Grammar is a word associated with the rules that govern language and its related pedagogy for articulating types of declarative knowledge. It can also refer to the organizational structure of practices and their related forms of knowledge, as described here by Ludwig Wittgenstein: “Essence is expressed in grammar.... Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is. (Theology as grammar.)”1 Wittgenstein’s remark about theology can be generalized to visual art, and, by extension, to the grammatical structure (...) of art education. The grammar of creative practices is described by George Steiner as the “articulate organisation of perception, reflection and experience, the nerve structure of consciousness when.. (shrink)

Wonder can be found in human creativity as well as in nature. While one version of belief in inspiration precludes human creativity, another presupposes it. Margaret Boden, however, suggests that creativity is continuous with generic human powers, and arises through breaking recognised rules. Problems are raised for this latter view. It needs to be added that creativity commonly involves participation in a tradition of skill or craftsmanship, and in a creative community. Further, the continuity approach is argued to be (...) consistent with a version of the inspiration approach, according to which the Creator can communicate through minds reflective of his/her creative imagination, as suggested by Austin Farrer. (shrink)

"We have no more beginnings", George Steiner begins in this radical book. A far-reaching exploration of the idea of creation in Western thought, literature, religion, and history, he reflects on the different ways people have of talking about beginnings, on the "coretiredness" that pervades end-of-the-millennium spirit, and on the changing grammar of discussions about the end of Western art and culture.

This book addresses fundamental issues in linguistic theory, including the relation between formal and cognitive approaches, the autonomy of syntax, the content of universal grammar, and the value of generative and functional approaches to grammar. It focuses on the grammar of case relations, signalled by morphological case, prepositions, and word order. Part I offers a critical history of modern grammars of case, focussing on the last four decades and setting this in the context of earlier, including ancient, (...) developments. The subjects considered include the evolution of ideas concerning deep structure and semantic and grammatical relations, and arguments for the maintenance of the traditional central position of case in the grammar. In parts II and III Professor Anderson examines the category of case and central unresolved issues in the grammar of case. The latter include questions relating to the idea of an ontologically-based grammar, particularly the degree to which syntactic categories and relationships are grounded in meaning, and the notion of linguistic creativity. This involves a consideration of the way in which cases may be identified and whether their distribution is determined through semantics. The book sheds new light on the interactions between meaning and grammar and on the structure and development of lexical and grammatical systems. The argument and its far-reaching consequences will be of wide interest to linguists, philosophers and others seeking to understand the workings of language. (shrink)

This paper introduces a novel perspective on Agentive Cognitive Construction Grammar (AgCCxG) by examining the intricate interplay between mind and language through the lens of both Active Inference and Peircean semiotics. AgCCxG emphasizes the impact of intention and purpose on linguistic choices as a cognitive imperative to balance the symbolic Self (Intelligent Agent) with the dynamics of the environment. Among other things, the paper posits that linguistic constructions, particularly Constructional Attachment Patterns (CAPs), like argument structure constructions, embody experienced interactions (...) with the world through reenactment routines via the integration of multisensory channels. Unlike traditional usage-based approaches (e.g., construction grammars), AgCCxG embraces a robust theory of signs that reveals human representation as a continuous process of semiotic hybridization for the creative prediction of uncertain scenarios. Importantly, the paper challenges the notion of the mind as a unified, rational, uncertainty-reducing machine by asserting that physical processes governing open biological systems profoundly influence the linguistic sign system. Intelligent agents’ adaptability in expressing incongruous realities thus highlights the role of semiotic hybridization in preserving an agent’s autonomy and semiotic boundary. (shrink)

Nicholas Allott considers Chomsky at ninety. [This is a short introduction to Chomsky's linguistic work, its implications for our knowledge about language and the mind, and its connections with the political philosophy that is implicit in his work on international relations and the media. I argue that Chomsky's contribution to linguistics, cognitive science and philosophy should not be controversial. He has been a major influence on the computational/representational view of the mind that is now taken for granted in serious work (...) in linguistics and cognitive psychology. His work in linguistics revolutionised the field, leading to the discovery of grammatical principles with considerable explanatory power, and has shifted the burden against those who oppose Universal Grammar: an innate, domain-specific system that underlies our linguistic abilities. Chomsky's political work includes detailed critiques of US and other Western policy, particularly foreign policy, and, with Edward Herman, a model that seeks to explain how radical opinions and inconvenient facts are excluded from the media. Chomsky also has a political philosophy, although he does not set it out in detail. He sees human beings as intrinsically creative and with an instinct for freedom, and he takes these features of human nature to favour a libertarian socialist society.]. (shrink)

