Did the pragmatic turn encompass the linguistic turn in the history of philosophy? Or was the linguistic turn a turn away from pragmatism? Some commentators identify the so-called “eclipse” of pragmatism by analytic philosophy, especially during the Cold War era, as a turn away from pragmatist thinking. However, the historical evidence suggests that this narrative is little more than a myth. Pragmatism persisted, transforming into a more analytic variety under the influence of (...) Quine and Putnam and, more recently, a continental version in the hands of Richard Rorty and Cornel West. In this paper, I argue that proof of the linguistic turn’s presence as a moment in a broader pragmatic turn in philosophy can be garnered from close examination of a single article, W. V. O. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” and a single issue: whether the analytic-synthetic distinction is philosophically defensible. (shrink)

By the beginning of the twenty-first century essentialism is giving way to the constructivist paradigm in the field of social sciences and humanities. However, linguistic essentialism survived all the shocks and received a classical form in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativism. The application of this hypothesis to the analysis of linguistic communities puts majority and minority languages in different positions: it makes strong languages even stronger, and simply kills small ones. The task of preserving minority languages (...) in programs built using this methodology turns out to be impossible. In our humble opinion, two research paradigms are more adequate for the purpose. One of them is associated with the pragmatic turn in the analytical philosophy of language and represents a transition from the analysis of the structure of the language itself to the analysis of the conditions of communication, taking into account all the sociocultural components of this process. The second methodology is Erving Goff man’s concept of social face and performative behavior. (shrink)

This collection of contributions from both linguists and lawyers brings a pragmatic perspective to the linguistic basis for legal meaning and for finding a norm by which to decide a case. That is, it turns from notions of linguistic meaning as residing in the text, as literal meaning waiting to be dug out, to focus instead on how readers infer pragmatic meaning, and on the kinds of inferencing that characterise legal discourse.

Over many decades, Richard Bernstein has interpreted contemporary philosophy’s three traditions, roughly distinguished as analytic, pragmatic, and Continental, emphasizing their mutual affinities. Despite this reference to the continent of Europe, it would be wrong to identify any of these traditions geographically or linguistically; even to call them ‘traditions’ is stretching a point. Pragmatism originated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it has spread from there, transmogrifying in the process and claiming surprising allies, such as Heidegger; the label ‘pragmatist’ has even been (...) affixed to Hegel! That its day has come is the theme of this, Bernstein’s latest book. Its title is a play on Richard Rorty’s famous.. (shrink)

Richard Bernstein’s recent book The Pragmatic Turn is a first-rate scholarly work, an enduring contribution to the literature on the history of Pragmatism, and one that is very difficult to find fault with. Since I am a Dewey scholar and a democratic theorist, I will focus mainly on the book’s third chapter (“John Dewey’s Vision of Radical Democracy”) and its relation to Bernstein’s overall thesis: namely, that “during the past 150 years, philosophers working in different traditions have explored (...) and refined themes that were prominent in the pragmatic movement.” While Bernstein criticizes several of Dewey’s intellectual opponents (e.g., Maine, Trotsky and Lippmann), he does not excuse Dewey and his democratic theory from similarly exacting scrutiny—as some Dewey scholars are guilty of. Indeed, a recurring critique in the third chapter is that Dewey’s democratic theory is too light on particulars, saying very little about how to institutionalize the ideal he sets forth. I think that there is a good reason for Dewey’s vagueness, and that reason comes forth when we appreciate the turn within the pragmatic turn. Some philosophical historians draw attention to philosophy’s large-scale or macro-level turns, such as the so-called “pragmatic” and “linguistic” turns, but tend to ignore the small-scale or micro-level turns within those broader turns. Bernstein is not one of them. Democratic theory experienced a deliberative turn in the late twentieth-century, followed by a turn toward more practical issues, such as testing, applying and institutionalizing the deliberative democratic ideal. Likewise, we encounter a more recent turn within pragmatist studies, which manifests in the secondary literature on John Dewey’s pragmatism. Download PDF . (shrink)

1. In his compelling article American Pragmatism: The Conflict of Narratives, Richard Bernstein quotes a perceptive line by Alasdair MacIntyre that goes [A] tradition not only embodies the narrative of an argument, but is only recovered by an argumentative retelling of that narrative which will itself be in conflict with other argumentative retellings. Bernstein, in the essay mentioned, works through MacIntyre’s passage in order to “engage in the ‘argumentative retelling’ of a metanarrative –...

