Die Autorinnen und Autoren dieses Bandes gehen davon aus, dass Geschichtskultur, wie sie in Museen und historischen Ausstellungen vermittelt wird, Vergangenheit nicht abbildet, sondern deutet und konstruiert. Sie präsentieren neue konstruktivistische Ansätze der Darstellung von Geschichte und erläutern, auf welche Weise sie für die Geschichtskultur in Museen, Ausstellungen und Medien genutzt werden können.

The rise of the sitar from a limited accompaniment instrument used in the regional courts of Northern India to an internationally recognized cultural icon underscores its importance both as an instrument and a cultural symbol—the sitar mirrors India’s social complexity. This story encapsulates the social, political and economic trauma resulting from the dismantling of Mughal empire to the partition of Pakistan, reflecting contesting social narratives and Hindu/Muslim cultural heritages through the distinctive musical styles modern India. A musical instrument and material (...) object of contested origins, the sitar extends from wood, gourd, wire, and ivory into complex social and cultural networks. I argue that the sitar, as object, cannot be reduced to either an empirical or phenomenological entity; it is a space of potentiality, the actualization of a virtual object. I examine the sitar as both byproduct and narrative, demonstrating how it defies attempts to limit its constantly rupturing borders with imposed cognitive frames, and how materiality and philosophical systems can inform ethnographic practice. (shrink)

Veganic agriculture, often described as farming that is free of synthetic and animal-based inputs, represents an alternative to chemical-based industrial agriculture and the prevailing alternative, organic agriculture, respectively. Despite the promise of veganic methods in diverse realms such as food safety, environmental sustainability, and animal liberation, it has a small literature base. This article draws primarily on interviews conducted in 2018 with 25 veganic farmers from 19 farms in the United States to establish some baseline empirical research on this farming (...) community. Its qualitative perspectives illuminate farmer perceptions of and experiences with veganic growing, including definitions, knowledge acquisition, values, and challenges. Results highlight a lack of agreement about the meaning of veganic agriculture in terms of allowable inputs and scope. Participants have drawn on a wide array of veganic and non-veganic resources to ascend their veganic production learning curves, also relying on experimentation and trial-and-error. Their farming is motivated by a diversity of real and perceived benefits, most notably consistency with veganism, food safety advantages, and plant and soil health benefits. Veganic product sourcing and the dearth of veganic agriculture-specific resources present considerable challenges to farmers. The article briefly discusses possibilities for developing veganic agriculture in the United States, such as through a US-based certification system and farmers’ associations, based on considerations of the trajectory of the US organic farming movement and veganic developments in Europe. Finally, the article suggests the importance of expanded research into soil health and fertility in plant-based systems to support practicing and potential veganic farmers. (shrink)

Clark highlights a neglected issue in research on language use: the process by which speakers and addressees anchor utterances with respect to individual entities in their common ground. In his review, he identifies the challenges linked to investigations of anchoring, but also displays the pitfalls of evading it.

I argue that some utterances of sentences containing occurrences of indexical expressions should not be evaluated with respect to the context of utterance. I suggest that we distinguish between context of utterance and context of interpret‐ation, and I employ this distinction in the analysis of recorded messages and other interesting linguistic phenomena. I then discuss the implications of my views on contexts with respect to the logic of indexicals. Against the traditional view, I argue that sentences such as (...) ‘I am here now’ or ‘something exists’ should not be treated as logical truths. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Truth-conditions are systematically determined when they are the output of an algorithmic procedure that takes as input a set of semantic and contextual features. Truth-conditional sceptics have cast doubts on the thesis that truth-conditions are systematic in this sense. Against this form of scepticism, Schoubye and Stokke : 759–793) and Dobler : 451–474.) have provided systematic analyses of utterance truth-conditions. My aim is to argue that these theories are not immune to the kind of objections raised by truth-conditional (...) sceptics. In particular, I argue that the use of Questions Under Discussion and ways of being is problematic. (shrink)

