According to the dominant position among philosophers of language today, we can legitimately ascribe determinate contents to natural language sentences, independently of what the speaker actually means. This view contrasts with that held by ordinary language philosophers fifty years ago: according to them, speech acts, not sentences, are the primary bearers of content. François Recanati argues for the relevance of this controversy to the current debate about semantics and pragmatics. Is 'what is said' determined by linguistic conventions, or is it (...) an aspect of 'speaker's meaning'? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is 'literal meaning'? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati provides an original and insightful defence of 'contextualism', and offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface. (shrink)

The distinction between literal and figurative use is well-known and embedded in ‘folk linguistics’. According to folk linguistics, figurative uses deviate from literal ones. But recent work on lexical modulation and polysemy shows that meaning deviation is ubiquitous, even in cases of literal use. Hence, it has been argued, the literal/figurative distinction has no value for theorising about communication. In this paper, we focus on metaphor and argue that here the literal–figurative distinction has theoretical importance. The distinction between literal and (...) metaphorical needs to be captured by our account of communication because literal uses transmit information in a way that metaphorical ones do not. We argue that there is a way to explain the literal/metaphorical distinction that preserves the core of the folk-linguistic idea and gives the distinction theoretical relevance. We propose that literal uses of a word are made with the intention to conform to an established practice of use, while metaphorical uses do not so conform, but depend on this pre-existing practice. Our account can deal with data that are problematic for other theories. A further advantage is that it extends naturally to other non-literal uses of words, including metonymy. (shrink)

Literal meaning is often identified with conventional meaning. In A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs Donald Davidson argues (1) that literal meaning is distinct from conventional meaning, and (2) that literal meaning is identical to what he calls first meaning. In this paper it is argued that Davidson has established (1) but not (2), that he has succeeded in showing that there is a distinction between literal meaning and conventional meaning but has failed to see that literal meaning and first meaning (...) are also distinct. This failure is somewhat surprising, since it is through a consideration of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation that the distinction between literal meaning and first meaning becomes apparent. (shrink)

Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I look at the historical development of Literalism. This development reveals a gradual weakening. The (...) question that naturally arises is: How far can we go in this direction? Where will this tendency ultimately lead us? And the obvious answer is: to Contextualism. In the second section I describe the steps which, from a critique of the currently dominant literalist position (Minimalism), can lead to Contextualism. In the last three sections I describe various contextualist positions, and I discuss possible literalist replies to the contextualist challenge. (shrink)

The complex relations between Islam and modern science have so far mostly been examined by thinkers at the conceptual level. The wider interaction of religious scholars and preachers with the general public on science issues is an unexplored area that is worthy of examination, for it often is characterized by a literalistic approach. I first briefly review literalism in its various forms. The classical Islamic jurisprudential school of Zahirism, widely regarded as bearing the flag of juristic literalism, is also briefly (...) presented. I then address specific science-related issues currently being discussed in literalistic ways by many religious scholars and preachers in their general-public discourse. I focus on the practical case of the determination of crescent-based Islamic months and holy occasions, the conceptual issue of evolution (biological and human), and the rule for the consumption of meat by slaughter of animals. In the last part of the essay I propose a constructive alternative to the literalistic mode: the Maqasidi (objectives-based) approach. This rather old method has seen some revival lately, mainly among Islamic jurists concerned with solving the new issues of modern times, especially for Muslims living in the West, but this approach has not yet been applied to science-related issues. I present the main ideas of this method and show their relevance and usefulness to science-related topics. (shrink)

Many recent definitions of lying are based on the notion of what is said. This paper argues that says-based definitions of lying cannot account for lies involving non-literal speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, loose use or irony. It proposes that lies should instead be defined in terms of assertion, where what is asserted need not coincide with what is said. And it points to possible implications this outcome might have for the ethics of lying.

