After discussing the manifest inconveniences of Galilean physicalism for both science and common sense, I propose an alternate, Aristotelian ontology of material things and show how it solves the epistemological problems engendered by the New Science. Read at the annual POH Symposium in Lake Wenatchee, WA, May 2011.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are generative AI systems capable of producing original texts based on inputs about topic and style provided in the form of prompts or questions. The introduction of the outputs of these systems into human discursive practices poses unprecedented moral and political questions. The article articulates an analysis of the moral status of these systems and their interactions with human interlocutors based on the Habermasian theory of communicative action. The analysis explores, among other things, Habermas's inquiries (...) into the analogy between human minds and computers, and into the status of atypical participants in the linguistic community such as genetically modified subjects and animals. Major conclusions are the LLMs seem to qualify as authors that originally participate in discursive practices but do display only a structurally derivative form of communicative competence and fail to meet the status of communicative agents. In this sense, while the contribution of AI writing systems in public discourse and deliberation can support the process of mutual understanding within the community of speakers, the human actors involved in the development, use, and diffusion of these systems share a collective responsibility for the disclosure of AI authorship and verification and adjudication of validity claims. (shrink)

This note argues that research in analytical philosophy broadly conceived should be published exclusively in English. Reasons are given for this and the thesis is defended against thirteen objections.

Language, one of humanity’s major transformative innovations, is foundational for many cultural, artistic, scientific, and economic advancements, including the creation of artificial intelligence (AI). However, in the fight against climate change, the power of such innovation is constrained due to the boring language of climate science and science communication. In this essay, we encapsulated the situation and risks of boring language in communicating climate information to the public and countering climate denialism and disinformation. Based on the (...) Serendipity-Mindsponge-3D knowledge management framework, we recommend several strategies for climate scientists and science communicators to be more creative and make their communication more interesting, including collaboration with other cultural sectors (e.g., stand-up comedians, climate fiction, etc.) and AI. (shrink)

Commas can splice our sentences, and shift their connotations. Our mixed modes for hyphens compound our words as well as confuse them—even dash them to pieces. In written language, how can we know we are asking a question unless we use the proper punctuation? Punctuation is vital to how we communicate. Whether in speech or prose, we punctuate our thoughts. In this sense, we may classify punctuation among what John Wesley calls “God’s many providences” in the sermon “The One (...) Thing Needful” (1733): “designed either to wean us from what is not, or to unite us to what is worthy of our affection. Are they pleasing? Then they are designed to lift up our hearts to the Parent of all good. Are they painful?” Wesley again answers rhetorically, “Then they are means of rooting out those passions that forcibly withhold us from [God]” (§II.4). Indeed, punctuation espouses varied ‘pleasing’ and/or ‘pleasant’ responses. Rather than merely forcing the point that our punctuation carries meaning—either in addition to or against that which we otherwise intend—I want to suggest that the poetry, prose, and other linguistic media/mediums within our liturgies innately possess meaning(s) which we have the opportunity to punctuate (i.e., ‘consecrate’ or ‘sanctify’) as faith communities or else surrender to the individualisms of our so-called (post)modern preferential interpretations: our proverbial run-on sentence protracting philosophical discussions amid this (in)definite period of change we acutely sense but struggle to describe. We are not God’s grammar police. For our part, however, faith communities and their leaders can and must more dutifully approach the task of shaping the nature, meaning, and purpose of our liturgies as truly corporate worship, not as mere collections of thoughts, words, and actions expressed by individuals more or less simultaneously. (shrink)

There is a tension between John Locke’s awareness of the fundamental importance of a shared public language and the manner in which his theorizing appears limited to offering a psychologistic account of the idiolects of individual speakers. I argue that a correct understanding of Locke’s central notion of signification can resolve this tension. I start by examining a long standing objection to Locke’s view, according to which his theory of meaning systematically gets the subject matter of our discourse (...) wrong, by making our ideas the meanings of our words. By examining Locke’s definition of “truth”, I show that Lockean signification is an expression relation, rather than a descriptive or referential relation. Consequently, the sense in which our words signify our ideas is roughly that our utterances advertise our otherwise undisclosed mental lives to each other. While this resolves one aspect of the public/private tension, I close with a brief discussion of the remaining tension, and the role for normative constraints on signification to play in generating a genuinely shared public language. (shrink)

Near the end of 'Naming the Colours', Lewis (1997) makes an interesting claim about the relationship between linguistic and mental content; we are typically unable to read the content of a belief off the content of a sentence used to express that belief or vice versa. I call this view autonomism. I motivate and defend autonomism and discuss its importance in the philosophy of mind and language. In a nutshell, I argue that the different theoretical roles that mental and (...) linguistic content play suggest these kinds of content should be understood as sensitive to different things. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both (...) common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, Davidson does not require uses of language to be self-perpetuating, in the way required by conventionalism, in order to be bona fide components of linguistic systems. Second, I argue that Davidson’s objections to conventionalism from language innovation and language variation fail, and that certain kinds of negative data in language use require an appeal to diachronic social relations. However, I also argue that recent work on communication in the a.. (shrink)