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

In this paper I argue, from the consideration of what I hope is the complete variety of a hearer’s approaches to a speaker’s utterance, that (1) the speaker’s intention does not settle the meaning of her utterance and (2) the hearer does not take a genuine interest in the speaker’s actual intention. The reason why the speaker’s intention does not settle utterance meaning is simply that no utterance meaning determination, as presupposed by intentionalists and anti-intentionalists alike, (...) takes place. Moreover, in the regular course of interpretation the hearer does not care about the speaker’s actual intention, but only about what the speaker presents as her intention: the hearer’s goal is to come up with an interpretation which the speaker will accept rather than an interpretation which corresponds to the speaker’s intention. In cases of accountability, suspicion and lying, the speaker’s actual intention is irrelevant; it is at most the speaker’s hypothetical intention which is at stake. (shrink)

_Thoughts and Utterances_ is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.

This paper examines implicaturist hybrid theories by examining how closely attitude expression by moral utterances fits with the varieties of implicature (conventional, particular conversational, generalized conversational) using five standard criteria for implicature: indeterminacy (§3), reinforceability (§4), non-detachability (§5), cancellability (§6), and calculability (§7). I argue (1) that conventional implicature is a clear non-starter as a model of attitude expression by moral utterances (2) that generalised conversational implicature yields the most plausible implicaturist hybrid but (3) that a non-implicaturist, and non-hybrid, alternative (...) might in fact be superior. (shrink)

This study develops a biosemiotic framework for a descriptive phenomenology. We incorporate the set _utterance-genre-lifeworld_ in biosemiotic theory by paralleling it with the Peircean-Uexküllean notions of _sign_, _habit_, and _Umwelt_ (respectively). This framework for empirical semiotic studies aims to complement the concepts of _affordance_ and _scaffold_, as applied in studies on learning. The paper also contributes to bridging Bakhtinian-Hallidayian-Habermasian views on utterance, genre, and lifeworld with biosemiotics. We exploit the possibility that biosemiotics offers to bring together hermeneutic and phenomenological (...) analysis. We relate these views to integrated _levels_ in a systemic framework for communication. Signs are seen as inter-dependent construction elements in utterances. Repeated use of utterances in shifting contexts generates shared recognizable _kinds_ of communication, or genres. ‘Life-genre’ is used in a zoo-communication context, to avoid anthropocentrism. _Life-genre_ serves animals’ life-functions. Genres make up a systemic network of communicational resources, along with the related concepts of event, affordance, and scaffold. Utterance, genre, and lifeworld have five aspects, constituting an integrative approach to communication: form, content, act, time, and space. Semiosis and positioning are _processes_ that connect aspects and levels. Levels, aspects, and processes make up the framework as a system. While biosemiotics supports a phenomenological notion of life-genre, in turn, this notion also contributes to the development of the former, bridging a gap between organisms’ sign experience on a micro-level and organisms’ phenomenal lifeworld/Umwelt. Comparisons of _lifeworld_ and _Umwelt_ reveal that, although not identical, these are sufficiently similar to be perceived as an overall _macro-_level for signs and communication. Starting from a construal of utterance and genre as dynamic, dialogical, and reciprocal, genre is positioned as _meso_-level, mediating between signs in utterances and the lifeworld/Umwelt level. We propose _genres_, understood as semiotic scaffoldings built through affordances, as an analytical concept to capture meso-level phenomena. Scaffolding is determined by both ongoing events and (pre-)available genres. Events are manifestations of these scaffolding processes. Identifying animal and educational communication as two particularly relevant fields for future applications, we compare key socio-semiotic concepts to the notions of sign, habit, and Umwelt. The notions affordance and scaffolding are particularly important to think of learning as continuous with adaptation. An overall aim is to broaden as well as finetune semiotic _phenomenology_ as a platform for empirical analyses of communication. We conclude by exemplifying and summarizing how the framework facilitates this. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kaplan’s claim that the sentence “I am here now” is logically true. A number of counter-examples to the claim have been proposed, including occurrences of the sentence in answerphone messages, written notes left for later decoding, etc. These counter-examples are only convincing if they can be shown to be cases where the correct context with respect to which the utterance should be evaluated is the context in which it is decoded rather than encoded. I (...) argue that this is not the case, and draw on the distinction between force and content to suggest an alternative account of how information is communicated in these cases that is consistent with Kaplan’s semantic theory. (shrink)