In this paper, I argue that theories of perception that appeal to Helmholtz’s idea of unconscious inference (“Helmholtzian” theories) should be taken literally, i.e. that the inferences appealed to in such theories are inferences in the full sense of the term, as employed elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary discourse. -/- In the course of the argument, I consider constraints on inference based on the idea that inference is a deliberate acton, and on the idea that inferences depend on the (...) syntactic structure of representations. I argue that inference is a personal-level but sometimes unconscious process that cannot in general be distinguished from association on the basis of the structures of the representations over which it’s defined. I also critique arguments against representationalist interpretations of Helmholtzian theories, and argue against the view that perceptual inference is encapsulated in a module. (shrink)

One can lie by asserting non-literal content. If I tell you “You are the cream in my coffee” while hating you, I can be rightfully accused of lying if my true emotions are unearthed. This is not easy to accommodate under many definitions of lying while also preserving the lying-misleading distinction. The essential feature of non-literal utterances is their falsity when literally construed. This interferes with accounts of lying and misleading, because such accounts often combine a literal construal of what (...) is said by an utterance with a falsity requirement for lying. In the presence of non-literal lies such definitions struggle to make plau- sible predictions for non-literal lies and merely misleading utterances together. In this article I aim to fix this by extending Daniel Hoek’s pragmatic account of conversational exculpature to assertions in general. Since this mechanism is designed to compute the intended meanings of non-literal utterances, it straightforwardly predicts non-literal lies to be as such. The lying-misleading distinction is also preserved, because merely misleading utterances arise out of exploiting a different pragmatic mechanism—Gricean additive implicatures. Along the way I also draw some general lessons about assertion and implicatures. (shrink)

In "Literal Meaning," John Searle claims to refute the view that sentences of a natural language have a meaning independent of the social contexts in which their utterances occur. The present paper is a reply on behalf of this view. In the first section, I show that the issue is not a parochial dispute within a narrow area of the philosophy of language, of interest only to specialists in the area, but is at the heart of a wide range of (...) important philosophical problems, those on which the recent linguistic turn in philosophy has properly taken a grammatical perspective. In the second section, I reply to Searle's criticisms of the view. (shrink)

En su conocida obra sobre Filón de Alejandría, Harry A. Wolfson sostiene que la filosofía filónica es el preámbulo de las “filosofías religiosas” de las tres tradiciones abrahámicas. Entre varias coincidencias y similitudes entre Filón y cada una de las filosofías religiosas, Wolfson destaca una particularmente importante: las tres tradiciones vieron en sus respectivas Escrituras dos significados, uno literal ( ῥητή o φανερά ) y otro oculto (ὑπόνοια). Cada una de estas tradiciones filosóficas buscó —a su manera— un método alegórico (...) de interpretación. Dicho método lo aprendieron los Padres de la Iglesia directamente de Filón. Y de los Padres habría sido transmitido, según Wolfson, al islam y al judaísmo. La versión más difundida entre los historiadores e historiadoras de la filosofía ha sido que, en realidad, ni el islam ni el judaísmo tuvieron contacto directo con Filón. Podría hablarse en todo caso de una influencia indirecta. A pesar de las ambigüedades al respecto, este artículo pretende elucidar las posibles similitudes entre las nociones de ῥητή o φανερά y ὑπόνοια y sus equivalentes árabes, _ẓāhir _y _bāṭin_. (shrink)

In this paper, we make a short history about: the neutrosophic set, neutrosophic numerical components and neutrosophic literal components, neutrosophic numbers, neutrosophic intervals, neutrosophic hypercomplex numbers of dimension n, and elementary neutrosophic algebraic structures. Afterwards, their generalizations to refined neutrosophic set, respectively refined neutrosophic numerical and literal components, then refined neutrosophic numbers and refined neutrosophic algebraic structures.

Alexithymia is characterised by difficulties in identifying, recognising, and describing emotions. We studied alexithymia in the context of speech comprehension, specifically investigating the incongruent condition between prosody and the literal meaning of words in emotion-based discourse. In two experiments, participants were categorised as having high or low alexithymia scores based on the TAS-20 scale and listened to three-sentence narratives where the emotional prosody of a key phrase or a keyword was congruent or incongruent with its literal meaning. The incongruent condition (...) resulted in slower reaction times and lower accuracy in recognition of emotions. This incongruence effect was also evident for individuals with high alexithymia, except for anger. They recognised anger as accurately in both congruent and incongruent conditions. Contrary to our hypothesis, however, individuals with high alexithymia did not show an overall difference in emotion recognition compared to the low alexithymia group. These findings highlight the nuanced relationship between emotional prosody and literal meaning, offering insights into how individuals with varying levels of alexithymia process emotional discourse. Understanding these dynamics has implications for both cognitive research and clinical practice, providing valuable perspectives on speech comprehension, especially in situations involving incongruence between prosody and word meaning. (shrink)

It is widely assumed that a literal understanding of someone’s self-deception that p yields the following contradiction. Qua self-deceiver, she does not believe that p, yet – qua self-deceived – she does believe that p. I argue that this assumption is ill-founded. Literalism about self-deception – the view that self-deceivers literally self-deceive – is not committed to this contradiction. On the contrary, properly understood, literalism excludes it.

