perceived as free of any tension. In a similar way Rosalind Krauss explained a motif of a grate present in Modernistic art and also exceptionally frequent in Eisenman’s work. -/- Annex Architecture is still writing Balzac novels. Peter Eisenman and literature -/- Architecture’s approach to writing, script or literature, present within Peter Eisenman’s work, is an exceptional phenomenon, furthermore a complex one. The article considers four possible relations. The first one relates to Eisenman’s characteristics as a person extremely gifted with the ability to wordplay, which very ‘play’ reveals skills to create architectural images. In the second approach the attention has been paid to Eisenman’s interests – in the first period of his oeuvre – in linguistic works by Noam Chomsky and his transformational-generative grammar. The third kind of relations applied to overcoming the need for autonomy of architecture (and of modernist aesthetics at the same time) and renew interests in questions of meaning in architecture. The fourth sort of relations occurred when Eisenman started to create reflections of historic or literary narrations in architecture – ‘stone stories’ and architectural fictions of their kind. -/- Bernard Tschumi -/- From perversion to deconstruction In Bernard Tschumi’s writings from the 1970s and 1980s we can find a transposition of important threads of post-structuralist ideas deriving from Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida’s works. The analysis of the architect’s writings also shows roots in Phillippe Sollers, Michel Foucault and Denis Hollier’s works. The analysis of borrowed elements from the beginnings of Tschumi’s theoretical activity may be helpful in explaining the contents of his later writings motre inspired by philosophy of deconstruction. The set of his earliest views was inspired by Marxism, Neo Marxism and French Structuralism, mainly by the writings of Henri Levebre and Guy Debord. From the thought of Levebre Tschumi took interest for city as not only a question of urbanistics but also a political issue. From Debord’s concepts he borrowed a conviction about the role of situational violation for changes in the society structure. Some of these beliefs were preserved in his own concepts of architecture as an event. From this period derived also his will to change conservative elements of social structure not by means of political revolution but of theoretical and creative activity. Tschumi acknowledged that the effective way of the proceedings towards achieving his aims would be accepting the role of both a critical intellectualist and architecture expert who would not hide away his left-wing orientation. The speculations defined by the architect as ‘revolting analyses’ were about to characterise contradictions which tear the society apart, penetrate architecture and constitute the basis of culture. Spreading away of the conscience of false assumptions hidden away in various disciplines could have weakened cohesion of a conservative society and influence the will to change among the elites. This way the beginnings of political revolution were rooted in philosophy of architecture. In 1977 Tschumi published his text entitled The Pleasure of Architecture inspired by Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, it also included some concepts derived from Georges Bataille and Jacques Derrida. First of all the author used Barthes’s concept which made an assumption that literary activity is pervaded by the spirit of resistance towards social rules, and Tschudi transferred this remark onto architecture. From the ideas of Bataille, acquainted via Holier’s work, he derived his belief that two concepts of space, a conceptual one (defined as Pyramid) and a sensual one (defined as Labirynth), not losing their distinct features, they join in the concept of experienced space which exceeds contradictions. The exceeding itself was defined as the basic rule of architecture and it was referred to situations in which architecture not only negates social needs, but also disavows its own tradition. Crossing the borders applies not only to political issues or permanent rules of the very discipline but also interfering with other fields (especially literature and film). The fact that architecture is associated with organising events turned Tschumi’s attention to questions of violence that result from upsetting architectural order of a given building by its users and the one hand, and on the other from forcing the users to specific acts imposed by this very order. The analysis of the concepts used by Tschumi in his early writings indicates that they are close to definitions that would occur in his reflection in the following years influenced by philosophy of deconstruction. -/- Approaching deconstruction Tschumi in his theories developed in the 1980s presumed that the current social world had undergone a deep process of decay, and the reaction against which ought to be based on ordering-up actions, and also preserving the main outline of disintegration of the whole and its elements in the state of conflict. The statements concerning the nature of the contemporary to Tschumi social relations were applied by him to the world of architecture, this led him to coming up with designing strategies that took into consideration the destabilised character of conditions in which works of architecture were created. New ways of conduct invented by Tschumi drew their inspiration from literature and research on literature, psychoanalysis, structural linguistics, structuralism and post structuralism, and eventually also deconstruction philosophy. The proposed methods were opposed by their author both to functionalism continuity trends and postmodern architecture. Tschumi’s proposals contradicted any forms of conservatism or traditionalism in political sphere as well as in reference to tendencies in architecture. They were not simple contradictions of social or architectural rules, they intrude them from the inside, weaken or escalate the already existing incongruities, they move the boundaries between the areas. Revolutionary illusions about the possibility of radical changes were replaced with strategies which completed, tainted or test former rules in the series of formal games of permutation and combination. Quite different from avant-garde formalism Tschumi’s games were not about maintaining the autonomy of a given area, but on the contrary – polluting it with other areas’ influences. Tschumi enjoyed demonstrating illusions of architecture concerning simple relations between form and function, or between form and meaning. Making use of Freud, Lacan and Foucault’s research he introduced a category of “madness” into architecture allowing an observation that the recognised norms are nothing but merely ones of many possible principles of behaviour, and their recognised status resulted from unjustified hindering innovativeness which is crucial for architecture. To reborn architecture’s capability of changing Tschumi also made use of Barthes’s discoveries concerning rules of narration and works by writers who applied in their writing knowledge on linguistics. Making a work’s author unclear by various mechanical transformations of its elements was however apparent only, and formal rigours imposed on the process of designing liberated possibilities difficult to obtain in more traditional creative action. Another mode of acting introduced by Tschumi was combining his work of elements deriving from outside architecture; joining space records with notation of motion and events accompanying architectural objects among others. These architectural and extra-architectural elements were not unified, on the contrary their heterogenous and conflictual character was stressed. This is how shock, anxiety and instability, typical for live in great metropolises, infiltrated architecture. Taking some ideas of deconstruction philosophy as a pattern Tschumi also took into critical consideration in his essays traditional in architecture oppositions between form and figuration, or theory and practice. By combining various inspirations he eventually worked out an idea of architectural event, which he understood as a series of actions contesting its own field, redefining its sources, principles and elements. An event, understood in this way, was not so much producing works as rather creating conditions of their production and at the same time designing the society different from a hierarchic one. -/- Park of deconstruction Among numerous philosophical strategies of deconstruction most frequently used was questioning the practice of strong opposition of two reasons. In many cases Bernard Tschumi’s writings just consider functioning of the conflict juxtaposition of the ideas of structure and ornament or theory and practice in history of architecture. Violation