The re-use of publicly available (personal) data for originally unanticipated purposes has become common practice. Without such secondary uses, the development of many AI systems like large language models (LLMs) and ChatGPT would not even have been possible. This chapter addresses the ethical implications of such secondary processing, with a particular focus on data protection and privacy issues. Legal and ethical evaluations of secondary processing of publicly available personal data diverge considerably both among scholars and the general public. (...) While some of these uses are met with opposition and criticism, others are quite unanimously viewed as unproblematic. Often, proponents and opponents of such practices invoke the same ethical and legal standards for their opposite conclusions. This state of affairs shows that other considerations besides the public availability of data must play a role. It calls for a theoretical clarification of the additional criteria that should guide decisions about the (legally informed) ethical acceptability of re-processing practices. In order to make a contribution towards this goal, the present chapter maps the ongoing debate and systematises the existing contributions around three lines of argument: a consent-centred position, an approach that focuses on the distinction between data and information, and finally a line of argument that focuses on the contextual norms that govern the flows of information. The chapter further relates these arguments to three underlying conceptions of privacy and data protection: rights-based, structural and contextual, and discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each position in the light of concrete examples. It concludes by arguing for a mixed approach that combines core elements of the structural and contextual approaches. The chapter aims to contribute to existing research in the fields of data, AI and research ethics, and to reconnect the debate with ethical and legal scholarship on privacy and data protection. In doing so, it aims to make a theoretical contribution towards refining existing conceptions of privacy and data protection in order to make them more fit to ‘drive our digital world’ as far as the use of publicly available data is concerned. (shrink)

This book analyzes the uses of emotive language and redefinitions from pragmatic, dialectical, epistemic and rhetorical perspectives, investigating the relationship between emotions, persuasion and meaning, and focusing on the implicit dimension of the use of a word and its dialectical effects. It offers a method for evaluating the persuasive and manipulative uses of emotive language in ordinary and political discourse. Through the analysis of political speeches and legal arguments, the book offers a systematic study of emotive language (...) in argumentation, rhetoric, communication, political science and public speaking. (shrink)

The paper presents a number of empirical arguments for the perceptual view of speech comprehension. It then argues that a particular version of phenomenal dogmatism can confer immediate justification upon belief. In combination, these two views can bypass Davidsonian skepticism toward knowledge of meanings. The perceptual view alone, however, can bypass a variation on the Davidsonian argument. One reason Davidson thought meanings were not truly graspable was that he believed meanings were private (unlike behavior). But if the perceptual view of (...) speech comprehension is correct, then meanings (or at least conveyed meanings) are public objects like other perceivable entities. Hence, there is no particular problem of language comprehension, even if meanings originate in “private” mental states. (shrink)

A growing conceptual and empirical literature is advancing the idea that language extends our cognitive skills. One of the most influential positions holds that language – qua material symbols – facilitates individual thought processes by virtue of its material properties (Clark, 2006a). Extending upon this model, we argue that language enhances our cognitive capabilities in a much more radical way: the skilful engagement of public material symbols facilitates evolutionarily unprecedented modes of collective perception, action and reasoning (...) (interpersonal synergies) creating dialogically extended minds. We relate our approach to other ideas about collective minds ( Gallagher, 2011, Theiner et al., 2010 and Tollefsen, 2006) and review a number of empirical studies to identify the mechanisms enabling the constitution of interpersonal cognitive systems. (shrink)

This paper raises questions concerning Ted Morris’ interpretation of Hume’s notion of meaning and investigates the private and public aspects of Hume’s notion of meaning.

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case study for understanding conceptual and linguistic propagation. In early 2020, scientists, politicians, journalists, and other public figures had to, with great urgency, propagate several public health-related concepts and terms to every person they could. This paper examines the propagation of coronavirus and social distancing and develops a framework for understanding how the language used to express a notion can help or hinder propagation. I argue that anyone designing (...) a representational device for propagation needs to appreciate the three-way causal relationship between language, people’s mental representations, and the extramental world. Using this framework, I explore what makes “social distancing” a bad name for social distancing and why it is unproblematic that “coronavirus” is a scientifically loose way of speaking about the virus. Through this and further study of the many historical examples of linguistic and conceptual propagation, conceptual engineers can better understand the complex challenges facing people who want to propagate representational devices. (shrink)

In Mexico, the management of public resources has been questioned by the State, and mainly the results that the public administration at its three levels (federal, state and municipal), by the lack of transparency in the application and verification of public resources. The experience that gives us the operation of different emerging programs that focused on reducing social and economic inequality in the country, we can locate them as the first attempts in the search for a solution (...) that is complex. Moving from the role of the benefactor and welfare state to the promoter of the regions and in the recognition of the focalization of priority attention areas, the path that has been taken is not only the beginning. Recognizing the public nature of public finances as a promoter of social development, we must understand it as the one assumed by the State through social, political and economic co-responsibility to solve poverty and marginalization of its own public policy orientation and vision of solution has been made since the eighties. From the above, we can point out some preliminary conclusions including the study of the indigenous language-speaking population with a high level of social exclusion in the methodology for the definition of multidimensional poverty in Mexico, will allow the allocation of public resources in the fight against poverty to be effective since it will make it possible to identify to the target population that is subject to social exclusion and marginalization. This invites us to a final reflection: What to do to address the just social demands of the indigenous population that is immersed in poverty, marginalization and exclusion? What to do so that they do not leave their communities, and if they have already done so, how to attend to the needs of family groups that are due to the expense of a remittance that may never arrive? (shrink)