The Japanese comparative adverb motto has two different uses. In the degree use, motto compares two individuals and denotes that there is a large gap between the target and a given standard with a norm-related presupposition. On the other hand, in the so-called ‘negative use’ it conveys the speaker’s attitude toward the utterance situation. I argue that similarly to the degree motto, the negative motto is a comparative morpheme, but unlike the degree motto it compares a current situation and (...) an expected situation at the level of conventional implicature /expressive. I argue that the speaker’s negative evaluation of the utterance situation in question comes from the large gap between the expected degree and the current degree. The theoretical implications of this paper are that there is a natural extension from semantic comparison to expressive comparison and that there is a type in natural language that can be called an ‘indirect expressive’, as opposed to ‘direct expressives’ like bastard and man. (shrink)

There has been a long felt need to investigate what the study of poetic language contributes to an understanding of ordinary language, and how posing the question in this way may indeed shift some of the assumptions about the way ordinary language works. Metaphor remains an important case in point: How do we get from “He kicked the bucket?” to “He died”? In this metaphorical idiom, the process is unavailable, without going into etymological hypotheses, because the meaning is already given (...) – it’s lexicalized, a “dead metaphor” -- no semantic construal is involved and the literal meaning doesn’t play a role in understanding the meaning of the expression. A poet might break up the idiom and say, “He kicked the bucket and broke it to pieces” – defamiliarizing the automatic reading of the idiom as “he died” and opening up suggestions, for example, of overcoming death; thus lending plasticity to and making present both the figurative and literal meaning. But true access to the process of metaphorical meaning-making is only available in cases of novel poetic metaphor, where the domains brought together are often disparate. I argue that there are good reasons for seeing poetry, fiction and literature in general not as speech acts but as representations, or semblances of speech acts (Searle’s notion of a pretend speech act doesn’t do this justice). Poems stage dramatic situations in which both poetic speaker (that is, the lyrical “I,”) and addressee, if any, are part of a fictional world, rather than the biographical poets themselves addressing a reader. The often ironic gaps and dialogical tensions between the norms and values projected by the poem itself and those expressed by any one of the voices in the poem – including the lyrical ‘I’s perspective – have a crucial expressive force unto themselves. As Searle realized, the indirect speech act model for poetry does not work; whereas “Could you pass the salt?” is a request masquerading as a question, there is no such one-to-one relationship between the poetic utterance and a single determinate speech act hiding behind it. Searle’s and Austin’s approaches couldn’t fully succeed, on my view, because there are key aspects of the language-game of poetry that distinguish poetry from ordinary language speech acts. Let’s say these are three aspects of a Gricean poetic contract between speaker and hearer : 1) the distinction between the lyrical ‘I’ and the biographical poet; 2) what I call the "quasipropositionality" of utterance in poetry (and fiction as well); and 3) poetic form and the ways in which it makes meaning through textual strategies of mediation, like point of view, parody, irony, enjambment, rhyme, meter, rhythm, sound-play, allusion, and metaphor. These forms of aesthetic mediation make it very problematic to isolate the serious or not-serious utterance of a single-line as a primary semantic unit. (shrink)

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider other applications (...) of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.”. (shrink)