of traditional relations between terms of this kind, both old and modern, raised Jacques Derrida’s objections, when he was induced for the first time to co-operate with architects’ milieu. During this long lasting thought exchange the philosopher eventually acknowledged Bernard Tschumi’s arguments for reasoning the encroachment of architecture’s fundamental rules. Deconstruction applied in architecture was not a simple transposition or analogy of practices that had been applied by philosophy of deconstruction. We may even say that considering architectural terms became an important formula of deconstruction. Architecture understood in philosophical way became something beyond the practice and theory of its own discipline, a sort of metaphysics of both philosophy and architecture. The deliberate encroachment of simplicity of dividing architecture into theory and practice, for the first time became a clear aim for Tschumi in his drawings and texts entitled The Manhattan Transcripts. The contents of this series of works was a record of characteristic features of this New York district in such a way that not only objects were the subject of the record but also relations between objects, people and events. The record was about to take into consideration a conflict character of elements of this representation and at the same time to avoid applying to them the rule of mimetism. The record became a form of reflection over the very record by an increased control over the ways of representation. Architecture which was considered in the The Manhattan Transcripts was not directed to fulfill the needs of inhabitation or production, it was rather related with hitherto usually marginalised liminal situations: building ostentatiously big monuments, religious cult, war etc. Architecture operating in these relations focused also the attention on the included in it continuous tendency to overpass its own restrictions, the role of violence as its not recognised factor, or the meaning of excess and shock in its operation. Architecture moving from reason towards madness became even more visible in the design of Parisian Parc de la Villette, whose pavilions were defined as folies (in French it means both small park buildings and follies). The park was supposed to be on the one hand a reflection of traditional society disintegration while on the other it questioned basic rules of producing a work of architecture. The traditional rules of designing, based on ordering up, were replaced with the strategies of dysfunction and dissociation. In Tschumi’s opinion methods of this kind may be equivalent of what Derrida named différance. Instead of aiming at mergence, any diversity, plays or variations were strengthen. Tschumi’s texts, in which he explained his attitude, were completed by Derrida’s extent statement entitled Point de folie – Maintenant l’architecture. Derrida’s article is the most significant of all his statements on architecture as a form of thinking and activity. According to the philosopher, architecture should divide space (in French defined as espacement), what enables both thinking and action – it arranges the space of an event. Tschumi’s buildings, defined as folies, in an essential way destabilise any created order, and at the same time they refresh it. Derrida’s statement suggests that architecture may become both metaphor of an order merging a language or a society but also of inner forces which deconstruct and reconstruct it. Therefore architecture is at the same time a construction, a deconstruction and a reconstruction. Parc de la Villette stands out in this system with its attempt to step beyond the scheme of an easy repetition and its heading for chances of achieving more radical otherness. -/- Conclusion Destruction as construction. Paradoxes of deconstruction in architecture -/- Scepticism about persistence and common importance of fundamental values of human culture evinced in philosophers and writers’ works as early as in Greek antiquity, nevertheless it was not expressed so strongly as in the second half of the 20th century. Especially in Heidegger’s work Being and Time (although originated in 1927, still influential in all later philosophy) the following states were characterised: the state of losing the ground (Abgrund), of being out of sight (Unheimlichkeit) and of being out of dwelling (Un-zuhause-sein) – as the basis of self-confidence of conscious being there (Dasein). The entire criticism of philosophy of home and dwelling draws the inspiration from this early writing of the German philosopher, it combines crisis of basic terms of metaphysics with social conditions which are dictated by living in large metropolis. The crisis of both metaphysical foundation and home appears to be similar to the situation of weakening the relations between a man and his dwelling in extensively expanding cities. Whereas philosophy, as well as many disciplines of social sciences, have diagnosed for a long time the destabilisation of fundamental ideas of Western culture and crucial changes in the ways of dwelling, architecture itself occurred to be “the last fortress of metaphysics” (J. Derrida). Among contemporary architects, Peter Eisenman and Bernard Tschumi were the ones who engaged most decidedly in the issues of critical analysis of architecture foundation and its social role. Both the architects noticed new formulas of contemporary social and individual existence, tremendously different from the entire history, and at the same time they affirmed lack of adequacy of architecture concepts to new situations. Both Eisenman and Tschumi used to describe the existing architecture as a tool for consolidation of highly integrated and hierarchised societies, and also as a discipline extremely uncoincidental with the current character of social life based on ideas of freedom and diversity. The means to transform architecture and make a factor of further social changes out of it, was a concept that accentuated revealing the inner contradictions of this discipline, and considering them in designing strategies. Eisenman’s activity, in regard of what has just been noticed, was focused on questioning the basic rules of traditionally comprehended architecture, especially the rule of purpose. The American architect noticed that the concept of architecture as fulfilment the need of location, hides away the fact that the location has to be constantly reconsidered, and hence it is overtaken by change (dislocation). Therefore new concept of architecture propounded architectural activity to translocate the concept of location – more than before – but also to change its status perpetually. Such comprehended architecture should claim, as its main purpose, the constant revision of this purpose and create itself anew permanently. Even Eisenman’s earliest designs of houses nos. I-IV broke with such values as the sense of safety, closeness and familiarity, and just on the contrary they accentuated senses of strangeness, homelessness and loss of confidence. The contradictions within architecture noticed by Tschumi referred to combination of intellectual and sensual values in architecture, when their non-appropriation was defeated by an additional condition, namely the way of experience based on pleasure of excess, marked by insanity. The features of folly were especially visible in his designs of gardens, where the order of planning was mixed with sensual experience introduced by particular elements (both the ones created by nature, and the buildings defined as folies). Parc de la Villette designed by the French architect in Paris put in question not only the common understanding of purpose in architecture but also the ideas of order and integrity, as its plan was based on the combination of independent layers with records of grids of points, various lines and planes. The architecture that collides inadequate elements with each other was supposed to be a kind of an event with no beginning and no end. The architecture treated as an event became a form of a space weakened articulation that maintains its diversity and lack of accordance of the elements building it up. The analyses of Eisenman and Tschumi’s theoretical writings indicate how much the aims of architecture have actually changed; instead of supporting social persistence, the architecture is rather intensifying contradictions, and instead of providing people with the sense of safety, it sublimes danger. From simple acts of defamiliarisation, increasing the distance to itself and enhancing the role of theory, through discomfort, anxiety, not feeling someone at home, weirdness, excess, shock and violence, architecture reached the edge of stability and uncertainty, only to make an attempt at penetrating what is impossible and unutterable, and recording what cannot become the subject of any records. -/- . (shrink)