Wittgenstein has shown that that life, in the sense that applies in the first place to human beings, is inherently linguistic. In this paper, I ask what is involved in language, given that it is thus essential to life, answering that language – or concepts – must be both alive and the ground for life. This is explicated by a Wittgensteinian series of entailments of features. According to the first feature, concepts are not intentional engagements. The second feature (...) brings life back to concepts by describing them as inflectible: Attitudes, actions, conversations and other engagements inflect concepts, i.e., concepts take their particular characters in our actual engagements. However, inflections themselves would be reified together with the life they ground unless they could preserve the openness of concepts: hence the third feature of re-inflectibility. Finally, the openness of language must be revealed in actual life. This entails the possibility of conceptual ambivalence. (shrink)

Sign Language Recognition (SLR) aims to translate sign language into text or speech in order to improve communication between deaf-mute people and the general public. This task has a large social impact, but it is still difficult due to the complexity and wide range of hand actions. We present a novel 3D convolutional neural network (CNN) that extracts discriminative spatial-temporal features from photo datasets. This article is about classification of sign languages are not universal and are usually (...) not mutually intelligible although there are also similarities among different sign languages. They are the foundation of local Deaf cultures and have evolved into effective means of communication. Although signing is primarily used by the deaf and hard of hearing, hearing people also use it when they are unable to speak, when they have difficulty speaking due to a health condition or disability (augmentative and alternative communication), or when they have deaf family members, such as children of deaf adults. In this article we use the 43500 image in the dataset in size 64*64 pixel by use CNN Architecture and achieved 100% accuracy. (shrink)

It has recently been argued that public linguistic norms are implicated in the epistemology of testimony by way of underwriting the reliability of language comprehension. This paper argues that linguistic normativity, as such, makes no explanatory contribution to the epistemology of testimony, but instead emerges naturally out of a collective effort to maintain language as a reliable medium for the dissemination of knowledge. Consequently, the epistemologies of testimony and language comprehension are deeply intertwined from the start, (...) and there is no room for grounding the one in terms of the other. (shrink)

In recent years the term ‘family language policy’ has begun to circulate in the international sociolinguistics literature (cf. Spolsky 2004, 2007, 2012, King et al. 2008; Caldas 2012; Schwartz & Verschik 2013)1. From a conceptual standpoint, however, the creation and/or use of this syntagma, applied directly to the language decisions taken by family members to speak to one another, can raise questions about whether one should apply what appears rather to be a framework that pertains to actions arising (...) out of institutionalisation, public debate, and formal decisions to a phenomenon produced ‘spontaneously’. ‘Language policy’, which is also commonly associated with the term ‘planning’, has traditionally evoked the study of actions taken by public authorities at the level of the institutional and social use of languages and of their process of decision-making, implementation and any effects on social language behaviours that may ensue. The expansion of this concept to the level of interpersonal uses in families, which corresponds to another sphere involving elements that are distinct from those of the political level or of a formally constituted organisation, can be misleading and conceal phenomena specific to this level of social reality. (shrink)

Noam Chomsky’s well-known claim that linguistics is a “branch of cognitive psychology” has generated a great deal of dissent—not from linguists or psychologists, but from philosophers. Jerrold Katz, Scott Soames, Michael Devitt, and Kim Sterelny have presented a number of arguments, intended to show that this Chomskian hypothesis is incorrect. On both sides of this debate, two distinct issues are often conflated: (1) the ontological status of language and (2) the relation between psychology and linguistics. The ontological issue is, (...) I will argue, not the relevant issue in the debate. Even if this Chomskian position on the ontology of language is false, linguistics may still be a subfield of psychology if the relevant methods in linguistic theory construction are psychological. Two options are open to the philosopher who denies Chomskian conceptualism: linguistic nominalism or linguistic platonism. The former position holds that syntactic, semantic, and phonological properties are primarily properties, not of mental representations, but rather of public languagesentence tokens; The latter position holds that the linguistic properties are properties of public language sentence types. I will argue that both of these positions are compatible with Chomsky’s claim that linguistics is a branch of psychology, and the arguments that have been given for nominalism and platonism do not establish that linguistics and psychology are distinct disciplines. (shrink)

Many studies have been conducted to investigate the implementation of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in ESL and EFL contexts, but those conducted in EFL context, have reported that the application of CLT was challenging. Still, as far as the Afghan EFL context is concerned, there is a lack of empirical research investigating the issue. Hence, the purpose of this study is to explore afghan EFL lecturers’ perceived challenges in practicing CLT. The study also aims to examine if there is (...) any significant relationship among teachers use of CLT, the perceived challenges, and their demographic profiles. This study uses a quantitative research approach in which a survey questionnaire was given to EFL lecturers teaching in a public university. The results of the study revealed that the EFL lecturers had positive perceptions of using CLT activities, as there were evidence of a number of major CLT activities conducted in their classrooms. The results also revealed that they faced certain challenges that prevented them from implementing CLT effectively. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between students’ related challenges and teachers’ perceptions of using CLT; however, no significant correlations were found among teachers’ demographic profiles and CLT perceived challenges. This research is significant since it could be used as a resource presenting a comprehensive picture of CLT implementation in EFL classrooms in Afghanistan. (shrink)

