In this volume, critical scholars and educational activists explore the intricate dynamics between the enclosure of global commons and radical visions of a common social future that breaks through the logics of privatization, ecological degradation, and dehumanizing social hierarchies in education. In its institutional and informal configurations alike, education has been identified as perhaps the key stake in this struggle. Insisting on the urgency of an education that breaks free of the bonds of enclosure, the essays included in this volume (...) weave together bright threads of radical thought into a vivid tapestry illustrating a critical framework for enacting a global educational commons. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging conversation, Michael Hardt reflects on recent transformations within Empire. Several unique themes emerge concerning power and pedagogy as they intersect with subjectivity and global crisis. Drawing on the common in conjunction with the tradition of love in education uncovers a different path that attends to today’s real political, ecological, and social needs. Finally, a focus on collectivity points to a possible strategy—collective intellectuality—for educators to revise traditional notions of leadership to encourage more ethical, democratic, and sustainable futures. (...) Yet, what this looks like in practice remains for us to imagine. (shrink)

This essay explores aesthetics, affect, and educational politics through the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Rancière. It contextualizes and contrasts the theoretical valences of their ethical and democratic projects through their shared critique of Kant. It then puts Rancière's notion of dissensus to work by exploring it in relation to a social movement and hunger strike organized for educational justice in Chicago's Little Village neighborhood. This serves as a context for understanding how educational provisions are linked to the aesthetic (...) distribution of perception within the neoliberal city. It also serves as a powerful example of how these orders of perception are resisted and subverted at the local level by aesthetic and affective means. Through the Little Village hunger strike the essay argues that while Rancière allows us to recognize the aesthetic dimensions of the political, he falls short in addressing tactical and/or affective considerations. The essay concludes by seeking to extend the critical efficacy of Rancière's dissensus through a rendering of tactical affect within Deleuzian metaphysics. (shrink)

Benhabib recasts the Derridean idea of `iteration' in democratic terms. While adhering to the original idea that both the fundamental terms of political consociation and the identity of the people itself is `radically' open, Benhabib argues that deliberative norms do and should frame the process of reiteration. For the deliberative democrat, the democratic constitution is not a would-be barrier to iterability (which we are told cannot be contained anyway); it is rather a communicative or discursive space in which the hitherto (...) suppressed or not yet present voice of other people finds its way and expands the terms of meaning giving and hence reason giving. The democratic constitution enables iteration; it is one side of a dialectic that relies upon, balances and, in some sense, makes the most of people power. Immigrants, in the final analysis, are the latest group to proclaim their presence in the sphere of constitutional interpretation, and thereby recalibrate the interpretive frame. And when they make their presence known in this way they have truly become a part of the `people'. When, however, they make their presence known in ways that undermine constitutional self-understanding, instead of engaging it, they are `not us'. Benhabib is hesitant to add this last bit, as she is hesitant to admit how much the constitutional identity of a people `rift with otherness' is reliant upon the historical referent and the generative/steering power of the right sort of constitutional court. (shrink)

Hardt and Negri’s Empire series has inspired twenty years of debate and experimentation across the social sciences and humanities in fields as divergent as international re...

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the (...) level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire’s decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire’s crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. (shrink)

The concept of biopolitics was first outlined by Michel Foucault (2003, 2007, 2009) in his lectures at the Collège de France in the late 1970s in order to name and analyze emergent logics of power...

Michael A. PetersBeijing Normal University, Beijing, PR China;There is an ecology of bad ideas, just as there is an ecology of weeds– Gregory Bateson (1972, p. 492)While there are classical anteced...

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them (...) as speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs. (shrink)

Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher–order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them (...) as speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs. (shrink)

This paper is an attack on the Dummett-Prawitz view that the principle of bivalence has a crucial double significance, metaphysical and meaning theoretical. On the one hand it is said that holding bivalence valid is what characterizes a realistic view, i.e. a view in metaphysics, and on the other hand it is said that there are meaning theoretical arguments against its acceptability. I argue that these two aspects are incompatible. If the failure of validity of bivalence depends on (...) properties of linguistic meaning, then there are no metaphysical consequences to be drawn. The case for this view is straightforward as long as we are discussing a language different from our own. But it seems that the distinction between failure because of meaning and failure because of reality cannot be applied to our own language, simply because our own language is just what we use to represent reality. I argue that this impression is illusory. In order to draw a conclusion about reality, meaning must be connected with truth in a non-trivial way, and precisely this cannot be done in the language for which the meaning theory itself is correct. (shrink)