Although declarations of the death of God seem to be provocations announcing the end of the era of theology, this announcement is actually central to the Christian revelation in its most classic forms, as well as to its reworkings in contemporary religious thought. Indeed provocative new possibilities for thinking theologically open up precisely in the wake of the death of God. Already Hegel envisaged a revolutionary new realization of divinity emerging in and with the secular world through its establishment of (...) a total order of immanence. However, in postmodern times this comprehensive order aspired to by modern secularism implodes or cracks open towards the wholly Other. A hitherto repressed demand for the absolute difference of the religious, or for “transcendence”, returns with a vengeance. This difference is what could not be stated in terms of the Hegelian System, for reasons that poststructuralist writers particularly have insisted on: all representations of God are indeed dead. Yet this does not mean that they cannot still be powerful, but only that they cannot assign God any stable identity. Nietzsche’s sense of foreboding concerning the death of God is coupled with his intimations of the demise of representation and “grammar” as epistemologically bankrupt, but also with his vision of a positive potential for creating value in the wake of this collapse of all linguistically articulated culture. He points the way towards the emergence of a post-secular religious thinking of what exceeds thought and representation. (shrink)

Play and the Artist’s Creative Process explores a continuity between childhood play and adult creativity. The volume examines how an understanding of play can shed new light on processes that recur in the work of Philip Guston and Eduardo Paolozzi. Both artists’ distinctive engagement with popular culture is seen as connected to the play materials available in the landscapes of their individual childhoods. Animating or toying with material to produce the unforeseen outcome is explored as the central force at (...) work in the artists’ processes. By engaging with a range of play theories, the book shows how the artists’ studio methods can be understood in terms of game strategies. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the scholastic technique of the Theravāda scholar-monk Chapaṭa Saddhammajotipāla. Chapaṭa is the author of several scholastic treatises in Pāli, the most voluminous of which is the Suttaniddesa, a commentary on the Pāli grammar of Kaccāyana. I offer a general introduction to the Pāli grammatical tradition and especially to the Pāli grammatical tradition of Burma, together with an introduction to the life and works of Chapaṭa. I also offer the first annotated translation of a passage from (...) the Suttaniddesa and in this way I show how the scholastic technique of Chapaṭa is based on a precise use of quotations, mainly from other Pāli or Sanskrit grammatical texts, but also from Buddhist literature. I finally give a preliminary assessment of typology and purpose of every different type of quotation. Although this paper consists mainly of preliminary work, it is the first essay entirely devoted to the Suttaniddesa, which is one of the most important grammatical works in the Theravāda tradition. (shrink)

Already hailed as a masterpiece, Foundations of Language offers a brilliant overhaul of the last thirty-five years of research in generative linguistics and related fields. "Few books really deserve the cliché 'this should be read by every researcher in the field'," writes Steven Pinker, author of The Language Instinct, "but Ray Jackendoff's Foundations of Language does." Foundations of Language offers a radically new understanding of how language, the brain, and perception intermesh. The book renews the promise of early generative linguistics: (...) that language can be a valuable entrée into understanding the human mind and brain. The approach is remarkably interdisciplinary. Behind its innovations is Jackendoff's fundamental proposal that the creativity of language derives from multiple parallel generative systems linked by interface components. This shift in basic architecture makes possible a radical reconception of mental grammar and how it is learned. As a consequence, Jackendoff is able to reintegrate linguistics with philosophy of mind, cognitive and developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and computational linguistics. Among the major topics treated are language processing, the relation of language to perception, the innateness of language, and the evolution of the language capacity, as well as more standard issues in linguistic theory such as the roles of syntax and the lexicon. In addition, Jackendoff offers a sophisticated theory of semantics that incorporates insights from philosophy of language, logic and formal semantics, lexical semantics of various stripes, cognitive grammar, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic approaches, and the author's own conceptual semantics. (shrink)

Nowadays, creativity has become one of the most important determinants of the development of modern economy. In it lies the potential for economic success not only of entire regions, but above all of business entities. Although creativity is difficult to define, it more frequently becomes the subject of scholarly considerations. In this study, an attempt was made to explore the climate for creativity because it determines the development of creativity and creative attitudes in creative sectors. The main research (...) goal was to show the importance and pattern of the determinants creating a climate conducive to creativity and its impact on the development of creative industries. The method of the study was a critical analysis of the source literature and the author’s own research. The aim of the work became the basis for formulating the following research hypothesis: recognising the components constituting a pattern of the climate conducive to creativity in the city will enable better development of entities included in the creative sector. In order to achieve the set goal and verify the research hypothesis, quantitative and qualitative research was carried out among representatives of creative professions employed in the creative sectors. (shrink)