This monograph investigates the temporal interpretation of narrative discourse in two parts. The theme of the first part is narrative progression. It begins with a case study of the adverb ‘now’ and its interaction with the meaning of tense. The case study motivates an ontological distinction between events, states and times and proposes that ‘now’ seeks a prominent state that holds throughout the time described by the tense. Building on prior research, prominence is shown to be influenced by principles of (...) discourse coherence and two coherence principles, NARRATION and RESULT, are given a formally explicit characterization. The key innovation is a new method for testing the definitional adequacy of NARRATION and RESULT, namely by an abductive argument. This contribution opens a new way of thinking about how eventive and stative descriptions contribute to the perceived narrative progression in a discourse. -/- The theme of the second part of the monograph is the semantics and pragmatics of tense. A key innovation is that the present and past tenses are treated as scalar alternatives, a view that is motivated by adopting a particular hypothesis concerning stative predication. The proposed analysis accounts for tense in both matrix clauses and in complements of propositional attitudes, where the notorious double access reading arises. This reading is explored as part of a corpus study that provides a glimpse of how tense semantics interacts with Gricean principles and at-issueness. Several cross-linguistic predictions of the analysis are considered, including their consequences for the Sequence of Tense phenomenon and the Upper Limit Constraint. Finally, a hypothesis is provided about how tense meanings compose with temporal adverbs and verb phrases. Two influential analysis of viewpoint aspect are then compared in light of the hypothesis. (shrink)