While utterance interpretation is standardly understood as context-sensitive inference, there are prima facie reasons to doubt it is fully unencapsulated. First, utterance interpretation is normally fast and automatic, while it has been argued that unencapsulated processes are slow and reflective. Secondly, certain illusions appear to show that the processing of utterances is unrevisable in light of further information. I argue that these reasons are not conclusive, and utterance interpretation relies on indefinite tracts of background knowledge and contextual (...) information.Examples show that interpretation requires the use of information that is not in the input and is neither purely linguistic nor purely stereotypical knowledge. I show that this applies to arriving at the proposition expressed (e.g. the proposition asserted) as well as implicatures.‘Grammatical’ and ‘semantic’ illusions show less than one might think about encapsulation of utterance interpretation. Some do not depend on reaching any stable interpretation. The inversion illusion is due in part to background knowledge. While the Moses illusion is revisable, such revision may be performed by a distinct capacity, so is not clear evidence for cognitive penetrability of the normal utterance interpretation process. (shrink)

Performative Utterances: Seven PuzzlesIt was John Austin who introduced the word "performative" (which he called "a new and ugly word") into the philosophy of language and linguistics. His original idea was that there are utterances which are more correctly characterized as doing something rather than stating something. Austin wrote: "when I say ‘I do’ (sc. take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife), I am not reporting on a marriage, I am indulging in it." As is well known, Austin (...) went on to work out this notion of a performative utterance (and of a performative expression) in a number of directions, but in the end the attempt to isolate performatives (doings) from constatives (true or false) failed dramatically, and the idea of viewing language use in terms of the performative-constative dichotomy gave way to the study of speech acts: "The total speech act in the total speech situation is the only actual phenomena which, in the last resort, we are engaged in elucidating." But giving up the performative-constative distinction does not mean giving up theorizing about performatives, and there is a cottage industry in the theory of language devoted to them. We identify seven puzzles for theorizing about performatives. We consider how Austin might have dealt with some of them. Finding his answers problematic, we then survey recent theories of performatives and zoom in on the major contenders, identifying one theory in particular for scrutiny and seeing how it fares with the seven puzzles. The upshot is that there is still work to be done understanding performatives. (shrink)

In this paper the author attempts to reconcile two claims recently defended by Mitchell Green. The first is that illocutionary force is part of speaker meaning. The second is that illocutionary force is a product of cultural evolution. Consistent with the second claim, the author argues that some utterances – particularly those produced by infants and great apes – are produced with communicative intent, but without illocutionary force. These utterances lack the normative properties constitutive of force because their utterers have (...) no grasp of the norms that operate on developed speech. If there can be utterances produced with communicative intent that lack force, we must consider how exactly force is a part of speaker meaning. In response the author argues that force is an inessential and acquired part of speaker meaning. As a result we need a conception of communicative intent more basic than illocutionary intent. He spells this out in terms of a ‘perlocutionary’ intention. (shrink)

Speakers often use ordinary words and phrases, unembedded in any sentence, to perform speech acts—or so it appears. In some cases appearances are deceptive: The seemingly lexical/phrasal utterance may really be an utterance of a syntactically eplliptical sentence. I argue however that, at least sometimes, plain old words and phrases are used on their own. The use of both words/phrases and elliptical sentences leads to two consequences: 1. Context must contribute more to utterance meaning than is often (...) supposed. Here's why: The semantic type of normal words and phrases is non-proppositional, even after the usual contextual features are added . Yet an utterance of a word/phrase can be fully propositional. 2. Often, a hearer does not need to know the exact identity of the expression uttered, to understand an utterance. The reason: Typically, words/phrases in context will sound the same, and mean the same, as some elliptical sentence token. (shrink)

Uttered language does not necessarily reflect the planned communications of schizophrenia patients, nor do their delusions necessarily reflect basic failures of inferential reasoning. The role of inhibitory failure in the production of speech and the role of primary experiences of discrepancy between intention and action, and between experience–based expectations and perceived realities account for many of the clinical phenomena that have led to the conclusion that these patients have a ‘thought’ disorder, or a ‘disturbed’ mind. The alternatives and the evidence (...) are summarized in this paper. (shrink)

Journal Name: Cognitive Linguistics Issue: Ahead of print.