A remarkable philosophical affinity may be observed between the intuitionistic conception of mathematics and the transformational generative approach to the study of language: both disciplines profess a mentalistic ontology, both posit an idealized subject, and both insist on their autonomy with respect to other disciplines. This philosophical parallel is formalized in terms of a generalization of the intuitionistic notion of creative subject; resulting are the foundations of a unified theory of mental acts based on intuitionistic logic — capturing, inter (...) alia, similarities between proof acts and speech acts. As an application of the theory, it is then shown how the notion of mental act may provide for an insightful formalization of various hypotheses pertaining to the linguistic dependence or relativity of mathematics. (shrink)

Film Theory addresses the core concepts and arguments created or used by academics, critical film theorists, and filmmakers, including the work of Dudley Andrew, Raymond Bellour, Mary Ann Doane, Miriam Hansen, bell hooks, Siegfried Kracauer, Raul Ruiz, P. Adams Sitney, Bernard Stiegler, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. This volume takes the position that film theory is a form of writing that produces a unique cinematic grammar; and like all grammars, it forms part of the system of rules that govern a (...) language, and is thus applicable to wider range of media forms. In their creation of authorial trends, identification of the technology of cinema as a creative force, and production of films as aesthetic markers, film theories contribute an epistemological resource that connects the technologies of filmmaking and film composition. This book explores these connections through film theorisations of processes of the diagrammatisation of cinematic matters of the filmic world. (shrink)

There are many problems of universals, at least the four distinguished by Jenny Teichmann. Consider her second one. ‘How can we form a general term when we are faced with easily distinguishable, widely differing examples?’ The term ‘blue’, for example, covers a wide range of—well, what does it cover a wide range of? A wide range of the colour blue? This is nonsense. What it covers is a wide range of blues —shades of blue. But we do not form a (...) general term when faced with or referring to these items. We distinguish them: cerulean, ultramarine, cyan, cobalt, navy blue and so on. ‘Blue’ is not the name of any of these shades of blue. It does not ‘cover’ anything except the colour , of which it is the name. ‘Blue’ is the name of the colour blue. There are no widely differing, easily distinguishable examples of that . The colour blue cannot differ widely or easily be distinguished from the colour blue. Leibniz's law prevents it. It is shades of blue which differ and are easily distinguishable. The moment we try to say, ‘But this differs from that’, the question will be, ‘This and that what? ’ If the answer is, ‘This colour ’ and ‘That colour ’, then a mistake has been made. For there is no differing and distinguishing in this case. Teichmann's problem cannot even be stated. If we say that what differ are this blue and that blue, which is the right thing to say, then we have two count nouns which mean ‘shade of blue’. There is no general term for these different shades. There is no answer to the question, ‘What is the name of all these differing shades?’ Certainly they are all blues, but each has its own name, and it is not ‘blue’. Teichmann's question cannot arise here either. The question, ‘What do blues have in common in virtue of which they are blue?’ is either elliptical or bad logical grammar. Which it is depends on the construal, or misconstrual, of ‘are blue’. The question should be either, ‘…in virtue of which they are blues ’ in the plural— they are not identical with the colour blue—or ‘…in virtue of which they are shades of blue.’ The plural agreement must come somewhere. (shrink)

Language sciences have long maintained a close and supposedly necessary coupling between the infinite productivity of the human language faculty and recursive grammars. Because of the formal equivalence between recursion and non-recursive iteration; recursion, in the technical sense, is never a necessary component of a generative grammar. Contrary to some assertions this equivalence extends to both center-embedded relative clauses and hierarchical parse trees. Inspection of language usage suggests that recursive rule components in fact contribute very little, and likely nothing (...) significant, to linguistic creativity. Further than this, if the productivity of human language is considered as not rigidly bound, but not infinite, then the need for any sort of iteration in generative grammars vanishes and can be replaced with a Non-iterative Explicit Alternatives Rule grammar. The knock-on effects of dispensing with recursive grammar components are: that language diversity can simply be based on rule and lexicon combinatorics with no potentially infinite dimensions derived from recursive or iterative components of rules; the oddity of a vast, multiply-infinite competence set of ‘grammatical but unacceptable’ productions is gone; and the development of a language faculty based on rules that eschew iterative rule components avoids any need for explaining ‘special’ mechanisms. On the broader front of searching for the mechanisms of mind, our analysis can be similarly applied to the proposals for a recursive basis for mind as an explanation for humanity’s great leap forward. (shrink)