The modern conception of the ``Rule of Law'' entails government bylaw not men, and takes law to consist in rules known in advance. Thislatter characteristic assumes that, for the most part, the meaningof such rules is unproblematic (Hart's ``core of settled meaning''), this usually being understood as a function of ``literal meaning''.A quite different model exists in the Bible: the early rules display``oral residue'', and their meaning, I argue, is constructed in``narrative'' rather than ``semantic'' terms: instead of asking:``what situations do (...) the words of this rule cover?'', we shouldinquire: ``what typical situations do the words of this rule evoke?''.Moreover, courtroom adjudication was not the norm, and its originalform was not based upon the application of written rules but ratherupon judicial discretion taken to have been divinely inspired. Isuggest that modern jurisprudence still retains traces of such earlierconceptions, in its account of modern law: despite their differences, both Hart and Fuller make use of narrative constructions of meaning,and Kelsen ultimately prefers the authority of the judge to the correctness of the rule he purports to apply. (shrink)

This paper argues that the literal meaning of words in a natural language is less conventional than usually assumed. Conventionality is defined in terms that are relative to reasons; norms that are determined by reasons are not conventions. The paper argues that in most cases, the literal meaning of words—as it applies to their definite extension—is not conventional. Conventional variations of meaning are typically present in borderline cases, of what I call the extension-range of literal meaning. Finally, some putative and (...) one or two genuine exceptions are discussed. (shrink)

The principle of explosion asserts that any formula can be derived from any pair of other contradictory formulas. Paraconsistent logic is typically regarded as a logic in which the universal validity of this principle is questioned. Therefore, a key point is determining when the validity can be considered universal to classify a logic as paraconsistent. A pertinent example to illustrate this point is the calculus CB1 that admits the principle but only for negated formulas, i.e., from any set {α, ∼α} (...) any other formula follows if and only if α is of the form ∼γ. Another example is Sette’s calculus P1, which is paraconsistent at the level of variables but not complex formulas. Both serve as compelling examples of the so-called borderline cases. In this paper, we examine several calculi expected to be paraconsistent at the level of literals. It means that a pair of formulas, α and ∼α, can yield any β if, and only if α is neither a propositional variable nor is its iterated negation. Furthermore, it is assumed that in some calculi presented here, β must adhere to specific restrictions. Once these conditions are satisfied, we refer to calculus as paraconsistent in a “controllable manner”. (shrink)

This paper examines the place of metaphorical interpretation in the current Contextualist-Literalist controversy over the role of context in the determination of truth-conditions in general. Although there has been considerable discussion of 'non-literal' language by both sides of this dispute, the language analyzed involves either so-called implicit indexicality, loose or loosened use, enriched interpretations, or semantic transfer, not metaphor itself. In the first half of the paper, I critically evaluate Recanati's (2004) recent Contextualist account and show that it cannot account (...) for the metaphorical-literal dependence characteristic of metaphor. I then turn to Carston's (2002), and Bezuidenhout's (2001) Contextualist accounts and show that they place no constraints on metaphorical interpretations. In the second half of the paper I sketch a Literalist theory of metaphor elaborated in Stern (2000) and respond to two kinds of Contextualist criticisms of that account by Camp (2005) and Stanley (2005). (shrink)

The role of literal meaning during the construction of meaning that goes beyond pure literal composition was investigated by combining cross-modal masked priming and ERPs. This experimental design was chosen to compare two conflicting theoretical positions on this topic. The indirect access account claims that literal aspects are processed first, and additional meaning components are computed only if no satisfactory interpretation is reached. In contrast, the direct access approach argues that figurative aspects can be accessed immediately. We presented metaphors ( (...) These lawyers are hyenas, Experiment 1a and 1b) and producer-for-product metonymies ( The boy read Böll, Experiment 2a and 2b) with and without a prime word that was semantically relevant to the literal meaning of the target word ( furry and talented, respectively). In the presentation without priming, metaphors revealed a biphasic N400-Late Positivity pattern, while metonymies showed an N400 only. We interpret the findings within a two-phase language architecture where contextual expectations guide initial access (N400) and precede pragmatic adjustment resulting in reconceptualization (Late Positivity). With masked priming, the N400-difference was reduced for metaphors and vanished for metonymies. This speaks against the direct access view that predicts a facilitating effect for the literal condition only and hence would predict the N400-difference to increase. The results are more consistent with indirect access accounts that argue for facilitation effects for both conditions and consequently for consistent or even smaller N400-amplitude differences. This combined masked priming ERP paradigm therefore yields new insights into the role of literal meaning in the online composition of figurative language. (shrink)