The present article concentrates on understanding the limits of language from the realm of meaning theory as portrayed by Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s picture theory provides a glimpse of reality by indicating that a picture could be true or false from the perspective of reality. He talks about an internal limitation of language rather than an external limitation of language. In Wittgenstein’s later works like Philosophical Investigations, the concept of picture theory has faded away, and (...) he deeply becomes more interested in the ‘use theory of meaning’ and ‘language game.’ My other attempt in this paper is to show Husserl’s theory of meaning and try to find out its compatibility with Wittgenstein’s thoughts. Husserl thinks that as a part of phenomenological experience, ‘meaning’ should be an act character that Wittgenstein rejected as an appeal of inner experience. Like Mohanty, I also attempt to show the Husserlian idea of meaning as an essence that is related to the meaning rather than linguistics. Both the giants are talking about description of language from different levels. My effort would be to illustrate how these two giant thinkers proclaim their meaning theories in such a way that leads to a well-known internalism versus externalism debate in the philosophy of mind and language. (shrink)

An “absolutely general” or "unrestricted" language is one the quantifiers and variables of which are meant to range over absolutely everything whatsoever. In recent years, an increasing number of authors have begun to appreciate the limitations of typical model-theoretic resources for metatheoretic reflection on such languages. In response, some have suggested that proper metatheoretic reflection for unrestricted languages needs to be carried out in a metalanguage of greater logical resources. For an unrestricted first-order language, for example, this means a second-order (...) metalanguage. Importantly, second-order quantification must then be understood as an irreducible logical expansion, and not as a restricted form of quantification over a special class of things, such as sets or properties. -/- In this paper, I will argue that the use of second-order resources is also required if we are to give an adequate meaning theory for an unrestricted first-order language. I then go on to show how such a meaning theory can be constructed, and draw some consequences for the individuation of propositional content along the way. (shrink)

The present article concentrates on understanding the limits of language from the realm of meaning theory as portrayed by Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s picture theory provides a glimpse of reality by indicating that a picture could be true or false from the perspective of reality. He talks about an internal limitation of language rather than an external limitation of language. In Wittgenstein’s later works like Philosophical Investigations, the concept of picture theory has faded away, and (...) he deeply becomes more interested in the ‘use theory of meaning’ and ‘language game.’ My other attempt in this paper is to show Husserl’s theory of meaning and try to find out its compatibility with Wittgenstein’s thoughts. Husserl thinks that as a part of phenomenological experience, ‘meaning’ should be an act character that Wittgenstein rejected as an appeal of inner experience. Like Mohanty, I also attempt to show the Husserlian idea of meaning as an essence that is related to the meaning rather than linguistics. Both the giants are talking about description of language from different levels. My effort would be to illustrate how these two giant thinkers proclaim their meaning theories in such a way that leads to a well-known internalism versus externalism debate in the philosophy of mind and language. (shrink)

Michael Dummett has interpreted and expounded upon intuitionism under the influence of Wittgensteinian views on language, meaning and cognition. I argue against the application of some of these views to intuitionism and point to shortcomings in Dummett's approach. The alternative I propose makes use of recent, post-Wittgensteinian views in the philosophy of mind, meaning and language. These views are associated with the claim that human cognition exhibits intentionality and with related ideas in philosophical psychology. Intuitionism holds that mathematical (...) constructions are mental processes or objects. Constructions are, in the first instance, forms of consciousness or possible experience of a particular type. As such, they must be understood in terms of the concept of intentionality. This view has a historical basis in the literature on intuitionism. In a famous 1931 lecture Heyting in fact identifies constructions with fulfilled or fulfillable mathematical intentions. I consider some of the consequences of this identification and contrast them with Dummett's views on intuitionism. (shrink)

In this paper, I briefly outline the notion of a truth-conditional meaning-theory and introduce two prominent problems it faces. The“extensionality problem” arises because not all correct specifications of truth-conditions are meaning-giving. The “explanatory problem”concerns the extent to which truth-conditional meaning-theories can contribute to the task of clarifying the nature of linguistic meaning.The “principle of humanity” is supposed to resolve both issues simultaneously. I argue that it fails to do so.

b> Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that (...) qualify them as speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs. (shrink)