Rooth & Partee (1982) and Rooth (1985) have shown that the English-specific rule-by-rule system of PTQ can be factored out into function application plus two transformations for resolving type mismatch (type lifting and variable binding). Building on these insights, this article proposes a universal system for type-driven translation, by adding two more innovations: local type determination for gaps (generalizing Montague 1973) and a set of semantic filters (extending Cooper 1983). This system, dubbed Cross-Linguistic Semantics (XLS), is shown to (...) account for various phenomena — including scope relations in English and Greenlandic Eskimo, internally headed relative clauses in Lakhota, serial verbs in Yoruba and VP ellipsis in English. (shrink)

The following argument is widely assumed to be invalid: there is a pain in my finger; my finger is in my mouth; therefore, there is a pain in my mouth. The apparent invalidity of this argument has recently been used to motivate the conclusion that pains are not spatial entities. We argue that this is a mistake. We do so by drawing attention to the metaphysics of pains and holes and provide a framework for their location which (...) both vindicates the argument's validity and explains why it appears invalid. To this end, we show that previously proposed explanations for the apparent invalidity of the argument fail. Moreover, we show that our account accommodates and explains seemingly opposing linguistic data. We conclude that the ‘pain-in-mouth argument’ does not undermine the view that pains are spatial entities. (shrink)

This paper highlights a small selection of cases where crosslinguistic insights have been important to big questions in the theory of semantics and the syntax/semantics interface. The selection includes (i) the role and representation of Speaker and Addressee in the grammar; (ii) mismatches between form and interpretation motivating high-placed silent operators for functional elements; and (iii) the explanation of semantic universals, including universals pertaining to inventories, in terms of learnability and the trade-off between informativeness and simplicity.

This study examined school characteristics and secondary school teachers’ work effectiveness in Abi Local Government Area of Cross River State. Specifically, the study examined the influence of school location, school population, and school ownership on secondary school teachers’ work effectiveness respectively. Three research questions were posed and three null hypotheses were formulated accordingly to guide the study. The design adopted for the study was a descriptive survey research design. A purposive sampling technique was used to select a sample (...) of 156 respondents out of a population of 549 teachers. A questionnaire titled “Teachers’ work effectiveness questionnaire” (TWEQ) was used as an instrument for data collection. Collected data were analysed using descriptive statistics, while the null hypotheses were all tested at .05 level of significance using the independent t-test statistical technique. The results of the analysis revealed that school characteristics such as location, population, and ownership, influenced secondary school teachers’ work effectiveness respectively. Based on these findings, it was recommended among others that; teachers should be motivated using intrinsic and extrinsic channels such as praises, rewards for outstanding performance, regular payment of salaries, promotion and other incentives such as improved working conditions, good classroom, and office environment, and so on, for improved work performance. (shrink)

Linguistics and philosophy, while being two closely-related fields, are often approached with very different methodologies and frameworks. Bringing together a team of interdisciplinary scholars, this pioneering book provides examples of how conversations between the two disciplines can lead to exciting developments in both fields, from both a historical and a current perspective. It identifies a number of key phenomena at the cutting edge of research within both fields, such as reporting and ascribing, describing and referring, narrating and structuring, locating in (...) time and space, typologizing and ontologizing, determining and questioning, arguing and rejecting, and implying and supposing. Each chapter takes on a phenomena and explores it through a set of questions which are posed and answered at the outset of each chapter. An accessible and engaging resource, it is essential reading for researchers and students in both disciplines, and will empower exciting and illuminating conversations for years to come. (shrink)