Literate Experience argues for the existence of certain shared patterns of intellectual association in the English seventeenth century, patterns that follow the outlines of Bacon’s project of epistemological reform. Bacon’s project offered a theory of how knowing as a private act could be transformed into a public one, an act related to the creation and maintenance of public authority. The question thus becomes, how did thinkers in the period reimagine civil society as a polity of knowledge? This study traces out (...) a variety of answers to that question, ranging from the Royal Society’s communal rhetoric to the work of four literary writers who, in a variety of ways, problematize the notion that political society exists as a community of shared knowledge. (shrink)

A literate scrutiny of a popular science Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-4 DOI 10.1007/s11016-011-9584-7 Authors Aileen Fyfe, School of History, University of St Andrews, St Katharine’s Lodge, The Scores, St Andrews, Fife, KY16 9AR Scotland, UK Journal Metascience Online ISSN 1467-9981 Print ISSN 0815-0796.

The Buddhist concept of skillful means , as introduced inMahāyāna sūtras, exposes a new awareness of the gap between text and meaning. Although the term is sometimes taken to point to the Buddha's pedagogical skills, this interpretation ignores the provocative use of the term in Mahāyāna texts. Treating skillful means as a universal Buddhist concept also fails to explain why and for what purpose it first became predominant in the Mahāyāna. Looking at the use of skillful means in the Lotus (...) Sūtra and in the Skill in Means Sūtra reveals a hermeneutic device aimed at criticizing an existing corpus of Buddhist literature. As such, skillful means is used to demonstrate that the old doctrine and the life of the Buddha contained fictitious features and were nothing but skillful means. This indicates a growing awareness of a gap between literal expressions and their hidden meaning that can only arise after some kind of religious corpus has been established. (shrink)

Traditionally, the dominant theory of metaphor has taken the form of saying that metaphor is a matter of using a word with a figurative meaning, that is, a meaning which deviates from standard, literal, meaning. The present article challenges the assumption on which such a characterization rests: that there are standard meanings for words fixed by conventions normative for our use of words. It argues that the most sophisticated defence of such a conception of meaning‐that of David Lewis‐gives an account (...) of convention that cannot be coherently applied to the case of language, and which misdescribes the phenomena of language. The fluidity and flexibility exhibited in our normal literal uses of words is such that to say that a meaning deviates from past meanings assigned to a word registers no contrast between the metaphorical use of words and the literal. Hence if we contrast the literal and the metaphorical, we must do it in some other way than by talking about what happens to the meanings of words. (shrink)

The distinction between literal and nonliteral meaning can be traced back to folk models about the relationship between language and the world. According to these models, sentences can be seen as building a representation of the world they describe, and understanding a sentence means knowing how each linguistic element affects the construction of the representation. Papers in this volume connect these folk models to the more scientific notions of the literal/nonliteral distinction proposed by philosophers, linguists, and cognitive scientists. The current (...) volume examines the literal/nonliteral distinction from a number of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, outlining some of the problematic assumptions in traditional paradigms and pointing to promising directions for the study of meaning. (shrink)

For Thomas Aquinas (1224-74), the Book of Job is the authoritative teaching concerning divine providence. In his Literal Exposition on Job, Aquinas offers a line-by-line commentary on the scriptural text. He analyzes the text not only by way of cross-references within the Book of Job and to other parts of Scripture, but also by appeal to the writings of Aristotle, the Church Fathers, and other Christian Aristotelians. Anthony Damico's translation is more literal than literary, preferring to render the Latin words (...) wherever possible by their obvious English derivatives. Martin Yaffe provides an extensive interpretive essay, bibliography, and indexes of citations. (shrink)