Sam Berstler has recently argued for a fairness-based moral difference between lying and misleading. According to Berstler, the liar, but not the misleader, unfairly free rides on the Lewisian conventions which ground public-language meaning. Although compelling, the pragmatic and metasemantic backdrop within which this moral reason is located allows for the generation of a vicious explanatory circle. Simply, this backdrop entails that no speaker has ever performed an assertion. As I argue, escaping the circle requires rejecting Berstler’s fairness-based (...) reason against lying. The problem is a general one: the wrong of lying cannot be founded on the goods of language. (shrink)

Lecture Notes On Eric Schmid's "Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language" Presented at the Book Release Event at Triest Gallery (NYC) on January 19, 2024 -/- Prospectus to a Homotopic Metatheory of Language by Eric Schmid proposes that mathematics does not involve the discovery of a synthetic a priori. In other words, mathematics is not a stable transcendent object of knowledge. Instead, Schmid defines math as a language that depends on an infinitely large network topology of (...) inferences. Importantly, this metatheory can be applied not just to the disciplinary specific languages of computer & natural science, but also ordinary & public languages. Mathematics is not the discovery of transcendent concepts, but a dynamic evolving language of inquiry. (shrink)

Effectiveness of Public Distribution System in Jammu & Kashmir -/- Author / Authors :Ms. Ramandeep Kour Page no.166-178 Discipline : Applied Economics/ Management/ Commerce Script/language : Roman/English Category : Research paper Key words: PDS (Public Distribution System), Fair Price Shop, Social Security, Essential Commodities.

In a recent paper, Francis Y. Lin proposes a “memory-challenge” to two main interpretations of Wittgenstein’s private language argument: the “no-criterion-of-correctness” interpretation and the “no-stage-setting” interpretation. According to Lin, both camps of interpretation fail to explain why a private language is impossible within a short time period. To answer the “memory-challenge”, Lin motivates a grammatical interpretation of the private language argument. In this paper, I provide a critical discussion of Lin’s objection to these interpretations and argue that (...) Lin’s objection fails. In the case of the “no-stage-setting” interpretation, Lin suggests that the private language user can establish a stage within a short time period. However, I show that this stage is insufficient for a private language to be used correctly. In the case of the “no-criterion-of-correctness” interpretation, Lin believes that since memory is reliable within a short period, no criterion is needed for the correct use of a private language. However, I argue that his objection attacks a strawman, since the interpretation concerns the structure of justification, rather than the weakness of memory itself. I conclude with a critical discussion on memory and primitive expressions, the latter of which are crucial to Wittgenstein’s approach to public language. This discussion will help to draw a sharp line between private language and public language, and cast some doubt on Lin’s grammatical interpretation. (shrink)

The idea that ambiguity can be productive in data science remains controversial. Efforts to make scientific publications and data intelligible to computers generally assume that accommodating multiple meanings for words, known as polysemy, undermines reasoning and communication. This assumption has nonetheless been contested by historians, philosophers, and social scientists, who have applied qualitative research methods to demonstrate the generative and strategic value of polysemy. Recent quantitative results from linguistics have also shown how polysemy can actually improve the efficiency of human (...) communication. I present a new conceptual typology based on a synthesis of prior research about the aims, norms, and circumstances under which polysemy arises and is evaluated. The typology supports a contextual pluralist view of polysemy’s value for scientific research practices: polysemy does both substantial positive and negative work in science, but its utility is context-sensitive in ways that are often overlooked by the norms people have formulated to regulate its use, including prior scholars researching polysemy. I also propose that historical patterns in the use of partial synonyms, i.e. terms with overlapping meanings, provide an especially promising phenomenon for integrative research addressing these issues. (shrink)

How are language and thinking related? The “Sapir-Whorf” hypothesis that language determines thinking, has been widely debated but more recently has attracted far less interest and some critics reject it outright, as refuted. Has it been refuted and is there no longer any reason to discuss Sapir and Whorf’s ideas? I will argue that it has not and that, in any case, the “hypothesis” does not express Whorf’s published ideas (nor, probably, Sapir’s). This leads to an even more (...) interesting question: what did Sapir and Whorf really write about the relationship between language and thinking? Because Sapirand Whorf differ significantly and should be treated separately, in this paper, I will focus on Whorf, whose writings I am most familiar with. After briefly describing Edward Sapirand Benjamin Lee Whorf, after whom the hypothesis is named, I will then describe the hypothesis and explain how it is precluded by Whorf’s own writings. (shrink)

Knowledge brokers are among the main channels of communication between scientists and the public and a key element to establishing a relation of trust between the two. But translating knowledge from the scientific community to a wider audience presents several difficulties, which can be accentuated in times of crisis. In this paper we study some of the problems that knowledge brokers face when communicating in times of crisis. During the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we collected interviews with (...) Italian experts that played a major role as knowledge brokers in the local media. We asked them questions about five main topics: the features and role of science communicators; the use of language in communicating science; the importance of the relation of trust with the public; the peculiarity of communicating in a context of emergency; the problem of disagreement among experts, and its public perception and communication. The goal of this paper is to understand, through the words of knowledge brokers themselves, what they consider as best practices (and obstacles) to create trust between scientists and the public. Our empirical work can inform normative accounts of what knowledge brokering should be about. (shrink)