Ontology has been proposed as a solution to the 'Tower of Babel' problem that threatens the semantic interoperability of information systems constructed independently for the same domain. In information systems research and applications, ontologies are often implemented by formalizing the meanings of words from natural languages. However, words in different natural languages sometimes subdivide the same domain of reality in terms of different conceptual categories. If the words and their associated concepts in two natural languages, or even in two terminological (...) traditions within the same language, do not have common referents in the real world, an ontology based on word meanings will inherit the 'Tower of Babel' problem from the languages involved, rather than solve it. In this paper we present evidence from a preliminary comparison of landscape terms in English with those in the Yindjibarndi language of northwestern Australia demonstrating that this problem is not just hypothetical. Some possible solutions are suggested. (shrink)

: The Hamblin-Karttunen approach has led to many insights about questions in English. In this article the results of this rule-by-rule tradition are reconsidered from a crosslinguistic perspective. Starting from the type-driven XLS theory developed in Bittner (1994a, b), it is argued that evidence from simple questions (in English, Polish, Lakhota and Warlpiri) leads to certain revisions. The revised XLS theory then immediately generalizes to complex questions — including scope marking (Hindi), questions with quantifiers (English) and multiple wh-questions (English, Hindi, (...) Japanese). Eliminating language- and construction-specific information from the compositional rules, in favor of universal semantic filters, leads to analyses that not only generalize across unrelated languages but are also empirically more accurate, not less. (shrink)

In Jeffrey King’s theory of structured propositions, propositional structure mirrors the syntactic structure of natural language sentences that express it. I provide cases where this claim individuates propositions too finely across languages. Crucially, King’s paradigmatic proposition-fact ^that Dara swims^ cannot be believed by a monolingual Greek speaker, due to Greek syntax requiring an obligatory article in front of proper names. King’s two possible replies are: (i) to try to streamline the syntax of Greek and English; or (ii) to insist that (...) English speakers can believe propositions inexpressible in Greek. I argue that the former option entails giving up a neo-Russelian framework, and the latter makes King’s account arbitrary or trivial. I conclude that the mirroring claim is untenable. (shrink)

In this issue of the Journal, Dundas et al. (Am J Epidemiol. 2014;180(2):197–207) apply a hitherto infrequent multilevel analytical approach: multiple membership multiple classification (MMMC) models. Specifically, by adopting a life-course approach, they use a multilevel regression with individuals cross-classified in different contexts (i.e., families, early schools, and neighborhoods) to investigate self-reported health and mental health in adulthood. They provide observational evidence suggesting the relevance of the early family environment for launching public health interventions in childhood in order to (...) improve health in adulthood. In their analyses, the authors distinguish between specific contextual measures (i.e., the association between particular contextual characteristics and individual health) and general contextual measures (i.e., the share of the total interindividual heterogeneity in health that appears at each level). By doing so, they implicitly question the traditional probabilistic risk factor epidemiology including classical “neighborhood effects” studies. In fact, those studies use simple hierarchical structures and disregard the analysis of general contextual measures. The innovative MMMC approach properly responds to the call for a multilevel eco-epidemiology against a widespread probabilistic risk factors epidemiology. The risk factors epidemiology is not only reduced to individual-level analyses, but it also embraces many current “multilevel analyses” that are exclusively focused on analyzing contextual risk factors. (shrink)

Objectives The study aims to evaluate the impact of the Revised Health Insurance Law 2014 on the utilisation of outpatient and inpatient care services, healthcare services utilisation at different levels of providers, types of providers and types of visits across different entitlement groups. Design/setting Secondary data from two waves of the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) 2016, VHLSS 2014 were used. A cross-sectional study applying propensity score matching was conducted. Participants A total of 4900 individuals who reported using (...) healthcare services are analysed. Outcomes measure Numbers of outpatient and inpatient visits, frequency of healthcare service utilisation at commune health stations, district hospitals, provincial hospitals, public and private health facilities, number of visits at health facility for medical treatment and health checks per year. Results The result indicates that health insurance (HI) policy increased the number of outpatient visits for the enrolled between 0.87 and 1.29. The greatest impact was found on participants of heavily subsidised health insurance (HSHI) programmes with 1.29 visits per person per year. Similarly, an increase between 0.08 and 0.16 in the number of inpatient admissions was because of participation in HI. With regard to type of healthcare providers, the study found that participation in HI has the most effect on the use of healthcare services at district hospitals. However, the study demonstrated that the impacts of HI on the increase in the frequency of visiting commune health stations, number of visits at the provincial hospital for HSHI groups, and number of visits at health facilities for health check and consultation were sensitive to unobserved characteristics. Conclusion Our findings imply that policy-makers in Vietnam could continue expanding health insurance coverage to increase access to healthcare services for citizens, especially vulnerable groups. In addition, the government should draw more attention to primary healthcare level. (shrink)