The popular interpretation of token‐reflexivism states that at the level of logical form, indexicals and demonstratives are disguised descriptions that employ complex demonstratives or special quotation‐mark names involving particular tokens of the appropriate expression‐types. In this article I first demonstrate that this interpretation of token‐reflexivism is only one of many, and that it is better to think of token‐reflexivism as denoting a family of distinct theoretical frameworks. Second, I contrast two interpretations of the idea of the token‐reflexive paraphrase of an (...) indexical sentence. The utterance approach claims that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of entire utterances. The sub‐utterance approach maintains that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of the particular indexical words used in the utterance. Next, I pose a problem that shows that neither of the two approaches is correct. The problem shows that the only viable version of the token‐reflexive proposition must somehow take into account the referential intentions of the speaker of the context. Therefore I conclude the article by sketching the framework of restricted intentional token‐reflexivism. I argue that it is an attractive semantic theory of distributed utterances that, among other things, enables automatic and intentional indexicals to be distinguished. (shrink)

Utterances in situated activity are about the world. Theories and systems normally capture this by assuming references must be resolved to real-world entities in utterance understanding. We describe a number of puzzles and problems for this approach, and propose an alternative semantic representation using discourse relations that link utterances to the nonlinguistic context to capture the context-dependent interpretation of situated utterances. Our approach promises better empirical coverage and more straightforward system building. Substantiating these advantages is work in progress.

In recent years, some people have held that a radical relativist position is defensible in some philosophically interesting cases, including future contingents, predicates of personal taste, evaluative predicates in general, epistemic modals, and knowledge attributions. The position is frequently characterized as denying that utterance-truth is absolute. I argue that this characterization is inappropriate, as it requires a metaphysical substantive contention with which moderate views as such need not be committed. Before this, I also offer a more basic, admittedly less (...) exciting alternative characterization of the position, in terms of departing from the Kaplan–Lewis–Stalnaker two-dimensional framework. (shrink)

It is argued that genuinely subsentential phrases, such as a discourse-initial utterance of “From France” to indicate the provenance of an item, provide evidence for the reality of the pragmatic process of free enrichment. I consider recent attempts to treat such discourse-initial fragments as linguistic ellipsis of some kind while accommodating the difference between these cases and accepted types of ellipsis such as sluicing and gapping. I claim that the mechanisms they posit to save an ellipsis story have no (...) role in an account of performance. An argument against the enrichment approach from the indeterminacy of the content of subsentential utterances is discussed, and refuted, and it is shown how this indeterminacy is accommodated in a contextualist pragmatic theory. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue against two prominent ways of thinking about the ontology of delusions: delusionality as marked by mistaken reasoning, and delusionality as marked by empathic unintelligibility. Rather than offering a competing definition of delusions as such, we provide a Wittgensteinian analysis according to which delusions are voiced in the form of utterances that cannot be evidentially justified, and clash with hinges accordingly. Hinges are here considered grammatical rules that allow us to justify our knowledge claims. Delusional utterances (...) conflict with these grammatical rules and are ungrammatical with respect to them. We will argue that the ungrammaticality of delusional utterances can account for both the intuitive appeal of a DSM-style definition in terms of false, unjustified and incorrigible beliefs, as well as its conceptual inadequacy. Similarly, this ungrammaticality accounts for both the intuitive appeal as well as the conceptual inadequacy of taking delusional utterances to be marked by the impossibility of others finding them empathically intelligible. It will be argued that traditional features such as lack of justification, imperviousness to counterarguments, and falsity are better considered to stem from, rather than to define, delusionality. It will be concluded that a further analysis of delusional utterances offers a way to positively define delusionality. (shrink)