‘Creative destruction’ is one of the most important analytical tools, taking into consideration both the economic and sociological characteristics of capitalist society. According to Schumpeter, in the long term, evolution gives rise to economic development resulting from batches of innovative solutions, leading to improvements in the standard of living. The innovation activity of firms is based on supply-side factors, hence it is large enterprises that excel in innovation since they strive to achieve a monopoly market position and above-average profits. (...) Schumpeter attempts to combine two elements: the spread of monopolies and the continuation of economic development, both occurring through innovation, which is far more important than price competition. The Schumpeterian ‘creative destruction’ permeates the main aspects of macroeconomic activity, not only in the long term, but also in the area of economic fluctuations, structural changes, or the functioning of markets. As a result, it becomes a factor determining changes in the economic order. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the role of territories in the process of creating and using knowledge and its impact on the economic efficiency of the companies which function within their boundaries. Regional cooperation increases the involvement of business entities in innovation activities, which translates into higher competitiveness of firms. Moreover, the awareness of the necessity of cooperation and use of innovation capital tends to grow. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880Robert GrudinThe Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880, by D. G. Myers; 224 pp. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1996, $30.40 paper.D. G. Myers opens his history of creating writing instruction in America with an anecdote: When Vladimir Nabokov was proposed for a chair in literature at Harvard, Roman Jakobson objected. “What’s next?” he said. “Shall we appoint [End (...) Page 529] elephants to teach zoology?” This question not only provides Myers’s book with its title but also suggests a major issue of literary pedagogy: is the teaching of literature the province of philologists and theorists who interpret books, or is it the province of authors who write them? Jakobson the philologist implies that writers, who just produce the stuff, lack knowledge of interpretive method and thus have little business in the classroom. Others—writers and teachers alike—have thought differently and have over the past century fostered the growth of creative writing at American colleges and high schools.The Elephants Teach is a comprehensive and coherent effort to deal with a ponderous mass of history and discourse: the development of writing curricula since 1880 and the ongoing professional dialogue about the proper relationship between writing and teaching. The first four of his seven chapters deal with roots and preliminaries: the rise of literature instruction as philology after the Civil War, the inception of English composition at Harvard (championed by Adams Sherman Hill, Barrett Wendell, Dean Le Baron Briggs, and Charles Townsend Copeland), and the professional, cultural, and financial forces drawing writers to campuses in the early twentieth century. These chapters establish three major forces leading to the rise of the creative writing curriculum: the consensus that writing experience is of value to the individual and society, the reiterated conviction that literary instruction should consider the perspective of the writer, and the broad recognition by “serious” writers, who had little or no access to the mass market, that they could agreeably support themselves in the classroom. These forces would lead to what Myers correctly sees as a massive compromise: a complex of writing programs simultaneously satisfying students’ needs and allowing thousands of writers to pursue, if only by fits and starts, their professional calling.Myers then serves up the main course: a three-chapter narrative, stretching from the 1920s down to the present, of the history of creative writing as a so-named and self-conscious institution in American education. The opening of this section is not only informative but characteristic of the overall lucidity of Myers’s style: “Creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s. It began in junior high school where it was originally conducted as an experiment to replace traditional English—grammar, spelling, penmanship, even literature classes—with something more appealing to young people. As such it was part of a broader movement to reform American education in the first half of the twentieth century. The cry was that subjects should not be taught, students should; the reform movement called itself progressive education. Creative writing was invented to transport progressive methods and materials into a junior-high-school English classroom. The man who invented it was a progressive educator—once well known, now largely forgotten—named Hughes Mearns” (p. 101). William Hughes Mearns (1875–1965) was himself a disciple of John Dewey, whose ideas formed the basis for progressive education in general. Adapting the Deweyan concept of learning as a spur to personal [End Page 530] development, Mearns saw writing “as the efficient cause of an education in which the final cause was personal growth” (pp. 104–11).After Mearns, Myers considers a somewhat more familiar chapter in history: the appearance of creative writing as a self-contained discipline on the college campus. Credit for the original initiative goes to Norman Foerster (1887–1972), who in 1930 took over the newly-founded School of Letters at the University of Iowa. A follower of Irving Babbitt and the “new humanism,” Foerster set out (in his own words) “to give all types of literary students a rigorous and appropriate discipline” (p. 126). Foerster’s “discipline” was a varied curriculum including... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Ecological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living by Dawn Nothwehr, and: The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity by Willis JenkinsJeffrey MorganEcological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living Dawn Nothwehr Collegevile, MN: Liturgical Press, 2012. 368pp. $39.95The Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity Willis Jenkins Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013. 304pp. $34.95Dawn M. (...) Nothwehr, OSF, and Willis Jenkins have written, so it seems, incommensurable books about the relation of religion to environmental problems. The central issue between them is whether or not it is possible to move from a theological tradition to fitting, ecologically responsible moral action. Nothwehr is quite confident that we can, and the first half of her Ecological Footprints: An Essential Franciscan Guide for Faith and Sustainable Living is, as the title suggests, a primer in Franciscan theology that moves toward a theology of sustainable living. After two opening chapters on scripture and the environment, the distinctly Franciscan quality of the guide really begins as Nothwehr surveys, over four chapters, the cornerstones of Franciscan theology: Clair, Francis, Bonaventure, and Scotus. Nothwehr’s main effort in these chapters is to draw out major themes in each figure’s work and to suggest how these themes might inform a contemporary ethics of sustainability. With heavy reliance on contemporary scholarship, Nothwehr covers significant ground: creation, the Trinity, Christology, sacramental theology, deification, panentheism, theological anthropology, and more. The effect is a bit dizzying, but a few focal lenses emerge. Across these major figures there is, Nothwehr contends, a profound commitment to the interrelatedness of all things, kinship throughout cosmos, [End Page 219] and the need for mutual respect among all creatures; all this is grounded in a vision of the Incarnation as the divine affirmation and deification of all things (121). That is, the Incarnation is the fullest revelation of the mutual love between the persons of the Trinity that shines forth throughout the creation and that summons each of us to treat all creatures as equals, as brothers and sisters united in one household (94). The ethical takeaway is straightforward: if we really held these (or similar) theological convictions, our ecological habits should follow suit (see, for example, 86).The difficulty is that environmental problems are complex and confuse our moral agency; furthermore, there is a general “spiritual malaise” that reinforces an entrenched apathy to do anything about those problems. The second half of the book takes up these complex problems, and it is there that Nothwehr hits her stride. Chapters 7 through 10 are all well-done exposés that guide the reader through the intricacies of subtle, systemic injustices that conspire to reinforce global warming (chapter 7), the global water crisis (chapter 8), problems of food access and security (chapter 9), and the crisis of peak oil and sustainable energy (chapter 10). The connection between these exposés and the earlier chapters on particular Franciscan theologians is loose but significant. While the earlier themes are not so much worked into the later chapters as they are very briefly referenced and invoked here and there, the point is that these themes from this tradition have the capacity to awaken us from our malaise and help us take responsibility for our world. In short, the Franciscan tradition, as a distinct theological worldview, can provide both motivation and a fair amount of practical guidance to help us confront the environmental problems facing us.Nothwehr’s book is the kind of book Willis Jenkins claims he initially set out to write: a book that helps us see how “theology matters to processes of cultural change” and provides “grammars of belief” sufficient to “generate satisfactory responses to representative problems of human power” (vii). But in setting out to write such a book, Jenkins found that such problems overwhelm the moral repertoires of religious traditions. Environmental problems, in particular, frustrate attempts simply to put ideas into practice. This is not to say religious traditions can only be found wanting before the contemporary slate of overwhelming problems; rather, such problems provide religious traditions with opportunities for constructive reevaluation and renewal of their... (shrink)