Speech acts and the autonomy of linguistic pragmatics This paper comments on selected problems of the definition of linguistic pragmatics with a focus on notions associated with speech act theory in the tradition of John Langshaw Austin. In more detail it concentrates on the relevance of the use of the Austinian categorisation into locution, illocution, and perlocution in locating a divide in between pragmatics and semantics, and especially the distinction between the locutionary act and the illocutionary act and (...) its implications for the definition of pragmatics and its separation from the semantic theory.The relation between form and meaning is further briefly reviewed against dichotomies including the Gricean and neo-Gricean ‘what is said’ versus ‘what is implicated’ or meant, between what can be ‘locuted’, but not said, and what can be said, but not asserted. These dichotomies are related to the theoretical commitments as to the accepted operative forces in speech acts, primarily convention and intention. It is suggested that, roughly, the development of the speech act theory can be viewed as a process by which the theory moves away from its originally sociolinguistic orientation towards a more psychologistic account, which in turn leads towards diminishing the role of semantics and the subsequent juxtaposition of pragmatics and syntax rather than pragmatics and semantics. (shrink)

Language Turned on Itself examines what happens when language becomes self-reflexive; when language is used to talk about language. Those who think, talk, and write about language are habitual users of various metalinguistic devices, but reliance on these devices begins early: kids are told, 'That's called a "rabbit"'. It's not implausible that a primitive capacity for the meta-linguistic kicks in at the beginning stages of language acquisition. But no matter when or how frequently these devices are invoked, one thing (...) is clear: they present theorists of language with a complex data pattern. Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore show that the study of these devices and patterns not only represents an interesting and neglected project in the philosophy of language, but also carries important consequences for other parts of philosophy. Part I is devoted to presenting data about various aspects of our metalinguistic practices. In Part II, the authors examine and reject the four leading metalinguistic theories, and offer a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts. But the primary goal of this book is not to promote one theory over another. Rather, it is to present a deeply puzzling set of problems and explain their significance. (shrink)

This is the first book devoted to the question of how language can be used to talk about language. Cappelen and Lepore examine the semantics, the pragmatics, and the syntax of linguistic devices that can be used in this way, and present a new account of our use of quotation in a variety of different contexts.

One of the important philosophical advantages stemming from study of the historical development of philosophical movements and traditions is the insight that comes from observing the logical out-working of a set of ideas over a period of time that far exceeds the lifetime of any individual thinker. An Aristotle or a Hegel may develop a philosophical mode of thought in an almost unbelievably comprehensive way, but no individual can grasp all the implications and ramifications of his philosophical vision, no matter (...) how monumental his powers may be. Many individuals, however, working over many years within the same framework of ideas can accomplish what no one of them alone could achieve. It is often said that philosophy is not an experimental science, and, in an obvious sense, this is true. But it is not entirely true. We can view the history of a tradition like Platonism, for example, or Augustinianism, as a vast experiment made by many thinkers with a set of ideas in which each thinker, building on what has gone before, seeks to develop further the basic premises of the position, proposing new logical alternatives, correcting errors, meeting objections, discovering further implications, and consolidating the results. In the case of a profound tradition, nothing less than this extended historical dialectic of ideas suffices to make plain what the basic position implies. Moreover, since climates of opinion change, the proponents of a given view will find that, in the course of time, new opponents appear, raising questions and posing problems that could not easily have been envisaged by the thinker who started the tradition. Sometimes these objections prove fatal and the tradition comes to an end; sometimes the objections are successfully overcome and the position finds new life and a more viable form of expression. The history of a tradition, therefore, is an indispensable resource for philosophical understanding. (shrink)