Strawson contends that the proper subject matter of a theory of meaning includes what is meant on an occasion of utterance. If his contention is correct, it rules out a recent proposal that Davidsonian semantic theory should limit its scope so that it does not capture the extension of what is meant or what is said. In this paper, I reject Strawson's arguments for his contention. Despite the persuasive ring of his claim that the essential character of (...) linguistic rules is that they are rules for communicating, his case remains unproven. (shrink)

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable (...) paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Arthur Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Richard Wollheim in Painting as an Art have each advanced a certain meaning theory of art (MT), more specifically, a theory according to which something is a work of art just in case it expresses a proposition. The first part of this essay sets out that view in more detail, with textual support that Danto and Wollheim do in fact hold that theory. The second part offers reasons (...) against accepting MT. (1) There seem to be persuasive counterexamples to MT: objects that are clearly works of art but which do not appear to exhibit any tendency towards propositionality. (2) Neither theorist provides an explanation as to why someone with something to say would choose to, as it were, hide his thought behind a painting. (3) MT will force a theory of the evaluation of art that parallels the evaluation of (say) scientific or philosophical thought. Artworks will be judged according to the profundity of the thoughts they express rather than by their aesthetic features – which would make Duchamp a greater artist than Monet! (shrink)

Stephen Salkever shows that reading Aristotle is a starting point for discussing contemporary political problems in new ways that avoid the opposition between liberal individualism and republican communitarianism, between the politics of rights and the politics of virtues. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable (...) paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

In this paper I attempt to give an account of the moral criticizability of motive by appeal to some insights in semantic theory. I maintain that the actions for which we hold persons responsible cannot strictly be understood as expressive of semantic meaning. However, I argue that morally responsible actions can be understood on analogy with a basic Gricean distinction between speaker's and sentence meaning. The analogy suggests that morally responsible actions require a competent moral agent to (...) operate from within the confines of an interpretive moral framework of action assessment, a framework analogous to the framework required for sentence meaning. (shrink)

The fundamental problem proponents of truth conditional semantics must face is to specify what role a truth theory is supposed to play within a meaning theory. The most detailed proposal for tackling this problem is the account developed by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig. However, as I will show in this paper, theories along the lines of Lepore and Ludwig do not suffice to put someone into the position to understand the objectlanguage. The fundamental problem of truth (...) conditional semantics thus remains unsolved. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Davidson's truth-theoretic semantics was not intended to replace the traditional pursuit of providing a compositional meaning theory but rather to achieve the same aim indirectly by placing conditions on a truth theory that would enable someone who understood it to understand its object language. The chapter argues that by placing constraints on the axioms of a Tarski-style truth theory, namely, that they interpret the terms for which they give satisfaction conditions, and specifying (...) a suitable canonical proof procedure that issues in T-sentence that remove all the metalanguage semantic terms from the right hand side and draw intuitively only on the content of the axioms, we can use the theory to interpret object language sentences. It further argues that if we ask what body of knowledge one must be in possession of to interpret the language, it turns out to be a set of propositions about the truth theory but not the axioms of the truth theory itself. This shows how to avoid the problem of the semantic paradoxes and the problem of vagueness. (shrink)

This study presents and develops in detail (a new version of) the argumental conception of meaning. The two basic principles of the argumental conception of meaning are: i) To know (implicitly) the sense of a word is to know (implicitly) all the argumentation rules concerning that word; ii) To know the sense of a sentence is to know the syntactic structure of that sentence and to know the senses of the words occurring in it. The sense of a (...) sentence is called immediate argumental role of that sentence. According to the argumental conception of meaning a theory of meaning for a particular language yields a systematic specification of the understanding of every sentence of the language which consists in a specification of the immediate argumental role of the sentence. The immediate argumental role is a particular aspect of the use of a sentence in arguments. But it is not the whole use in arguments, nor is the whole use in arguments reducible to the immediate argumental role. That is why, by accepting the argumental conception of meaning, we can have epistemological holism without linguistic holism. The argumental conception distinguishes between the understanding and the correctness of a language. Such a distinction makes it possible to account for our understanding of paradoxical languages. Redundancy theory of truth, realistic conceptions of truth or epistemic conceptions of truth are all compatible with an argumental conception of sense. But here it is argued that an epistemic conception of truth is preferrable. Acceptance of the argumental conception of meaning and of an epistemic conception of truth leads to a rejection of the idea of analytic truth. The argumental conception is pluralistic with respect to the understandability of different logics, and neutral with respect to their correctness. (shrink)

The article presents the nature of shared intentions and collective responsibility in simultaneous discussion of individualism, which views that collective agents and shared intentions are to be analyzed in relation between individual agents who are members of the collectives. It discusses as well the agent meaning theory that states that an agent moves against the interpretive background of action evaluation shared by the agent and the moral community.