The appearance of openly accessible Artificial Intelligence Applications such as Large Language Models, nowadays capable of almost human-level performances in complex reasoning tasks had a tremendous impact on public opinion. Are we going to be "replaced" by the machines? Or - even worse - "ruled" by them? The behavior of these systems is so advanced they might almost appear "alive" to end users, and there have been claims about these programs being "sentient". Since many of our relationships of (...) power and social dominance are apparently based on intelligence, where the "smarter" seems to prevail on the "dumber" (as we see for example with livestock farming, or with the distribution of salaries according to formal and intellectual qualifications etc.) the emergence of programs and AI applications of this level of sophistication brings us to the question "what will AI do to us?". Our error is to frame Artificial Intelligence in the same way we frame Natural Intelligence and mistakenly address it as we would do with biological life, even applying to it the same biopolitical categories. We here try to reverse the common arguments in relationship between life and intelligence and show that our progresses in Artificial Intelligence might have no immediate consequence for the topic of life as such, as life and intelligence are well separated issues, and - even when we would like to somehow fuse them together, we are very far away from having an "Artificial Life" to the degree of complexity and effectiveness we have with "Artificial Intelligence". (shrink)

The introduction argues that nothing could be more natural than the phenomenological treatment of language; after all, its breakthrough in method consists in a renewed appreciation for the power of speech to unlock the truth of things. Interest in the phenomenology of language has increased in the last two decades due to the publication of new phenomenological texts and due to dialogue with other disciplines and approaches. At the same time, the phenomenological contribution cannot be fully appreciated apart (...) from its transcendental method. Only in light of its unique approach do the properly phenomenological themes come to the fore; among these are presence and absence, the pre-predicative, and embodied intersubjectivity. Phenomenology’s analysis of language is a vital one within the philosophy of language; it shows that language belongs to experience, and it shows how language arises from and gives voice to joint experience. (shrink)

The limited access to public secondary education in rural regions of Haiti has impacted children who want to pursue their education beyond the primary level. This generic qualitative study aimed to explore the perceptions of informed Haitian educators and other educators who were knowledgeable about the lack of access to public secondary education in rural Haiti, specifically through the framework of polarities of democracy theory. Data were gathered by conducting semistructured interviews with 20 educators who were situated in (...) both Haiti and the United States. NVivo 14 was used to organize, code, and analyze the data. Thematic analysis revealed three themes: (a) the government prioritizes political and personal interests over rural residents’ education, (b) disparities need to be reduced between urban and rural areas, and (c) a revolution in education is needed to build more public secondary schools for rural residents. Public policy recommendations included investing in training rural individuals to create a database of academics who can meet local students’ educational demands. Positive social change can occur by enhancing governmental services, implementing strategies to revitalize the agricultural sector in rural regions, and promoting active participation of rural residents in shaping the design of public schools to ensure effective secondary education for their children. (shrink)

Some time ago, the philosopher Luciano Floridi suggested that Western philosophy, and the mainstream contemporary approach to it traditionally called ‘analytic philosophy’, is in dire need of a reboot. The concern was that the discipline might be in a period of decadence. Analytic philosophy would be benefited by greater internationalization, wider and more transparent decision-making, and the reduction (as much as possible) of conflicts of interest as well as of its current habit of hiring and providing publication opportunities on the (...) basis of contacts, networking, and academic pedigree. If we are right, then we need a reconditioning of the institutional framework of analytic philosophy that adjusts it to the current global and interconnected world. (shrink)

Public discourse is increasingly characterized by a climate of intolerance, a culture of exclusion (cancel culture) and thinking in categories of political correctness. (German) language is systematically manipulated by public broadcasting in line with a gender political agenda. A more and more uncritical and ideologically coloured trend journalism is on the rise there. The Freedom and quality of science are also methodically undermined due to nonproven and populist claims. -/- Der Öffentliche Diskurs ist zunehmend geprägt von einem (...) Klima der Intoleranz, einer Kultur der Ausgrenzung (cancel culture) und einem Denken in Kategorien der political correctness. Die (deutsche) Sprache wird im Sinne einer genderpolitischen Agenda im Öffentlichen Rundfunk systematisch manipuliert. Ein zunehmend unkritischer und ideologisch gefärbter Tendenzjournalismus gewinnt dort an Terrain. Auch die Freiheit und die Qualität der Wissenschaft werden aufgrund unhaltbarer und populistischer Behauptungen methodisch untergraben. -/- . (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of the ways in which the notion of public reason has come to manifest itself in recent Islamic writings. The discussion is part of an effort to discover a common language in terms of which Islamic and liberal/secular discourses about democracy and public debate can be understood. The difficult question we are left with is whether it is permissible to speak of “public reason” sans phrase, or whether the notion must always (...) be qualified by reference to culture and religion. (shrink)