The writing piece ‘Literal transitions’ proposes a literary answer to the question as to whether a potential transit from the word ‘organic’ to the word ‘digital’ exists. The piece as well as its creation process and the author’s comments on it will be described in the following. What can result from this experiment is a reflection of the language material itself, a certain degree of awareness of the implications of the traditional or unconscious constraints in language. Literal Transitions is not (...) an explanation, but an examination with artistic means. This examination is based on three assumptions: (1) the potential of literature unfolds when writing is constrained; (2) restrictions make the language’s silence speak and (3) we need fictions to build our world. (shrink)

We distinguish between literal and metaphorical applications of Bayesian models. When intended literally, an isomorphism exists between the elements of representation assumed by the rational analysis and the mechanism that implements the computation. Thus, observation of the implementation can externally validate assumptions underlying the rational analysis. In other applications, no such isomorphism exists, so it is not clear how the assumptions that allow a Bayesian model to fit data can be independently validated.

This response to the articles of Luzzati and Broekman (in this issue)addresses principally the character of early rabbinic legalinterpretation, as viewed by the Rabbis themselves. It considers, withexamples, their concept of ``simple meaning'' (peshat), and itsplace within their overall hermeneutic system and its theologicalpresuppositions. The second section responds more briefly to thetheoretical critiques of Luzzati and Broekman, stressing that (myversion of) semiotics is descriptive rather than normative; resists thereduction of textual meaning to interpretation; and refuses to equatedecision-making with justification. I (...) suggest that traces of traditionaltheological positions may be discerned in the normativist positions ofmy interlocutors. (shrink)

In Pieces of Mind: The Proper Domain of Psychological Predicates (Oxford UP, 2018), I argue that psychological predicates used to ascribe cognitive capacities to many nonhuman biological species should be interpreted literally with the same reference for humans and nonhumans alike. In this Mind & Language book symposium, I respond to comments and criticisms by Zoe Drayson, Edouard Machery, and Eric Schwitzgebel, and conclude that the Literalist position is still the best interpretation of these uses.

It is not the case that there is only one literal sense of “same person.” When presented in different contexts, “she is/is not the same person” can have different answers concerning the same entity or set of entities across the same period of time. This is because: Persons are composed of many parts, and different parts have different persistence conditions. This follows from a reductionist view of the self. When we ask about sameness of persons, or “personal identity,” we are (...) asking because of certain practical concerns. Different concerns will look to the persistence of different parts of the person for criteria of sameness. No single criterion of sameness tracks all concerns. By combining reductionism with contextualism, the disparate answers to the personal identity question can be clarified without losing the practical concerns motivating them. (shrink)

In this work, it is shown that given a correct understanding of the nature of reference and of linguistic meaning generally, it is possible to produce non-revisionist analyses of the nature of -/- *Perceptual content, *Mental content generally, *Logical equivalence, *Logical dependence generally, *Counterfactual truth, *The causal efficacy of mental states, and *Our knowledge of ourselves and of the external world. -/- In addition, set-theoretic interpretations of several semantic concepts are put forth. These concepts include truth, falsehood, negation, and conjunction.

Autistic individuals are commonly said – and also consider themselves – to be excessively literalist, in the sense that they tend to prefer literal interpretations of words and utterances. This literalist bias seems to be fairly specific to autism and still lacks a convincing explanation. In this paper we explore a novel hypothesis that has the potential to account for the literalist bias in autism. We argue that literalism results from an atypical functioning of the predictive system: specifically, an atypical (...) balance between predictions and error signals in language processing may make individuals more uncertain about their own predictions. Such uncertainty is then often resolved by resorting to the safest interpretation, that is, the literal one. We start by reviewing existing explanations of other autistic traits that appeal to predictive processing. We then apply these insights to language, by showing that predictions play a key role in everyday comprehension and that a low level of confidence in one’s own predictions is likely to escalate comprehension difficulties. Finally, we take a deeper look at non-literal uses of language by discussing the case of metaphors, to illustrate how a predictive processing account offers a promising explanation of the literalist bias in autism. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the historical-philosophical analysis of the problem of ambivalence as a fundamental principle of Derrida’s philosophical thinking. It shows how such primordial philosophical questions as ones of limits of philosophies and of limits of philosophy define the basic problem dimensions of Derridean conception. It consideres the correlation of the theme of marginality with both the problem of Derrida’s cultural self-identification and the idea of the metaphoricity of language as the initial premise of différance logic. Also the (...) article examines the role of transcendentalistic implications in Derridean thought that determine a his-torical and philosophical context of Derrida’s philosophy. The analogy between quasi-transcendental and metaphorical aspects of deconstructive thinking is drawn. The identifica-tion of Jewish and metaphorical in Derrida’s conception is demonstrated. The author introduces the concept of "literal metaphor" as the quintessence of Derrida’s philosophical thought which structures its basic forms, namely: aporia, hyperbole, question, commentary. (shrink)