This volume is a collection of original contributions from outstanding scholars in linguistics, philosophy and computational linguistics exploring the relation between word meaning and human linguistic creativity. The papers present different aspects surrounding the question of what is word meaning, a problem that has been the center of heated debate in all those disciplines that directly or indirectly are concerned with the study of language and of human cognition. The discussions are centered around the newly emerging view of the mental (...) lexicon, as outlined in the Generative Lexicon theory (Pustejovsky, 1995), which proposes a unified model for defining word meaning. The individual contributors present their evidence for a generative approach as well as critical perspectives, which provides for a volume where word meaning is not viewed only from a particular angle or from a particular concern, but from a wide variety of topics, each introduced and explained by the editors. (shrink)

Until recently, cognitive science focused on such mental functions as problem solving, grammar, and pattern-the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers: we invent new meanings, imagine wildly, and even have ideas that have never existed before. Today the cutting edge of cognitive science addresses precisely these mysterious, creative aspects of the mind.The Way We Think is a landmark analysis of the imaginative nature of the mind. Conceptual blending (...) is already widely known in research laboratories throughout the world; this book, written to be accessible to both lay readers and interested scientists, is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner show that conceptual blending is the root of the cognitively modern human mind, and that conceptual blends themselves are continually combined and reblended to create the rich mental fabric in which we live.The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, culture, and invention; and how we imagine what could be and what might have been. The result is a bold and exciting new view of how the mind works. (shrink)

Exocentric compounding is a creative morphological process that contributes to the English lexicon. However, because it lacks a syntactic or semantic head, it was deemed an exceptional case in most word-formation literature and hence neglected. Previous work has only been limited to syntax-based grammar and the notion of headedness and thus failed to address the other linguistic rules that constrain exocentric compounds. The current paper aims to identify the frequency of exocentric compounds and thus to determine their viability. (...) The research will also look into how conceptual metaphor and/or conceptual metonymy motivate exocentric compound formation. The results demonstrate that exocentric compounds are viable lexical units, generating content words (e.g., adjectives and adverbs) through productive word-formation processes, and extending word senses. The results also suggest that conceptual metonymy is more active than conceptual metaphor in the formation of exocentric compounds. The present findings have several implications for research on exocentric compounds, conceptual metonymy and conceptual metaphor. (shrink)