I distinguish between two claims of transparency of experiences. One claim is weaker and supported by phenomenological evidence. This I call the transparency datum. Introspection of standard perceptual experiences as well as bodily sensations is consistent with, indeed supported by, the transparency datum. I formulate a stronger transparency thesis that is entailed by representationalism about experiential phenomenology. I point out some empirical consequences of strong transparency in the context of representationalism. I argue that pain experiences, as well as some (...) other similar experiences like itches, tickles, orgasms, hedonic valence, etc., are not transparent in this strong sense. Hence they constitute empirical counterexamples to representationalism. Given that representationalism is a general metaphysical doctrine about all experiential phenomenology for good reasons, I conclude that representationalism about phenomenal consciousness is false. Then, I outline a general framework about how the introspection of phenomenal qualities in perceptual experience works in light of the transparency datum, but consistent with the rejection of strong transparency. The result is a form of qualia realism that is naturalist and intentionalist, and has close affinities to the adverbialist views developed in the latter part of the last century. I then apply this framework to pain experiences and their bodily locations. (shrink)

Evaluativism is best thought of as a way of enriching a perceptual view of pain to account for pain’s unpleasantness or painfulness. Once it was common for philosophers to contrast pains with perceptual experiences (McGinn 1982; Rorty 1980). It was thought that perceptual experiences were intentional (or content-bearing, or about something), whereas pains were representationally blank. But today many of us reject this contrast. For us, your having a pain in your toe is a matter not of (...) your sensing “pain-ly” or encountering a sense-datum, but of your having an interoceptive experience representing (accurately or inaccurately) that your toe is in a particular experience-independent condition, such as undergoing a certain “disturbance” or being damaged or in danger (Armstrong 1962; Tye 1995). But even if such representational content makes an experience a pain, a further ingredient seems required to make the pain unpleasant. According to evaluativism, the further ingredient is the experience’s possession of evaluative content: its representing the bodily condition as bad for the subject. In this chapter, I elaborate evaluativism, locate it among alternatives, and explain its attractions and challenges. (shrink)

The current IASP definition of pain has come under renewed criticisms recently. There is a new momentum for its revision as reflected by the fact that IASP has now a Presidential Task Force dedicated to look into whether there is enough warrant to update the definition. I critically review all the major criticisms of the current definition in detail, and raise new difficulties rarely discussed before. I show that none of the major criticisms has enough warrant to force us (...) to substantially revise the current definition. Combined with the discussion of the new difficulties, there is nonetheless a need to restate the definition using slightly different terminology that will make the original intent of the current definition clearer and more precise. A restatement of the definition is proposed and its potential is discussed in light of some empirical questions that remain. [The IASP Council has now approved a revised definition and published its rationale here: Pain 2020 Sep 1; 161(9), pp. 1976–1982. The new definition follows (most of) my recommendations.]. (shrink)

Philosophical considerations regarding experiential spatial content have focused on exteroceptive sensations presenting external entities, and not on interoceptive experiences that present states of our own body. A notable example is studies on interoceptive touch, in which it is argued that interoceptive tactile experiences have rich spatial content such that tactile sensations are experienced as located in a spatial field. This paper investigates whether a similarly rich spatial content can be attributed to experiences of acute, cutaneous pain. It is argued (...) that such experiences of pain do not have field-like content, as they do not present distance relations between painful sensations. (shrink)

The official definition of ‘pain’ by the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) hasn’t seen much revision since its publication in 1979. There have been various criticisms of the definition in the literature from different quarters: that the definition implies a dubious metaphysical dualism, that it requires a strong form of consciousness as well as linguistic abilities, that it excludes many vulnerable groups that are otherwise perfectly capable of experiencing pain, that it has therefore (...) unacceptable practical as well as ethical consequences, that it is unhelpful to the health-care professional as an operational definition, that it is too narrow, and many others. In my view, most of these criticisms depend on misunderstandings or on uncharitable interpretations. My aim is to go over the definition, clarify some potential ambiguities, and argue that these criticisms don’t cut much ice. At the end, I will present a few slightly reworded versions of the definition that I claim are more felicitous and capture the original intended meaning by the members of the taxonomic committee in a much better and transparent way that avoids all the major extant criticisms in the literature. (Written for interdisciplinary audiences.). (shrink)