One of the important philosophical advantages stemming from study of the historical development of philosophical movements and traditions is the insight that comes from observing the logical out-working of a set of ideas over a period of time that far exceeds the lifetime of any individual thinker. An Aristotle or a Hegel may develop a philosophical mode of thought in an almost unbelievably comprehensive way, but no individual can grasp all the implications and ramifications of his philosophical vision, no matter (...) how monumental his powers may be. Many individuals, however, working over many years within the same framework of ideas can accomplish what no one of them alone could achieve. It is often said that philosophy is not an experimental science, and, in an obvious sense, this is true. But it is not entirely true. We can view the history of a tradition like Platonism, for example, or Augustinianism, as a vast experiment made by many thinkers with a set of ideas in which each thinker, building on what has gone before, seeks to develop further the basic premises of the position, proposing new logical alternatives, correcting errors, meeting objections, discovering further implications, and consolidating the results. In the case of a profound tradition, nothing less than this extended historical dialectic of ideas suffices to make plain what the basic position implies. Moreover, since climates of opinion change, the proponents of a given view will find that, in the course of time, new opponents appear, raising questions and posing problems that could not easily have been envisaged by the thinker who started the tradition. Sometimes these objections prove fatal and the tradition comes to an end; sometimes the objections are successfully overcome and the position finds new life and a more viable form of expression. The history of a tradition, therefore, is an indispensable resource for philosophical understanding. (shrink)

This book traces the linguistic turns in the history of modern philosophy and the development of the philosophy of language from Locke to Wittgenstein. It examines the contributions of canonical figures such as Leibniz, Mill, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine, and Davidson, as well as those of Condillac, Humboldt, Chomsky, and Derrida. Michael Losonsky argues that the philosophy of language begins with Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. He shows how the history of the philosophy of language in the modern (...) period is marked by a dichotomy between formal and pragmatic perspectives on language and that modern philosophy has not been able to integrate these two aspects of human language. Language as a human activity and language as a syntactic and semantic system remain distinct and competing focal points, although the interplay between these points of view has driven the development of the philosophy of language. (shrink)

I will argue that the cognitive-linguistic enterprise should step up its efforts to embrace the social and pragmatic dimensions of language. This claim will be derived from a survey of the premises and promise of the cognitive-linguistic approach to the study of language and be defended in more detail on logical and empirical grounds. Key elements of a usage-based emergentist socio-cognitive approach known as Entrenchment-and-Conventionalization Model (Schmid 2014, 2015) will be presented in order to demonstrate how social (...) and pragmatic aspects can be integrated and operationalized in a cognitive-linguistic framework. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Cognitive Linguistics Jahrgang: 27 Heft: 4 Seiten: 543-557.

There is a well-established social practice whereby we hold one another responsible for the things that we say. Speakers are held liable for the truth of the contents they express and they can be sanctioned and/or held to be unreliable or devious if it turns out what they say is false. In this paper chapter we argue that a better understanding of this fundamental socio-linguistic practice – of ascribing what we will term (following Borg (2019)) ‘linguistic liability’ – (...) helps to shed light on a core debate in semantics and pragmatics, concerning how and where to draw the line between different kinds of content. We suggest that attributions of linguistic liability form a heterogenous (rather than a homogenous) class and seek to show that different kinds of liability judgements are useful because they track divergent kinds of content – specifically the kinds that have come to prominence in recent theorising theorizing about the semantics/pragmatics divide. (shrink)

“One of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads, or in our heads.” Wittgenstein… aber wir sprechen das Allgemeine aus;” Hegel“Hegel is the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.” Derrida“Linguistic turn”, “pragmatic paradigm”, “Destruktion”, “deconstruction”, “condition postmoderne”, “pensiero debole” are not only philosophical labels. They are not only indices of intellectual positions which have inscribed themselves, as consequences as well as preconditions, in (...) the end of traditional metaphysics. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, Nietzsche'sGenealogy of Moralsannounces, describing the empty space which the metaphysical concepts have left; and in doing so opening up a seemingly boundless dimension for new developments of thoughts. The dilemma of these developments of modernity is that the vacuum they left, caused by their ruthless critique, cannot be refilled. So the outlook of modernity remains necessarily heterogeneous and unstable, meandering towards the colourful and fashionable-macabre extremes of postmodemity which gain from the tragic certainty of rien ne va plus the happy imperative of anything goes. But these are also ciphers of a particular philosophical-historical constellation, a work situation, in which the potencies of reason, being verhimmelt for a long time, now are going to be situated into their real contexts. Only, as Habermas puts it, “under the premises of an unexcited postmetaphysical thinking”, the once heroic concept of theory, which was meant to explain the world of human beings and their history as well as Nature out of onto-theleological principles of rationality, falls to pieces. (shrink)