Due to the wide scope of (in particular linear) homotopy type theory (using quantum natural language processing), a metatheory can be applied not just to theorizing the metatheory of scientific progress, but ordinary language or any public language defined by sociality/social agents as the precondition for the realizability of (general) intelligence via an inferential network from which judgement can be made. How this metatheory of science generalizes to public language is through the recent advances (...) of quantum natural language processing, but the traditional metalogical encodings (of Tarski) is relatively comparable through universes such as the type of types or type of types of types found in the inherent inferentialism of UF/HoTT via infinity-groupoids. The "computational trinity" of proofs=programs=algebra in HoTT also means reason is defined functionally as "what it does" by what it computes (proofs are programs). Following Reza Negarestani's recent book, through the self's self-realizability, achieving self-consciousness and consciousness beyond selfhood, "geistig manifestation" is achieved in the form of general intelligence, but only through an inferential network of social agents intrinsically encoded through computation. (shrink)

Citizens can be meaningfully involved in multiple phases of the urban planning process from decision-making to implementation via a dedicated online platform through which they can interact with planners and decision-makers. In historical contexts, local people are essential resources for decision-makers seeking critical local information needed for effective planning and intervention—including what those citizens recall from the past about the area’s social values and the built environment and what they imagine and hope for their neighborhood’s future. This public knowledge, (...) collected through storytelling and mapping, can play a fundamental role in shaping the framework for neighborhood rehabilitation plans. As a foundation for designing an online visual questionnaire to collect local knowledge and understand the views and expectations of local people, this study focuses on theoretical ideas to define a framework for an online visual questionnaire tool. The tool presented provides a common visual language that people can easily understand and use whatever their social class, education, or background. It also has the benefit of enabling citizens and planners to interact directly regardless of their geographical location. To proposing a framework for the online visual questionnaire, the first step was to review some existing visual tools and methods, including analog used for community engagement and digital used in urban planning to encourage and support public participation. Through an analysis of these methods, some important variables and criteria were identified that further our understanding of citizens’ perceptions of their neighborhoods. The next step, as part of a larger study, will be examining a historical public space, including a bazaar, hammam, and cistern—located in the historical context of Yazd— a central city in Iran registered as a cultural heritage site by UNESCO— as a case study with the larger goal of identifying some specific. (shrink)

We provide a new text corpus from the social medium Telegram, which is rich in indirect forms of divisive speech. We scraped all messages from one channel of supporters of Donald Trump, covering a large part of his presidency from late 2016 until January 2021. The discussion among the group members over this long time period includes the spread of disinformation, disparaging of out-group members, and other forms of offensive speech. To encourage research into such practices of poisoning public (...) political discourse, we added automatic annotations of offensive language to all messages. We further added manual annotations of harmful language to a portion of the posts in order to enable the analysis of more implicit forms of online harm. (shrink)

Uncertainty is recognized as a key issue in water resources research, amongst other sciences. Discussions of uncertainty typically focus on tools and techniques applied within an analysis, e.g. uncertainty quantification and model validation. But uncertainty is also addressed outside the analysis, in writing scientific publications. The language that authors use conveys their perspective of the role of uncertainty when interpreting a claim —what we call here “framing” the uncertainty. This article promotes awareness of uncertainty framing in four ways. 1) (...) It proposes a typology of eighteen uncertainty frames, addressing five questions about uncertainty. 2) It describes the context in which uncertainty framing occurs. This is an interdisciplinary topic, involving philosophy of science, science studies, linguistics, rhetoric, and argumentation. 3) We analyze the use of uncertainty frames in a sample of 177 abstracts from the Water Resources Research journal in 2015. This helped develop and tentatively verify the typology, and provides a snapshot of current practice. 4) Provocative recommendations promote adjustments for a more influential, dynamic science. Current practice in uncertainty framing might be described as carefully-considered incremental science. In addition to uncertainty quantification and degree of belief (present in ~5% of abstracts), uncertainty is addressed by a combination of limiting scope, deferring to further work (~25%) and indicating evidence is sufficient (~40%) – or uncertainty is completely ignored (~8%). There is a need for public debate within our discipline to decide in what context different uncertainty frames are appropriate. Uncertainty framing cannot remain a hidden practice evaluated only by lone reviewers. (shrink)

Pronouns often convey information about a person’s social identity (e.g., gender). Consequently, pronouns have become a focal point in academic and public debates about whether pronouns should be changed to be more inclusive, such as for people whose identities do not fit current pronoun conventions (e.g., gender non-binary individuals). Here, we make an empirical contribution to these debates by investigating which social identities lay speakers think that pronouns should encode and why. Across four studies, participants were asked to evaluate (...) different types of real and hypothetical pronouns, including binary gender pronouns, race pronouns, and identity-neutral pronouns. We sampled participants from two languages with different pronoun systems: English (N = 1,120) and Turkish (N = 260). English pronouns commonly denote binary gender (e.g., he for men), whereas Turkish pronouns are identity-neutral (e.g., o for anyone). Participants’ reasoning about pronouns reflected both a familiarity preference (i.e., participants preferred the pronoun type used in their language) and—critically—participants’ social ideologies. In both language contexts, participants’ ideological beliefs that social groups are inherently distinct (essentialism) and should be hierarchal (social dominance orientation) predicted relatively greater endorsement of binary gender pronouns and race pronouns. A preregistered experimental study with an English-speaking sample showed that the relationship between ideology and pronoun endorsement is causal: Ideologies shape attitudes toward pronouns. Together, the present research contributes to linguistic and psychological theories concerning how people reason about language and informs policy-relevant questions about whether and how to implement language changes for social purposes. (shrink)