Our objective in this paper is twofold: first, we intend to address the tenability of the enactivist middle way between realism and idealism, as it is proposed in The Embodied Mind. We do so by taking the enactivist conception of bringing forth a world literally in three conceptual levels: enaction, niche construction and social construction. Based on this proposal, we claim that enactivism is compatible with the idea of an independent reality without committing to the claim that organisms have cognitive (...) access to a world composed of properties specified prior to any cognitive activity. Our second goal is to show that our literal interpretation of bringing forth a world not only sustains the legitimacy of the middle way, but it also allows us to revive the conception of evolution as natural drift—which is perhaps the least examined aspect of the original enactivist theory and is central to the understanding of cognition in an enactive way. Natural drift focuses on how structural couplings between organism and environment trigger viable pathways of maintenance and reproduction, instead of selecting the most adapted trait to a pregiven environment. Thus, although enactivists typically do not explore the consequences of their views regarding evolutionary dynamics, we show how natural drift provides a suitable starting point. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE IN THE REPRESENTATION OF GOD IN HIS SEMINAL work on the theory of signs, Charles Morris affirms that human beings are " the dominant sign-using animals" and that" the human mind is inseparable from the functioning of signs-if indeed mentality is not to be identified with such functioning." 1 By means of acculturation we learn to use and interpret signs, both linguistic and (...) non-linguistic; and by virtue of these capacities we can appropriately designate the human animal as homo symbolicus, homo loquens, and homo sapiens. Indeed, all forms of human culture presuppose the ability to use and interpret signs, including that form of human culture which leads us to speak of ourselves as homo religious. Over the years I have come to understand and speak of religion as a community with its cultus. There is the community, be it triba1, national, or universal with its polity or structure and ongoing history; and there is the cultus with its organic system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs, encompassing ·such elements as stories, creeds, scriptures, doctrines, theologies, confessions, prayers, chants, songs, rites, rituals, sacraments, artifacts, etc. Like any other cultural system, scheme or network of signs one can characterize a religious cultus as an inter -subjective set of signs whose usage is determined by the implicit or explicit rules that govern the relations of signs to each other; the relations of the signs to the objects which the signs designate or denote, or stand for in some way; and the relations of signs to the users or interpreters of these signs and to those who are affected by these signs in some way. 1 Charles W. Morris, FoundatioJi of the Theory of Signs, in International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, Vol. I, No. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939), p. L 6~7 628 WILLIAM L. POWER: Given this understanding of community and cultus, one can describe a religion as an organized group of socially interdependent human beings which uses or employs ·a system of linguistic and nonlinguistic signs to represent reality in its various modalities and mixtures of good and evil and to affect human ways of life on the basis of that representation. Altering the terminology somewhat, one could say that a religious community uses its cultus to proclaim, enact, and display a comprehensive worldview.and to form and tr:msform the ethospathos of human beings in their solidarity and solitude. Expressed semiotically, there is the system of signs of a particular community, the intended signification of these signs, and the significance of these signs for those who use and are affected by them. What distinguishes a religion from other forms of human culture is that a rel·igious cultuml sy•stem or a religious community with its cultus is primarily concerned with ultimate or supreme reality or with that which is divine, holy, or sacred and that reality's bearing on and relevance for human life and well-being. In short, a religion is a cultural system which functions to map the whole of re.ality and to acculturate in desirable ways or to civilize. If a religion is a cultural system, then one can identify three distinct yet inseparably related dimensions of every religion. There is 1) the cultural dimension consisting of the interrelruted signs, symbols and expressions of a cultus; 2) the reality and value dimension consisting of the ontological and axiological purport of the cultus; and 3) the experiential dimension consisting of the existential import of the cultus. It is this thioo dimension which has led many in the past and in the present to speak of religion as piety, consciousness of things divine, ultimate concern, religiousness, etc. In the tradition of Peircian semiotics, one can speak of these three dimensions as the syntactic, semantic, and praigmatic dimensions of a religion; and they can be analyzed and studied with the aid of syntactics or syntax, semantics, and pr:agmatics, which as a unity LITERAL AND METAPHORICAL USES OF DISCOURSE 629 constitute the discipline of semiotics. As Peirce recognized, modem semiotics is continuous with the Medieval trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric-the semiotics of almost a millennium a;go... (shrink)

The idea of Brazilian philosophy presupposes the reception of modern philosophical ideas by 19th century literates. The correct interpretation of the value and meaning of their texts on philosophy implies a consideration about the humanistic intervention of literates in the history of western philosophical teaching.