Philosophical debate about the meaning of normative terms has long been pulled in two directions by the apparently competing ideas: (i) ‘ought’s do not describe what is actually the case but rather prescribe possible action, thought, or feeling, (ii) all declarative sentences deserve the same general semantic treatment, e.g. in terms of compositionally specified truth conditions. In this paper, I pursue resolution of this tension by rehearsing the case for a relatively standard truth-conditionalist semantics for ‘ought’ conceived as a (...) necessity modal and proposing a revision to it motivated by the distinctively prescriptive character of some deontic modals. In my view, this puts pressure on a popular conception of one of the core debates of metanormative theory between realists and antirealists. To make good on this claim, I go on to explore two very general ways we might interpret the results of compositional semantics—“representationalism” and “inferentialism”—in order to argue that, contrary to what is generally assumed, both can capture the special prescriptivity of ‘ought’ and both can countenance compositionally specified and informative truth-conditions for ought-sentences. Hence, my main thesis is that the deciding factor between them should not be which of ideas (i) and (ii) we are more impressed by but rather what we think of the relative merits of how representationalism and inferentialism respect these ideas. I’m inclined to favor an antirealist form of inferentialism, but the task I’ve set myself here is mainly to articulate the view in the context of metanormative theory and the semantics of deontic modals rather than try to defend it fully. To this purpose, towards the end I also briefly compare and contrast inferentialism with a third “ideationalist” metasemantic view, which may be an attractive home for some sophisticated versions of metanormative expressivism. Depending on how expressivism is worked out, it may be completely compatible with and so perhaps usefully combined with inferentialism or it may offer a competing way to respect ideas (i) and (ii). (shrink)

To begin with the former, representation is as familiar as it is puzzling. The English sentence ‘ Santiago is east of Sacramento’ represents the world as being a certain way. So does my belief that Santiago is east of Sacramento. In these examples, one item—a sentence or a belief—lays claim to something else, a state of affairs, which may be far removed in space and time. This is the phenomenon that naturalist theories of meaning aim to explain. How is (...) it possible for one thing to stand for something else in this way? (shrink)

This Book Offers A Fresh Exposition Of The Buddhist Theory Of Meaning (Apohavada) Against The Backdrop Of Indian Linguistic Thought And Shows How This Theory Is Positioned Vis-A-Vis Current Issues And Assumptions In Language. Consists A Very Useful Glossary.

Distributional semantics is an area of corpus linguistics and computational linguistics that seeks to model the meanings of words by producing a semantic space that captures the distributional properties of those words within a corpus. In this paper, I provide an overview of distributional semantic models, including a broad sketch of how such models are constructed. I then outline the reasons for and against the claim that distributional semantic models can serve as a theory of meaning, paying special (...) attention to those within the field who have defended this claim. Finally, I conclude by arguing that despite the fact that such models are holistic, they nevertheless avoid the objections raised against holistic theories of meaning, particularly from Fodor & Lepore (1992) (Holism: a shopper’s guide. Blackwell, 1992) and Fodor & Lepore (1999). (shrink)

In 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' Donald Davidson attacks a picture of language which, he says, is prevalent among philosophers and linguists. Davidson's criticism, even if correct, is not radical enough. The common irregularities of everyday language, such as malapropisms, nicknames, and slips of the tongue, not only imply that linguistic meanings are not governed by conventions that are learned in advance of occasions of interpretation, but undermine the very idea that linguistic meaning can be accounted for in terms (...) of systematic meaning-theories. Davidson continues to hold that Tarskian truth-definitions should play a central role in philosophical accounts of language, but if the goal is to describe rather than to improve or otherwise change language, we must give up the aspiration towards theoretical systematicity altogether. In this connection, Davidson's approach is compared with those of Quine and Wittgenstein. It is argued that Davidson's unwillingness to give up the notion that meaning is systematic is best explained in terms of his vacillating between treating meaning-theories as mere representations of the linguistic abilities of a speaker and seeing them as playing a more substantial role in communication. (shrink)