In scientific communications, journal articles, and philosophical aesthetic debates the words “art”, “creativity”, and “machine” are put together more and more frequently. Since some machines are designed to, or happens to, imitate human artistic creativity, it seems natural to use the same words to talk about human artists and machines which imitate them. However, the evolution of language in light of technology may conceal specific features of the phenomena it is supposed to describe. This makes it difficult to understand (...) what machine creativity actually is and how it is connected to human creativity. The aim of the paper is to investigate why, and in what sense, the functioning of some machines may be described in terms of artistic creativity and what is the relation between machine creativity and its human archetype. I start (§1) by introducing some general ideas concerning how language evolves alongside new technologies and focusing on the case of machine creativity. In §2 I review how some creative machines have been presented to the public, thus showing that a linguistic habit which connects machines to artistic creativity has already formed. In §3 I survey the debate on machine aesthetics and I highlight the main traits of the issue. In §4 I submit a primary scheme of machine creativity which draws on the concept of functional autonomy. Finally (§5), I argue that machine creativity cannot be mistaken for a substitute of the human kind, despite the fact that the word is the same. Creative machines are technological mediums by which new forms of human aesthetic experience can be explored. The kind of creativity machines enjoy displays a functional nature. (shrink)

Language, Truth, and History is an excellent volume of essays coming from one of the most important philosophers in the last fifty years. It would be of interest to anyone interested in the ways Davidson's philosophy evolved after the publication of the first two volumes, and it is essential reading for anyone working in philosophy of language or philosophy of mind.

The recent resurgence of the language of thought (LOT) hypothesis has drawn much attention. The history of philosophy and cognitive science has provided us with various versions of LOT. From Sellars to Fodor, theorists have offered us considerations on the vehicles, content, and functions of such a representation format. However, it’s been more than 50 years since Fodor’s publication on LOT (1975), and the resurgence suggests that we need a modern iteration of LOT to fit with recent developments in (...) the study on cognition. Therefore, in this paper, I argue that we need a middle ground between Fodor and Sellars’s views on LOT – specifically, we should abandon Fodor’s view on the vehicle and content of LOT, and we should also acknowledge that perception might involve LOT (contrary to what Sellars thought). What we should focus on is LOT representations’ format’s function, that at least some neural processes are analogous to linguistic structures, and how such a function is able to facilitate a modern situational view of cognitive representation. Having this account of LOT, we can make it a more versatile tool fitting with the other cognitive frameworks, such as the free energy principle and Bayesian inference. (shrink)

A woman is listening to Sinatra before work. As she later describes it, ‘suddenly from nowhere I could hear my mother singing along to it … I was there again home again, hearing my mother … God knows why I should choose to remember that … then, to actually hear her and I had this image in my head … of being at home … with her singing away … like being transported back you know I got one of those (...) … like shivery feelings really suddenly’ (Anderson 2004, 9-10). An older couple, discussing their honeymoon forty years ago, each say that they can’t remember the show they saw, until through iterative, puzzled cross-cuing they finally get there – ‘Desert Song, that’s it’ (Harris et al 2011, 292). An elderly English veteran of a prisoner of war camp in Japan, finishing up morning tea with a young Japanese social scientist interested in reconciliation, suddenly calls out loudly - in Japanese - ‘stand to attention’. He stands to attention in front of her: like many of the men she interviews, he physically re-enacts fragments of that long-past world of the camp, bringing that absent past into this new present context with a visceral shock (Murakami 2001, 2012; Middleton & Brown 2005, 133-136). (shrink)

This bibliography of Stumpf’s publications is the most comprehensive to date. It relies in part on the bibliography published by Stumpf in his autobiography (Stumpf 1924), which is incomplete and does not include his publications after 1924. In addition to the works of Stumpf published during his lifetime or posthumously, we indicate the translations of his works in several languages and some of the syllabus and lecture notes of his students that are available in different institutions.

This study which utilized the critical analysis, analyzed Wittgenstein’s concept of language-game and its implications in philosophical discipline and contemporary society. To delineate the origin of the problem of language in terms of epistemological dimension, the researcher analyzed the related concepts on classical philosophy. To determine the origin of the concept of language-game, the researcher used the historical method. To constructively criticize the end-goal of language-game, the hermeneutical approach of Hans Georg Gadamer was employed. From the (...) findings and with the aid of the above-mentioned methods, the researcher had come up with these conclusions. Language is inalienable in the sociological nature of man. Man is always related or connected to the other. In this sense, man shares his very subjectivity with the other. Unless he realizes this, he cannot actualize the essential part of his nature. In every aspect of man’s life, it is imperative for him to negotiate, communicate, and collaborate with the members of his household and society. Wittgenstein is the one of the philosophers who gave deeper commitment and emphasis on the concerns of language in man’s life. Mastering our use of language is not just for the sake of conventional understanding, but, more importantly, we use it in its proper context in order to express our thoughts clearly and in the process to understand ourselves. It is because, as we speak or write using language as medium of communication, we are projecting ourselves to the other. If we come up with the c common understanding, then we will be able to create a harmonious society. This study provided the readers with a better understanding of the importance of proper use of words or terminologies in their proper context. It is because this research delved on the conceptual and analytical mechanisms of using language in order to give a systematic pattern of corrective thinking and application for word’s use. Aside from affirming the importance of language in connection with our contemporary activities, this research looked into a deeper realization on the workings of language. This realization originated from Wittgensteinian context of understanding. As affirmation for Wittgenstein, it is appropriate to say that to understand a word in its proper context is to understand the sentence. To understand a sentence is to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of technique. This signifies that understanding is to know how to do something; in the case of language, understanding language means knowing how to use it. The researcher realized that understanding the meaning of a word is not something private to the mental life of an individual, but something which exist out in the open, in the public domain. This means that understanding the meaning is objectively understandable by people. However, the researcher did not agree with Wittgenstein’s view that philosophy should stop once we clear the way of understanding how our language works. Instead, the researcher adheres to the fact that philosophy as enterprise is an undying process in search for truth. For the researcher, we do not stop philosophizing because our imaginations continue to desire progress in terms of creativity. Thus, he affirmed Gadamer in claiming that we should not hinder our philosophical endeavors by breaking it. Even if we can clear the confusions and misunderstanding of language, still our active minds cling to what is new in the field of learning things. This research led to the formulation of other theories which can be useful tool in understanding the complexities with regards to ourselves and our society as a whole. Henceforth, all the laborious efforts of this research and the regimented time invested in the writing of this work are meaningfully compensated. (shrink)