In everyday English usage, the words ‘literal’ and ‘figurative’ are normally taken to be opposite in meaning. It is an opposition with very ancient roots. One of its forbears was the medieval theory of Scriptural hermeneutics, which distinguished among the literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogic senses of Scripture. This itself had an ancestry in pre-Augustinian times: Augustine tells in his Confessions how he learned from Ambrose the trick of interpreting Scripture figuratively, thus eliminating the problems and contradictions created by a (...) literal reading. Earlier still, the distinction and the opposition were at least implicit in Poetics 21, where Aristotle differentiated between the standard or normal name for a thing, and various other types of name among which he listed metaphor. The antonymy of the literal and the figurative is therefore deeply embedded in our intellectual history, and it is perhaps for this reason that it has remained, to a large extent, unexamined and unquestioned. (shrink)

Against Barnett (2012), I argue that the theory I advance in DeRose 2010 is best construed as one on which ‘"were"ed-up’ future-directed conditionals like ‘If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby’ are, in ways important to how they function in deliberation, different in literal content from their ‘straightforward’ counterparts like ‘If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby’. I also defend my way of classifying future-directed conditionals against an attack (...) by Barnett by defending a standard (among philosophers) approach to the basic structure of some conditionals. Finally, I counter Barnett’s charge that by using the concept of deliberation in my account of the meaning of future-directed conditionals, I put an implausibly demanding constraint on what it takes to understand such sentences. (shrink)

Article lays out the conceptual space for Indian theorizing about literal and non-literal meaning by way of each of these three textual traditions. Since the article’s structure is topical rather than historical, a chronology of major figures is appended to help orient readers. The focus of the article is the period demarcated roughly from 200 CE to 1300 CE, often characterized as the Classical Period of Indian philosophy.

Resumen: En el presente artículo se evidencia la vinculación que establece Rama entre lengua/literatura y espacio/poder en La ciudad letrada. Este nuevo paradigma ha permitido pensar y repensar la literatura latinoamericana y los estudios culturales, sin embargo, entraña contradicciones dentro del mismo pensamiento del uruguayo. La tajante división que el autor establece entre ciudad real y ciudad letrada hace imposible pensar el rol de la literatura fuera de la esfera del poder institucional, al mismo tiempo que relega ontológicamente la realidad (...) de esta última a una meramente instrumental. Nuestra propuesta es leer a la luz del concepto de transculturación esta oposición, para establecer una dialéctica que permita considerar la politicidad propia de la ciudad real y su rol activo en la expresión de una literatura de resistencia política. Abstract: In the present article we show the relationship that Rama establish between language/power and space/power in the Ciudad Letrada. This new paradigm has allowed us to think and rethink Latin American literature and cultural studies, non the less, it also brings out contradictions inside the own thinking of the Uruguayan author. The strong division that the author establishes between the real city and the literate city does not allow one to think of the role of literature outside the field of institutionalized power, at the same time that he relegates the ontological reality of the latter to a merely instrumental one. Our proposal is to read this opposition in the light of the notion of transculturation, establishing a dialectic that allows us to consider the very policy of the real city and its active role in the expression of a political resistance literature. (shrink)

This chapter is the longest in the book. It is titled “Eroding literal truth” and considers nine drivers, in addition to electronically-powered popular culture previously discussed, that contribute to the dream society and the rise and fall of literal truth. This first two sections, “Language, literacy and literature” and “Learning in changing environments”, show how the emergence and dominance of reading and writing fixed a new sense of truth, logic, and reason in minds accustomed to oral fluidity. The printing press (...) later exalted these features via learning based on reading rather than doing. In the US, academic departments of English taught us to craft clever lies as well as to believe—amazingly enough—that learning from vivid lies is the best way to grasp and covey truth. But literature may be dying now, along with literacy, replaced by other features that enhance the scaffolding of dream societies: Advertising teaches us to want things we don’t otherwise want in order to live large in the neighborhood, while credit cards allow us to acquire them. Amusement parks, Expos, sporting events (as participants or spectators) similarly seduce us into spending enormous amounts of time in ever grander imaginaries of fun, leisure, and make-belief. Electronic games and virtual reality replace physicality—in war, violence, sex, indeed all aspects of life. The chapter ends with a timeline of technological, social, commercial, military, political and legal developments over the last 60 years that each and cumulatively led to the emergence of a dream society. The dream society is much, much more than K-Pop alone! (shrink)