This article has two aims. The first is to introduce some novel data that highlight rather surprising pragmatic abilities in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The second is to consider a possible implication of these data for an emerging empirical methodology in philosophy of language and mind. In pursuing the first aim, we expect our main audience to be clinicians and linguists interested in pragmatics. It is when we turn to methodological issues that we hope to pique the interest (...) of philosophers. Still, the methodological issue becomes pressing precisely because of the empirical finding—thus the first part is important for the philosophical readers as well. The game plan is as follows. Given our intended dual audience, we begin with background on autism and pragmatics. Some of this material will be familiar to some of our readership, but few will know all of it. (Those who do are invited to skip these sections.) We then present some results from our pilot study on a corpus of speech by people with ASD. The heart of our finding is that certain speakers with ASD, who have severe trouble with familiar pragmatic phenomena such as metaphor and conversational implicature, exhibit surprising abilities with respect to what is often called “pragmatic determinants of what is said.” We turn next to a possible implication of this finding: It seems to suggest that hitherto seemingly promising evidence from ASD about the semantics/pragmatics boundary is.. (shrink)

Contrary to some recent self-styled “linguistic pragmatists” who seek to dispense with the purportedly obsolete term “experience”. this essay attempts to show that pragmatism cannot cogently dispense with experience, understanding that term in its Deweyan sense as “culture” and not some sort of mentalistic perception or state. Focusing on Robert Brandom’s recent Perspectives on Pragmatism, I show how the very assumptions that Dewey meant to call into question with his “instrumentalist turn” in 1903 are enshrined in Brandom’s “new (...) and improved” form of pragmatism. Judged in terms of its pragmatic consequences, Brandom’s linguistic pragmatism returns to the well trodden paths and problems of analytic philosophy and not the radical approach that Dewey’s “cultural naturalism” (Dewey’s name for his philosophy) offers. The fundamental issue is not, I contend, between types of pragmatism at all but between conceptions of human nature and what a human life is. John Stuart Mill once said of Bentham that, for an empiricist, he had really very little experience, especially of human nature. I am afraid that the same judgment here is passed on those wishing to dispense with experience and somehow retain pragmatism. (shrink)

Reconstructing the philosophical project of William James, Alexis Dianda deploys a concept of experience that avoids both foundationalist epistemology and an account of the subject rooted in immediately given objects of consciousness. In doing so, Dianda rethinks the role of experience as well as the aims and resources of pragmatic philosophy.

The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what determines the content of the context? Many theorists would include among these determinants aspects of the speaker’s intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the determinants of the context never include the speaker’s intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication. (...) To illustrate an alternative approach, I present an original theory of the reference of demonstratives according to which the referent of a demonstrative is the object that adequately and best satisfies certain accessibility criteria. Although I call my thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called “pragmatics.”. (shrink)

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great (...) heuristic utility concerns the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection. (shrink)

The attempt to draw a clear distinction between Philosophy and the empirical sciences can almost be taken as the defining trait of the analytic movement in contemporary philosophical thought. The empirical science that has most frequently threatened to swallow up questions of particular interest to philosophers since the time of Descartes has been psychology. Characteristic, then, of analytic philosophy has been the rejection of what it terms psychologism, that is to say, the mistake of identifying philosophical categories with those of (...) psychology, whether introspective or behavioristic. It is clear that to launch an attack on psychologism, thus conceived, presupposes that one has a list of philosophical categories which one is able to identify as such; and this in turn presupposes an ability to sketch, at least in a general way, a distinctly philosophical account of these concepts, although a systematic account along non-psychologistic lines may be a distant and ill-defined goal. The analytic movement in philosophy has gradually moved towards the conclusion that the defining characteristic of philosophical concepts is that they are formal concepts relating to the formation and transformation rules of symbol structures called languages. Philosophy, in other words, tends to be conceived of as the formal theory of languages. From this standpoint, consequently, psychologism is conceived of as the psychological treatment of concepts which are properly understood as formal devices defining a mode of linguistic structure. (shrink)

The analysis of belief ascriptions has been a central problem in philosophy for the past one hundred years. Working within a direct reference framework, the dissertation begins with a look at several of the most influential analyses of belief ascriptions over this period of time. It is argued that they all suffer from a common defect; they ignore important contextual factors which affect how belief ascriptions are interpreted. To repair this defect it is necessary to enter the realm of pragmatics--the (...) study of linguistic acts and the contexts in which they are performed. It is argued that the information conveyed by an utterance may differ significantly from its literal content. "Information conveyed" is a purely pragmatic concept; an utterance may potentially convey different information for every one of its interpreters, even though it has only one literal content. ;Following the development of the literal content/information conveyed distinction, three recent pragmatic theories of belief ascription are examined. Counterexamples are presented to each of these in turn. Finally, a theory of belief ascription is presented which is based on the literal content/information conveyed distinction. This new theory fits all of the examples that gave the other theories trouble. (shrink)