The aim of this text is to elucidate certain aspects of the use of expressions such as “is true” and “it is true that” (henceforth “truth-expressions”) and, through this, some features of the concept of truth. It focuses on addressing the question of whether truth-expressions play the role of a predicate or an operator. The investigations pursued are intended to be grammatical—in Wittgenstein’s sense of the term. I begin with a short presentation of a widely held view about the role (...) played by truth-expressions. I then contrast the Wittgensteinian conception of grammar with that of linguistics. I sketch Frege’s, Wittgenstein’s, Prior’s and Brandom’s central ideas regarding the issue under consideration. As a further step, I investigate the role of truth-expressions by examining several sentences in which they occur, and discuss objections to the proposed analysis. On my approach, truth expressions play the role of a predicate only when applied to sentences, and in all other cases function as operators. One advantage of such a position is that it enables a dissolution of the problem of truth-bearers: where truth-expressions are operators, the issue simply does not arise, and where they are predicates, it is sentences that are the truth-bearers. (shrink)

We usually consider literary thinking to be peripheral and dispensable, an activity for specialists: poets, prophets, lunatics, and babysitters. Certainly we do not think it is the basis of the mind. We think of stories and parables from Aesop's Fables or The Thousand and One Nights, for example, as exotic tales set in strange lands, with spectacular images, talking animals, and fantastic plots--wonderful entertainments, often insightful, but well removed from logic and science, and entirely foreign to the world of everyday (...) thought. But Mark Turner argues that this common wisdom is wrong. The literary mind--the mind of stories and parables--is not peripheral but basic to thought. Story is the central principle of our experience and knowledge. Parable--the projection of story to give meaning to new encounters--is the indispensable tool of everyday reason. Literary thought makes everyday thought possible. This book makes the revolutionary claim that the basic issue for cognitive science is the nature of literary thinking. In The Literary Mind, Turner ranges from the tools of modern linguistics, to the recent work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and Gerald Edelman, to literary masterpieces by Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Proust, as he explains how story and projection--and their powerful combination in parable--are fundamental to everyday thought. In simple and traditional English, he reveals how we use parable to understand space and time, to grasp what it means to be located in space and time, and to conceive of ourselves, other selves, other lives, and other viewpoints. He explains the role of parable in reasoning, in categorizing, and in solving problems. He develops a powerful model of conceptual construction and, in a far-reaching final chapter, extends it to a new conception of the origin of language that contradicts proposals by such thinkers as Noam Chomsky and Steven Pinker. Turner argues that story, projection, and parable precede grammar, that language follows from these mental capacities as a consequence. Language, he concludes, is the child of the literary mind. Offering major revisions to our understanding of thought, conceptual activity, and the origin and nature of language, The Literary Mind presents a unified theory of central problems in cognitive science, linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, and philosophy. It gives new and unexpected answers to classic questions about knowledge, creativity, understanding, reason, and invention. (shrink)

Preface --Part I: What is excellence? -- The making of a new meaning of excellence -- The making of a concept -- Divine imitation and excellence -- Excellence and subject -- Infinite longing -- A view of human nature -- Self-world correlation and excellence -- Exegeting excellence -- The grammar of excellence -- Excellence : technical and ontological -- Excellence as will-to-the-infinite -- Excellence as community of abstract-concrete and more -- Problematic standards of excellence -- Excellence and creativity -- (...) The core features of excellence -- An African conception of excellence -- New being : the construction of excellent self -- Conclusion: The features of excellence -- New being : participation and imitation -- Christology of excellence -- Imitation in Christian theology -- Justice, love and hope -- Excellence and justice -- Excellence and love -- Excellence and hope -- Part II: Social ethical framework -- A framework for social ethics -- Tillich's concept of ethics -- Creativity and theonomous ethics -- Governance and prophetic spirit -- A model of an excellentist social world -- Outline of governance ethics -- Excellence and the prophetic spirit -- The prophetic spirit and the law -- Social practice as boundary of possibilities -- Social practice : the tension between included and excluded possibilities -- The myth of goods : internal versus external -- Excellence and economic development -- The theological character of economic development -- Modeling excellence on factors of economic development -- Excellence and money -- Economic development : the role of work and monetary policy -- The good, truth, and beauty -- The depth and destiny of excellence -- The exit and tag line : Africa and excellence. (shrink)