In recent years, the opioid crisis in the United States has sparked significant discussion on doctor–patient interactions concerning chronic pain treatments, but little to no attention has been given to investigating the vocal aspects of patient talk. This exploratory sociolinguistic study intends to fill this knowledge gap by employing prosodic discourse analysis to examine context-specific linguistic features used by the interlocutors of two distinct medical interactions. We found that patients employed both low pitch and creak as linguistic (...) resources when describing chronic pain, narrating symptoms and requesting opioids. The situational use of both features informs us about the linguistic ways in which patients frame fraught issues like chronic pain in light of the current opioid crisis. This study expands the breadth of phonetic analysis within the domain of discourse analysis, serving to illuminate discussions surrounding the illocutionary role of the lower vocal tract in expressing emotions. (shrink)

In August 2021, Froese et al. published survey data collected from 2,543 respondents on their subjective experiences living under imposed social distancing measures during COVID-19 (1). The questionnaire was issued to respondents in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. By combining the authors’ expertise in phenomenological philosophy, phenomenological psychopathology, and enactive cognitive science, the questions were carefully phrased to prompt reports that would be useful to phenomenological investigation and theorizing (2–4). These questions reflected the various author’s research interests (e.g., technology, grief, (...) time). Between April 7th and July 31st, 2021, a second questionnaire with the same question set was issued to respondents of the original who had agreed to do a follow-up. This was intended to capture subjective reports of life under social distancing measures a year after the initial survey. By this time–depending on their country of residence and health status–respondents had potentially lived with repeated and prolonged lockdowns and a variety of other restrictions on their social lives. When taken together, Survey I and Survey II provide a cross-cultural and longitudinal dataset that allows for analysis of longer-term impacts of imposed social distancing measures on people’s experiences. For researchers working in diverse disciplines, this dataset offers a rich resource that reflects people’s reactions to the imposition of different social restrictions in different countries and over different time periods. (shrink)

What the authors attempt to address in this paper is a Kantian question: not whether, but how is cross -cultural understanding possible? And specifically, what is a more effective approach for cross -cultural understanding? The answer lies in an analysis of two different models of cross -cultural understanding, that is, propositional and hermeneutic understanding. To begin with, the author presents a linguistic interpretation of culture, i.e., a culture as a linguistically formulated and transmitted symbolic system with (...) its conceptual core as a scheme of basic cultural presuppositions, which it referred to as a cultural language. After exploring the essential role of cultural presuppositions in cross -cultural understanding, the author discusses the traditional model of cross -cultural understanding, namely, the propositional model. Through critically examining the two popular versions of the propositional model, i.e., the projective approach and the adoptive approach to cross -cultural understanding, it is found that cross -cultural propositional understanding is doomed to failure. To move us beyond the absolutism -relativism trap embedded within propositional understanding, the author first introduces and discusses Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic understanding, and then applies Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutic model of understanding to cross -cultural understanding. It is finally concluded that cross -cultural understanding is essentially hermeneutic—including the case of cultural learning, not propositional. Therefore, cross -cultural understanding is hermeneutically possible. (shrink)

Both patients and clinicians frequently report problems around communicating and assessing pain. Patients express dissatisfaction with their doctors and doctors often find exchanges with chronic pain patients difficult and frustrating. This chapter thus asks how we could improve pain communication and thereby enhance outcomes for chronic pain patients. We argue that improving matters will require a better appreciation of the complex meaning of pain terms and of the variability and flexibility in how individuals think about (...) pain. We start by examining the various accounts of the meaning of pain terms that have been suggested within philosophy and suggest that, while each of the accounts captures something important about our use of pain terms, none is completely satisfactory. We propose that pain terms should be viewed as communicating complex meanings, which may change across different communicative contexts, and this in turn suggests that we should view our ordinary thought about pain as similarly complex. We then sketch what a view taking seriously this variability in meaning and thought might look like, which we call the “polyeidic” view. According to this view, individuals tacitly occupy divergent stances across a range of different dimensions of pain, with one agent, for instance, thinking of pain in a much more “bodycentric” kind of way, while another thinks of pain in a much more "mindcentric” way. The polyeidic view attempts to expand the multidimensionality recognised in, e.g., biopsychosocial models in two directions: first, it holds that the standard triumvirate— dividing sensory/cognitive/affective factors— needs to be enriched in order to capture important distinctions within the social and psychological dimensions. Second, the polyeidic view attempts to explain (at least in part) why modulation of experience by these social and psychological factors is possible in the first place. It does so by arguing that because the folk concept of pain is complex, different weightings of the different parts of the concept can modulate pain experience in a variety of ways. Finally, we argue that adopting a polyeidic approach to the meaning of pain would have a range of measurable clinical outcomes. (shrink)