As proposed for the emergence of modern languages, we argue that modern uses of languages (pragmatics) also evolved gradually in our species under the effects of human self‐domestication, with three key aspects involved in a complex feedback loop: (a) a reduction in reactive aggression, (b) the sophistication of language structure (with emerging grammars initially facilitating the transition from physical aggression to verbal aggression); and (c) the potentiation of pragmatic principles governing conversation, including, but not limited to, turn‐taking and (...) inferential abilities. Our core hypothesis is that the reduction in reactive aggression, one of the key factors in self‐domestication processes, enabled us to fully exploit our cognitive and interactional potential as applied to linguistic exchanges, and ultimately to evolve a specific form of communication governed by persuasive reciprocity—a trait of human conversation characterized by both competition and cooperation. In turn, both early crude forms of language, well suited for verbal aggression/insult, and later more sophisticated forms of language, well suited for persuasive reciprocity, significantly contributed to the resolution and reduction of (physical) aggression, thus having a return effect on the self‐domestication processes. Supporting evidence for our proposal, as well as grounds for further testing, comes mainly from the consideration of cognitive disorders, which typically simultaneously present abnormal features of self‐domestication (including aggressive behavior) and problems with pragmatics and social functioning. While various approaches to language evolution typically reduce it to a single factor, our approach considers language evolution as a multifactorial process, with each player acting upon the other, engaging in an intense mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Moreover, we see language evolution as a gradual process, continuous with the pre‐linguistic cognitive abilities, which were engaged in a positive feedback loop with linguistic innovations, and where gene‐culture co‐evolution and cultural niche construction were the main driving forces. (shrink)

In the past two decades or so, a number of researchers from various fields within linguistics have turned their attention to interpersonal phenomena, such as the linguistic expression of speaker opinion or evaluation , or the encoding of subjectivity in language and its diachronic development . Many linguists have offered categorizations of evaluative meaning, based on authentic discourse data, but no connection has been made with cognitive approaches to appraisal processes. This paper offers a first meta-theoretical exploration of such (...) issues. It compares dimensions of evaluation that have been identified in linguistic and cognitive studies, and also examines how psychological research into basic emotions can be related to linguistic research on affect. On the basis of these comparisons a proposal for a new classification of evaluative meanings is made. The focus of this paper is on only one aspect of the highly complex phenomenon of evaluation, namely potential evaluative dimensions, although other relevant issues will also be touched upon, including the pragmatics of evaluation. (shrink)

The article devoted to the study of elaborate correlation between language and ideology, language and culture. The author dwells on the shift in the key concept of social and humanitarian studies from a classical standard and language description to the flexibility in the language use and functioning. It is necessary to point out though that despite some similarities in correlation between language and culture on the one side and language and ideology on the other side, there are some differences in (...) the pragmatic perspectives between these categories. The discourse that has been formed under the ideological influence tends to be formal and ritualized to a greater extent than those language structures that have been developed due to culturally consistent processes i.e. connection and transmission between the generations. The author also makes an attempt to apply the paradox of globalization by A. Giddens to social linguistics. The runaway world theory introduced by a British sociologist A. Giddens singles out that the globalizing world does not become predictable as globalization predominates, but, on the contrary, social and linguistic processes become less and less manageable. The understanding of language and society becomes more complicated and demands new doctrines and innovative concepts, such as post-non-classical paradigm might conjure in. The author also takes into account the causes making standard language too flexible and changeable. The main cause of this process is an intent conditioned by certain communicative situation or by certain reasons to alter illocution of the utterances for representing identity, resulting in turn to more prestigious or more sophisticated language. (shrink)