Conceptual projection from one mental space to another always involves projection to "middle" spaces-abstract "generic" middle spaces or richer "blended" middle spaces. Projection to a middle space is a general cognitive process, operating uniformly at different levels of abstraction and under superficially divergent contextual circumstances. Middle spaces are indispensable sites for central mental and linguistic work. The process of blending is in particular a fundamental and general cognitive process, running over many (conceivably all) cognitive phenomena, including categorization, the making of (...) hypotheses, inference, the origin and combining of grammatical constructions, analogy, metaphor, and narrative. Blending is not secondary to these phenomena but prerequisite, and its operation is not restricted to any one of these phenomena. We give evidence for blending from a wide range of data that includes everyday language, idioms, literary metaphor, non-verbal conceptualization of action, creative thought in mathematics, evolution of socio-cultural models, jokes, and advertising. Blending is in general invisible to consciousness and detectable only on analysis. Blended spaces are routinely necessary for constructing central meanings, inferences, and structures, and for motivating emotions. We show that the blending of highly schematic spaces yields the fusion of grammatical constructions and functional assemblies studied in Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar. Finally, recognizing the cognitive import of middle spaces allows us to propose a generalized four-space model of conceptual projection that subsumes a variety of previous models. We explore the consequences of this model for the theory of concept formation. Introduction 3 I. The four space model 4 II. The phenomenon of blended spaces 5 1. Dante's Inferno 5 2. Regatta 7 3. The riddle of the Buddhist monk 8 4. Getting ahead of oneself 9 5. Tuning in, and other actions 11 6. Complex numbers 12 III. Prototypes of blending and mistaken reductions 14 IV. Further evidence for conceptual projection into a blended space 17 1. President Bush on third base 18 2. President Nixon in France 19 3. Personification 21 V. Category extension 22 VI. Generic spaces 24 VII. Parameters and subschemes 25 VIII. Blending and grammar 30 IX. The concept of a concept 33 Notes 35 References 38. (shrink)

My aim in this chapter is to extend the Realist account of the foundations of linguistics offered by Postal, Katz and others. I first argue against the idea that naive Platonism can capture the necessary requirements on what I call a ‘mixed realist’ view of linguistics, which takes aspects of Platonism, Nominalism and Mentalism into consideration. I then advocate three desiderata for an appropriate ‘mixed realist’ account of linguistic ontology and foundations, namely (1) linguistic creativity and infinity, (2) linguistics as (...) a theory of types (and not tokens) and (3) independence but structural respect between language and the linguistic competence thereof. My own brand of mixed realism, what I call ante rem realism, is defended along the lines of an ante rem or non-eliminative structuralism, the likes of which has been offered for mathematics by Resnik (1997) and Shapiro (1997). In other words, grammars describe a mind-independent (but not necessarily unconnected) linguistic reality in terms of linguistic patterns or structures also known as natural languages. I further amend this picture to allow for the possibility of a naturalistic account of language acquisition and evolution by arguing against a particular view of the type-token distinction. (shrink)