An overview of theorizing about literal and nonliteral meaning in Indian philosophy, broadly construed to include aesthetics and poetics, grammar, and the philosophical darśana-s.

Although the concept of the literal is very widely used in the discussion of biblical interpretation, it has seldom been deeply analysed. “Conservative” understandings of the Bible are often thought of as literal, but it is equally true that “critical” views are built upon literality. In some relations, literality seems to imply physicality, in others to mean exactitude in the rendering of “spiritual” realities. In Christianity the relation of Christians to the laws of the Old Testament is a (...) prime area of application of these categories. Are the silences of the Bible to be taken as “literally” as its words? And does literality give us access to intentions? (shrink)

Because my paper was often metaphorical, some participants on the symposium expressed puzzlement about my literal meaning, especially about the passage from Mailer. Here are ten literal "theses" that the paper either argues for, implies, or depends on.1. What metaphor is can never be determined with a single answer. Because the word has now become subject to all of the ambiguities of our notions about similarity and difference, the irreducible plurality of philosophical views of how similarities and differences relate will (...) always produce conflicting definitions that will in turn produce different borderlines between what is metaphor and what is not. We thus need taxonomies, not frozen single definitions, of this "essentially contested concept.". (shrink)

The opposition prose/verse can only be established in the heart of literal language. The only way of producing nonliteral language is in conversation.... Enrique Anderson Imbert published a book in 1958 titled ¿Qué es la prosa?, in which he says: 'No, we do not speak in prose. Prose is not a projection of everyday speech, but rather artistic elaboration."1 But my adherence to his intelligent point of view is not total because he situates prose in the heart of written language, (...) and I think that it should be ascribed to literal language. For Anderson Imbert such an idiomatic modality results in an artistic elaboration; but the intention of prose can be quite different. The reader, for instance, by virtue of his reading, can transform prose into literature; and unwritten prose does exist, as has been stated. In many cases it is impossible to compose the texts in verse; structurally, then, an opposition cannot be established, just as in the case of the student who takes notes following the explanations of the professor. These texts can only be what they are: a more or less truthful transcription, a "copy" of oral language, a mere change of substance, abbreviated in order to bring it closer, as a simple memento, to the elliptical articulations of inner language. · 1. "No, no hablamos en prosa. La prosa no es proyección del habla corriente, sino elaboración artística." Enrique Anderson Imbert, ¿Que es la prosa? 4th ed., p. 31. Fernando Lázaro Carreter is the director of the department of Spanish at the Universidad Autónoma in Madrid and a member of the Real Academia Española. The author of books on both linguistics and criticism, his published works include: Las ideas lingüísticas en España durante el siglo XVIII; Diccionario de términos filológicos; Estilo barroco y personalidad creadora; Ensayos de Poética ; and Lazarillo de Tormes en la picaresca. This article is a preliminary statement of a problem he is currently investigating: literary language understood as "literal language.". (shrink)

May I be permitted to chat a little, by way of recreation, at the end of a somewhat toilsome and perhaps fruitless adventure?”1 So begins the introduction to Robert Browning’s “transcription,” as he entitles it, of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, in which the principles of literal translation are discussed and defended.2 As one who has recently been on the same adventure as Robert Browning, I wonder whether it is not salutary to review his arguments, for I have come to believe firmly that (...) the path he took was fruitless, or very nearly so. Yet of the many translators, stretching into the most recent times, who have provided us with literal renditions of ancient Greek texts, he at least offered an apology for it, and a better one, in my view, than any I have seen. I want to try, by reviewing Browning’s arguments, to shed some light on why his adventure of translation was barren, and in the process state some precautions for the translation of ancient Greek literature. I am not sure whether these precautions apply to the philosophy of translation in general, for the differences between two languages vary greatly with time and place; nevertheless, the review may be of some general help. (shrink)