The present article focuses on the conceptual structures of two Arabic words which are used in both everyday life and science: كَهْرَبَاء (kahrabāʾ) (electricity) and ضَوْء (ḍawʾ) (light). Under a cognitive linguistics approach, the polysemy of these terms, revealed in the citations extracted from ArabiCorpus, is studied. More specifically, the analysis of the terms involves the polysemy or ‘radial category’ along with its prototypical and peripheral meanings, and the main factors in projecting the idealised cognitive models (ICMs) where the radial (...) categories are formed: conceptual metaphor and conceptual metonymy. The results indicate that power and knowledge motivate the conceptualisations that underpin the categories كَهْرَبَاء (kahrabāʾ) (electricity) and ضَوْء (ḍawʾ) (light) respectively. Using such non-scientific conception in understanding the scientific senses of these terms leads to students’ confusion and failure to understand them. To ensure that students construe the scientific concepts correctly, they must be mindful of the inconsistency between their non-scientific and scientific meanings. (shrink)

Understanding the nature of pain depends, at least partly, on recognizing its subjectivity (thus, its first-person epistemology). This in turn requires using a first-person experiential method in addition to third-person experimental approaches to study it. This paper is an attempt to spell out what the former approach is and how it can be integrated with the latter. We start our discussion by examining some foundational issues raised by the use of introspection. We argue that such a first-person method in (...) the scientific study of pain (as in the study of any experience) is in fact indispensable by demonstrating that it has in fact been consistently used in conjunction with conventional third-person methodologies, and this for good reasons. We show that, contrary to what appears to be a widespread opinion, there is absolutely no reason to think that the use of such a first-person approach is scientifically and methodologically suspect. We distinguish between two uses of introspective methods in scientific experiments: one draws on the subjects’ introspective reports where any investigator has equal and objective access. The other is where the investigator becomes a subject of his own study and draws on the introspection of his own experiences. We give examples using and/or approximating both strategies that include studies of second pain summation and its relationship to neural activities, and brain imaging- psychophysical studies wherein sensory and affective qualities of pain are correlated with cerebral cortical activity. We explain what we call the experiential or phenomenological approach that has its origins in the work of Price and Barrell (1980). This approach capitalizes on the scientific prospects and benefits of using the introspection of the investigator. We distinguish between its vertical and horizontal applications. Finally, we conclude that integrating such an approach to standard third-person methodologies can only help us in having a fuller understanding of pain and of conscious experience in general. (shrink)

Despite pervasive variation in the content of laws, legal theorists and anthropologists have argued that laws share certain abstract features and even speculated that law may be a human universal. In the present report, we evaluate this thesis through an experiment administered in 11 different countries. Are there cross‐cultural principles of law? In a between‐subjects design, participants (N = 3,054) were asked whether there could be laws that violate certain procedural principles (e.g., laws applied retrospectively or unintelligible laws), and (...) also whether there are any such laws. Confirming our preregistered prediction, people reported that such laws cannot exist, but also (paradoxically) that there are such laws. These results document cross‐culturally and –linguistically robust beliefs about the concept of law which defy people's grasp of how legal systems function in practice. (shrink)

The present paper aims to broaden the current understanding of students’ misconception of scientific terminology by identifying the gaps between Arabic and English scientific terminologies and between everyday language and scientific language. The paper compares the polysemy, prototypes, and motivating factors of English energy with those of Arabic طَاقَة (ṭāqa), with more focus on students’ prior knowledge. The study employs Lakoff’s (1987) idealized cognitive models and Rosch’s (1975) prototype theory to reveal the radial members of both categories, i.e., energy and (...) طَاقَة (ṭāqa), and to explain the kinds of cognitive mechanisms that motivate the extension as well as understanding of the meanings of these terms. To this end, the study uses several English and Arabic dictionaries, lexical databases and corpora. This is to explore all the meanings, prototypes and motivating factors of the terms under investigation. The results show that the terms energy and طَاقَة (ṭāqa) overlap in prototypical meanings and motivating factors but differ in less prototypical and peripheral meanings. English and Arabic learners may then face similar issues in learning scientific concepts due to the difference between their pre-existing knowledge and scientific language. (shrink)