ConclusionWe have worked out a small part of a program originally devised by Kaplan which included a clarification of the phrase ‘y intends to demonstrate x’. The analysis of demonstrative utterances, combined with a theory of deferred ostensive reference, enabled us to account for a much larger class of utterances (accompained by a relevant gesture) than expected. Regrettably, the analysis forces more questions on us than it answers. Although I have used the term ‘gesture’ quite freely without providing any sort (...) of explication, there is much more to say about gestures and their relation to speech. Especially questions concerning the ontological nature of gestures (‘What kind of a thing is a gesture anyway?’), their epistemological status (‘How can we tell gestures apart from other actions?’), and their semantic status (‘What makes a gesture have meaning?’) have remained largely unexplored. To my knowledge, no philosopher in the analytic tradition has addressed those issues in any systematic manner. (shrink)

This book, "Utterance Interpretation and Cognitive Models", is a collection of papers that stems from the conference of the same name held at the Free University of Brussels in June 2006. Our main objective is to reconcile armchair theorising about the semantics-pragmatics interface with hypotheses about cognitive architecture. For that reason, the papers in the collection place some of the hottest questions in contemporary philosophy of language within the scope of a psychologically plausible theory of human communication. The collection (...) is articulated into three parts. The first concerns the cognitive counterparts of lexical meanings. The second explores the links between moods and forces. The third looks at the epistemological status of semantic theory from the point of view of human psychology. (shrink)

Ruffino-Marco_Deferred-utterances-and-proper-contexts.

The cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is an area that continues to provoke intense theoretical debate among pragmatists. That utterance interpretation involves some type of mind-reading or theory of mind (ToM) is indisputable. However, theorists are divided on the exact nature of this ToM-based mechanism. In this paper, it is argued that the only type of ToM-based mechanism that can adequately represent the cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is one which reflects the rational, intentional, holistic character of (...) interpretation. Such a ToM-based mechanism is supported on conceptual and empirical grounds. Empirical support for this view derives from the study of children and adults with pragmatic disorders. Specifically, three types of clinical case are considered. In the first case, evidence is advanced which indicates that individuals with pragmatic disorders exhibit deficits in reasoning and the use of inferences. These deficits compromise the ability of children and adults with pragmatic disorders to comply with the rational dimension of utterance interpretation. In the second case, evidence is presented which suggests that subjects with pragmatic disorders struggle with the intentional dimension of utterance interpretation. This dimension extends beyond the recognition of communicative intentions to include the attribution of a range of cognitive and affective mental states that play a role in utterance interpretation. In the third case, evidence is presented that children and adults with pragmatic disorders struggle with the holistic character of utterance interpretation. This serves to distort the contexts in which utterances are processed for their implicated meanings. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the role of theorizing in relation to utterance interpretation. (shrink)

This study applied the speech act theory to investigate the theological significance of the utterance of the name of Jesus, interpreting it as a performative act that generates the reality of faith and salvation. Rather than a mere verbal expression, the invocation of Jesus’ name is analysed as a linguistic event that reconfigures the believer’s identity and fosters practical faith. Through a systematic exploration of locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary dimensions, the study elucidates how the utterance initiates a relational (...) transformation and mediates salvific experience. The analysis demonstrates that confession of faith is not simply intellectual assent, but an embodied linguistic act that actively participates in the formation of spiritual life and practice. Contribution: This article clarifies how the utterance of Jesus’ name functions as a performative act that forms faith identity and mediates salvation. It offers a theological perspective that recognises confession not merely as symbolic language but as an active participation in salvific reality. (shrink)

Moore supposedly discovered that there are sentences of a certain form that, though they can be true, no rational human being can sincerely and truly utter any of them. MC and MO are particular instances:MC: “It is raining and I believe that it is not raining”MO: “It is raining and I don’t believe that it is raining”In this paper, I show that there are sentences of the same form as MC and MO that can be sincerely and truly uttered by (...) rational agents. We call sentences of the same form as MC and MO “Moorean Sentences”. In Part II, we go over a standard argument for why sentences of the same form as MC and MO cannot be sincerely and truly uttered, and we explain why this argument is unsound. In explaining why this argument is unsound, we rely on the context-sensitivity of belief-reports and show that the premises of the argument are not all true in the same context. We then employ a general theory of belief reports that incorporates guises to explain why our examples are sincerely utterable while Moore’s sentences are typically not sincerely utterable. The answer will turn on the suggestion that belief reports carry a hidden quantifier over guises, where the domain of quantification is determined by context. We conclude with general lessons about Moore’s Paradox and the supposed limits of first-person belief reports. (shrink)