As past studies of the association between parent-child relationship and problematic internet use show mixed results and are influenced by many factors, this meta-analysis of 75 primary Chinese and English language studies from 1990 to 2021 with 110,601 participants (aged 6−25 years) explored (a) the overall association between parent-child relationship and problematic internet use, and (b) whether the association is affected by their types, country, measures, objects of the parent-child relationship, gender, age, year and publication types. We used funnel (...) plots, Classic fail-safe N and Egger's test to test for publication bias and for moderation with the homogeneity tests. The results showed a negative association between quality of parent-child relationship and problematic internet use (r = −0.18, 95% CI = [−0.20, −0.15]). The moderation analysis found that compared with internet addiction tendency, the association between social media addiction and parent-child relationship was stronger. (shrink)

This article starts from the assumption that there is a connection between art and language and responsibility. What is it based on? It follows on from the research of the Hamburg Circle in the 1920s by Ernst Cassirer and Aby M. Warburg, and was strengthened in the 2000s by Hartmut Böhme. Their joint starting point is the emotional life of human beings. Thus, they assume that already the perception is shaped by it and can be increased in rituals. Comparably (...) hardly noticed by us, it continues to have an effect in art and language and thus influences the recipient. From this derives the demand that both the one who speaks and the one who is creatively active bears responsibility for his or her doing. With the knowledge of the effect of art and language, however, the recipient is also required to take responsibility for his actions influenced by it. The article aims to show this connection, which is deeply rooted in the nature of human beings. -/- The article was originally published in German. It has now been translated by the author with the kind permission of the Evangelical Church in Germany. Additions were made only in the notes and in the bibliography. The concept for the text goes back to a conference of the Evangelical Academy of the Martin Luther City of Wittenberg (Saxony). On this basis, the author was invited to contribute to the publication of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) Mitteilungen—Zur Erneuerung evangelischer Predigtkultur (Kirche im Aufbruch 5), edited by Kathrin Oxen and Dietrich Sagert. Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2013. The selection of the text for this issue of Art Style Magazine was based on one of the fundamental ideals of Metropolis, which sees itself as democratic and based on the responsibility of each member in dealing with art and language. (shrink)

The past eighteen years witnessed the rapid development of experimental philosophy of language. Adopting a bibliometric approach, this study examines the research trends and status quo of this burgeoning field based on a corpus of 237 publications retrieved from PhilPapers. It is observed that experimental philosophy of language has undergone three stages, the initiation stage, the development stage, and the extension stage, across which there is a clear upward trend in the annual number of publications. Michael Devitt, Edouard (...) Machery, John Turri, Nat Hansen, et al., are found to be the most productive philosophers, testifying their leading positions in this field. Journals, instead of books, are the major homes of works in this area. The analysis also yields a list of influential works, including the seminal work “Semantics, Cross-cultural Style” and other significant publications on the semantics of various types of expressions. Relatedly, the major research themes are found to include not only intuitions about the reference of proper names, but also a wide array of philosophically and linguistically interesting issues like the meaning of color adjectives, epistemic modals, and predicates of personal taste, the norms of assertions and the essence of lies, etc. These findings showcase that experimental philosophy of language has broadened the research territory and offered deep insights into central issues of philosophy of language that are beyond the reach of the conventional armchair methodology. (shrink)

The conceptualisation of schooling is often based on “ideal children” in “ideal situations.” However, in determining the level of participation for children who are considered vulnerable in schooling, it is important to understand the lived experiences of these children. In this study, migrant children (particularly undocumented ones) in South Africa are the focus, and their lived experiences were considered through reflections from their parents and teachers. Data were collected using semi-structured interviews, and analysed using a constant comparative method of qualitative (...) analysis within a grounded theory approach. The study found that challenges affecting migrant children’s schooling include the lack of documentation, language barriers, issues of transition and adaptation (discrimination), and the inability to access further education. Strategies were identified to address the challenges, including schools liaising with the Department of Home Affairs, implementing cultural diversity programmes within the school, and through deliberate inclusive programmes. (shrink)