In this paper, we propose an understanding of philosophy of education as cultural and intercultural work and philosophers of education as cultural and intercultural workers. In our view, the discipline of philosophy of education in North America is currently suffering from measures of insularity and singularity. It is vital that we justly and respectfully engage with and expand our knowledge and understanding of sets of conceptual and life-practice resources, and honor and learn from diverse histories, cultures, and traditions. Such honoring (...) provides responsive conditions for our coming together in and across differences in order that we may productively and creatively address and overturn grammars of violence, destruction, and dis-ease in these complexly troubled times. Committing ourselves to deconstructing historical and contemporary beliefs, values, and practices that are compromising human and planetary flourishing, we undertake responsibilities to go cross-cultural and intercultural. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Kenneth Burke on Dialectical-Rhetorical TranscendenceJames P. ZappenKenneth Burke's concept of rhetoric is complex and elusive, increasingly so as it becomes intertwined and infused with dialectic in the long third part of A Rhetoric of Motives and in some essays published shortly thereafter (1951; 1955; 1969b [1950], 183–333).1 The connection between Burke's rhetoric and dialectic is well established (Brummett 1995; Crusius 1986; 1999, 120–21; Wess 1996, 136–216; Wolin 2001, 143–204), (...) and his concept of rhetoric as identification is widely recognized for its broadening of the traditional view of rhetoric as persuasion to include identification as a means of inducing cooperation and building communities (Crusius 1999, 120–21; Hauser 1986, 120–37; Henderson 1988, 33–34). Timothy W. Crusius establishes the fundamental relationship between A Grammar of Motives and A Rhetoric of Motives as dialectical and rhetorical counterparts and explains both the strengths and the limitations of identification as a means of inducing cooperation (1986). According to Crusius, dialectic explores the substance of a person or thing—all that "supports or 'substands'" it—from multiple and shifting perspectives, viewing human action dramatistically as act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (24–28). Rhetoric complements dialectic and its multiple dramatistic perspectives by promoting "identification" and "cooperation," building "a community, a sense of oneness amid diversity of conflicting interests and values" (28–30). As Crusius and others observe, [End Page 279] however, identification as a means of inducing cooperation is inherently limited since any identification necessarily also entails a division: "Every 'us' requires a 'them'" (29; Biesecker 1997, 47–49; Wolin 2001, 177–78). Thus, for example, while Christianity provides a powerful instance of identification, it also provides an equally powerful illustration of its division from other peoples—"Satan and his counter-kingdom," "the Turk infidel," and "the pagan hordes of Asia" (28–29). For Burke, these divisions were largely political (George and Selzer 2007, 16–57, 110–32; Lentricchia 1983, 21–38). For us, they are differences of gender, culture, and economic and social class (Condit 1992), compounded by political, economic, and religious differences on a global scale. By this account, the first two parts of the Rhetoric offer at best a partial solution to the problem. The third part challenges and mystifies and in itself seems to offer little more than a utopian vision without purpose or outcome (Crusius 1999, 120–21; Wess 1996, 211–16; Wolin 2001, 201–3).2 Situated within the broader context of Burke's work, however, the third part seems rather to offer a bold and creative solution to the problem by merging dialectic and rhetoric with dialogue and poetic myth in a dialectical-rhetorical transcendence—a concept that merits a place alongside identification as a major contribution to rhetorical theory (1969b, 197–208, 221–33).3Burke's concept of dialectical-rhetorical transcendence developed over the course of more than twenty years, from the mid 1930s to the mid 1950s and beyond. Its sources are partly Hegelian and Marxist but increasingly Platonic,4 as Burke comes to perceive the Hegelian and Marxist concepts of history as part of the problem of competing ideologies and his version of Platonic transcendence as the solution—a solution that leads, on the one hand, toward "pure persuasion" and "ultimate identification" and, on the other, toward the pragmatics of a new rhetoric and a revolutionary program of lifelong education (1951; 1955; 1969b, 267–94, 328–33; Biesecker 1997, 43–47; Lee 2004; Wess 1996, 203–5, 211–16; Wolin 2001, 201–3). In the midst of the political divisiveness of the 1930s, Burke glimpsed in Hegel and even Marx the possibility of bridging conflicting ideologies via transcendence, but he turned to Plato in the Grammar and again in the Rhetoric to explain the processes by which opposing ideas and ideologies might merge in transcendent visions or myths that encompass what he perceived to be partial and partisan points of view. In the Grammar, his solution is dialectical—a merger of opposing ideas at higher levels of generalization through a process of linguistic abstraction and transformation that respects a diversity of individual interests, even as it seeks to transcend them in larger [End... (shrink)

A metaphor that has dominated linguistics for the entire duration of its existence as a discipline views sentences as edifices consisting of Lego-like building blocks. It is assumed that each sentence is constructed (and, on the receiving end, parsed) ab novo, starting (ending) with atomic constituents, to logical semantic specifications, in a recursive process governed by a few precise algebraic rules. The assumptions underlying the Lego metaphor, as it is expressed in generative grammar theories, are: (1) perfect regularity of (...) what Saussure called langue, (2) infinite potential recursivity of syntactic structures, (3) unlimited human capacity for linguistic creativity, (4) the impossibility of acquiring structural knowledge from examples, and (5) the impossibility of such knowledge being stored in a memory-intensive form (ensembles of exemplars). (shrink)

The paper aims at analyzing Wittgenstein's arguments on voluntary action as they are developed in Part II of PI in Z and eventually in RPPI-II. Special attention is paid to the scrutiny of arguments which could be characterized as the pars destruens and the pars construens of Wittgenstein's grammar of action. The first one consists in the usage of the distinction between dispositions and states to get rid of the "misleading parallels" which undermine the explicative claims of scientific psychology; (...) the second lies in the elaboration of a "conceptual" analysis of the phenomena of mental life which would constitute an adequate instrument to locate voluntary actions, and "creative acts" in general, in Wittgenstein's plan for a treatment of psychological concepts. (shrink)

The paper aims at analyzing Wittgenstein's arguments on voluntary action as they are developed in Part II of PI in Z and eventually in RPPI-II. Special attention is paid to the scrutiny of arguments which could be characterized as the pars destruens and the pars construens of Wittgenstein's grammar of action. The first one consists in the usage of the distinction between dispositions and states to get rid of the "misleading parallels" which undermine the explicative claims of scientific psychology; (...) the second lies in the elaboration of a "conceptual" analysis of the phenomena of mental life which would constitute an adequate instrument to locate voluntary actions, and "creative acts" in general, in Wittgenstein's plan for a treatment of psychological concepts. (shrink)