Using video recordings of draft meetings conducted as part of an intramural basketball program as data, this conversation analytic study examines the use of an incomplete utterance in a joint evaluative activity. In particular, we focus on how the participants, volunteer coaches, who meet to draft players for their respective teams, produce a syntactically incomplete utterance as a means to critically assess a player, a non-present third party to the interaction. Analysis reveals that the participants use an incomplete (...) utterance as part of dispreferred design; it allows them to withhold articulating overt criticism of others. By trailing off where the criticism is due, the participants display reluctance to verbalize what is to be said and treat its articulation as delicate. The syntactic structure of the utterance that includes a contrastive conjunction and accompanying embodied actions such as head shakes help them convey a critical stance. We examine the use of incomplete utterances in both agreement and disagreement sequences; the recipients display their unproblematic understanding of the critical assessment and respond by providing their own assessments that either affiliate or disaffiliate with the conveyed critical stance. (shrink)

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. They (...) are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated”. This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example : I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account : the structure of sentence does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account. (shrink)

The currently standard approach to fiction is to define it in terms of imagination. I have argued elsewhere that no conception of imagining is sufficient to distinguish a response appropriate to fiction as opposed to non-fiction. In her contribution Kathleen Stock seeks to refute this objection by providing a more sophisticated account of the kind of propositional imagining prescribed by so-called ‘fictive utterances’. I argue that although Stock's proposal improves on other theories, it too fails to provide an adequate criterion (...) of fictionality. I conclude by sketching an alternative account according to which fiction is a genre. (shrink)

Are there entities which are just distinct, with no discerning property or relation? Although the existence of such utterly indiscernible entities is ensured by mathematical and scientific practice, their legitimacy faces important philosophical challenges. I will discuss the most fundamental objections that have been levelled against utter indiscernibles, argue for the inadequacy of the extant arguments to allay perplexity about them, and put forward a novel defence of these entities against those objections.

What is it to understand another speaker’s utterance? A natural view is that such understanding requires at least the acquisition of propositional knowledge of the utterance’s meaning. This view is challenged by cases in which it correctly seems to a hearer H as though an utterance means such-and-such, but where H doesn’t form the belief that it means such-and-such due to a misleading defeater. Such cases have been claimed to be examples of understanding without belief, and a (...) fortiori of understanding without knowledge. The paper examines this argument in detail and defends a mixed verdict: While the argument succeeds in showing that there is a reading of attributions of utterance understanding on which the natural view is false, such attributions also have a different reading on which the natural view may well be true for all the argument shows. In making the case for the second half of this claim, the paper gives center stage to the close intuitive connection between utterance understanding and communicative success. (shrink)

Slovenian philosopher Miran Bozovic's An Utterly Dark Spot examines the elusive status of the body in early modern European philosophy by examining its various encounters with the gaze. Its range is impressive, moving from the Greek philosophers and theorists of the body (Aristotle, Plato, Hippocratic medical writers) to early modern thinkers (Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Descartes, Bentham) to modern figures including Jon Elster, Lacan, Althusser, Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen J. Gould, and others. Bozovic provides startling glimpses into various foreign mentalities haunted by (...) problems of divinity, immortality, creation, nature, and desire, provoking insights that invert familiar assumptions about the relationship between mind and body. The perspective is Lacanian, but Bozovic explores the idiosyncrasies of his material (e.g., the bodies of the Scythians, the transvestites transformed and disguised for the gaze of God; or Adam's body, which remained unseen as long as it was the only one in existence) with an attention to detail that is exceptional among Lacanian theorists. The approach makes for engaging reading, as Bozovic stages imagined encounters between leading thinkers, allowing them to converse about subjects that each explored, but in a different time and place. While its focus is on a particular problem in the history of philosophy, An Utterly Dark Spot will appeal to those interested in cultural studies, semiotics, theology, the history of religion, and political philosophy as well. Miran Bozovic is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Der grosse Andere: Gotteskonzepte in der Philosophie der Neuzeit (Vienna: Verlag Turia & Kant, 1993) and editor of The Panopticon Writings by Jeremy Bentham (London: Verso, 1995). (shrink)

Since people can often successfully interpret utterances that flout or ignore conventions, Davidson concludes that shared conventions are neither necessary nor sufficient for linguistic interpretation. This conclusion is based on an overly narrow conception of what it is to know, and to share, a language. Rather than, as Davidson argues, simply interpreting the meaning the speaker intends their words to be interpreted as having (and their words’ truth conditions), successful interpretation requires interpreting the illocutionary act the speaker intends to be (...) interpreted as performing (and the act’s felicity conditions). This change in focus highlights the need for many types of shared conventions, beyond the conventional meanings of words that Davidson considers and dismisses as unnecessary. When any one convention is ignored or flouted, interpretation is possible because the apparently unconventional utterance nonetheless conforms to a host of other shared conventions. Conventions are necessary for linguistic interpretation. (shrink)

Historians know a great deal about how English thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the "documentable" past, but relatively little about how they perceived times stretching back beyond history. Arthur B. Ferguson shows in this elegant essay that prehistory had great meaning in Renaissance England. Commentators of various sorts—from poets to antiquaries—looked to the most distant past for the vanishing point that would perfect their historical perspective and orient them in an age of increasing change. In this pursuit (...) they had often to let imagination serve the purposes of interpretation. Though largely speculative, their efforts reveal much about the intellectual life of Renaissance England. Since the Bible left little room for speculation on prehistory—in fact no room at all for the concept itself—_Utter Antiquity_ concentrates on myth and legend outside of the biblical context and on those who conjured prehistory out of these sources. A subtle conflict between belief and skepticism emerges from these pages, as Ferguson reveals how some Renaissance writers struggled with ancient explanations that flouted reason and experience, while others sidestepped such doubts by relating prehistory to man's social evolution. By isolating and analyzing topics such as skepticism, rationalism, and poetic history, Ferguson illuminates the development of historical consciousness in early modern England. His accessible and eloquent study contributes significantly to an understanding of the Renaissance mind and intellectual history in general. (shrink)

A revelation given by the Cherub of divine Wisdom with a very clear and unclouded view of the activities of humankind in a world created by them on this Earth. On the one hand, The Cherub of divine Wisdom gives explanations on the emergence of the Eternal Kingdom and on the other, the utter degeneration of the Fall-regime with its many excesses that reach its deep point today. Thus, the Earth is hardly able any more to support the basis of (...) life for the people. (shrink)

The pragmatics underlying Paul Grice’s analysis of utterance-meaning provide a powerful framework for investigating the commitments arguers undertake. Unfortunately, the complexity of Grice’s analysis has frustrated appropriate reliance on this important facet of his work. By explicating Cicero’s use of apostrophe in his famous “First Catilinarian” this essay attempts to show that a full complex of reflexive gricean speaker intentions in essentially to seriously saying and meaning something.

Four types of aggravated opening utterances (insult, command, accusation, refusal without a reason) and four types of mitigated opening utterances (request, indication of shared responsibility, reaffirmation, and refusal with a reason) were investigated. Ordinary social actors rated each of the mitigated opening utterances higher than aggravated opening utterances on specific appropriateness, general appropriateness, and effectiveness. Hence, the type of opening employed to initiate an argumentative episode influences judgments of appropriateness and effectiveness.