The study of the cognitive substrates of pragmatic disorders is a relatively recent development in clinical pragmatics. This development has been ushered in by calls from researchers and clinicians on two fronts. First, it has been urged that the field of pragmatics should undergo a cognitive turn, such that a cognitive examination of pragmatic concepts is afforded equal significance to societal, philosophical and linguistic approaches to the discipline. Second, clinicians have increasingly acknowledged that it is not (...) possible to assess and treat clients with pragmatic disorders in isolation from cognitive concerns. The chapter begins with an examination of the various cognitive processes that play a role in a standard communicative exchange. From this examination the two main components of any cognitive treatment of pragmatic disorders—executive functions and theory of mind—are established. The findings of clinical studies of clients with pragmatic disorders are discussed. These studies suggest an association between cognitive processes such as theory of mind on the one hand and a range of pragmatic impairments on the other hand. Conversational data from clients with pragmatic disorders are used to illustrate these cognitive-based pragmatic impairments. Finally, three theoretical frameworks with the potential to explain the cognitive basis of pragmatic disorders are examined. (shrink)

The article discusses the concepts of communicative practical philosophy as a component of hermeneutic-linguistic-pragmatic-semiotic turn in philosophy, associated with the transition from the paradigm of subjectivity to the paradigm of intersubjectivity. In particular, the concept of “I” is considered as a factor in the internalization of intersubjectivity, because it is from the very beginning woven into the context of speech practice with the pronoun “I”, which is marked by the reflective “I am I”. The transcendental “I” is (...) the internalization of the transcendental communicative community; the classic concept of “adulthood”, associated with “the courage to be guided by one’s own mind”, is an internal manifestation of communicative competence, which in an internalized form is part of the structure of identity. The mind appears in such definitions as “discourse”, “argumentation”, “consensus”. In turn, discourse differs from other speech practices, such as conversation, talk, debate, dialogue, which also have their own internalizations, forming a complex identity structure. The article deals with the internal “maintenance of discourse” both in the process of substantiation of human knowledge and in the process of justification (legitimation) of the correctness of moral duty. In particular, this is manifested in the formulation of the categorical imperative of moral practice, which is considered in the light of the transition from the monologue dimension to the transcendental-pragmatic one. The article also shows the need to move from a monologue concept of responsibility to a communicative concept of shared responsibility. It is emphasized that such a transition is an urgent need of modern times, a sign of which is the desire to overcome the crisis civilization of “risks and threats” and the formation of a civilization of dialogue based on the argumentative understanding, for which the guiding idea is the “transcendental consensus”. (shrink)

In this article, our aim is to examine the place of “reality” in Richard Rorty’s thought in view of the important and key discussion of language in the philosophy of this thinker. In other words, we know that with the occurrence of the “linguistic turn” in the middle of the twentieth century, the relationship between language and reality has become one of the central debates of philosophy, especially analytical philosophy, and has become of particular importance. Is it language (...) that determines the external reality for us? Is knowing the world outside the mind possible only through the possibilities that language gives us? And to what extent does the structure of language affect our cognitive pattern? These are only a part of the linguistic concerns that have occupied the minds of contemporary philosophers. The main concern and problem of the present article, which has been approached using a descriptive-analytical method, is to examine the relationship between language and reality in Richard Rorty’s thought and to show how he defends the linguistic structure of having reality. Rorty, following an analytical philosophy that, in addition to detailed analyses of traditional philosophical concepts, like the concepts of truth, meaning, necessity, etc. and by changing the discussion from experience to discussion from language in the direction of pragmatizing the basic principles of positivism, believes that it is trans-lingual and trans-temporal. The common denominator that Plato found in the outside world and transferred to man in the Cartesian-Kantian tradition is sought in analytic philosophy in language, and so analytic philosophers continue to pursue the traditional philosophy project of providing a trans-historical and eternal framework for the accurate representation of the world. Rorty tries to overcome this view of analytical philosophers with a Darwinist and pragmatic view of language and under the influence of philosophers such as Wittgenstein.For Darwinists, language is a tool among other tools that gives its users the ability to better and more efficiently adapt to their environment and meet their needs. For the likes of Wittgenstein and like-minded people, despite their many and sometimes profound differences, language had an important and pivotal place with its eventual and possibility feature. Influenced by thinkers such as Wittgenstein, and in the context of his Darwinist and pragmatic approach to language, Rorty attributes certain characteristics to language that can be said to influence his whole thought. Firstly, he considers language as a tool like other tools and, therefore, considers it to have no fixed nature and identity. Given that it is not possible to leave the language and on the other hand language has a poetic and metaphorical character, the function of language cannot be a representation of reality and reality can never be available to us naked and as independent of language and descriptions. Therefore, from Rorty’s point of view, reality is a linguistic and constructed matter of language that we humans have invented in cooperation with each other and in accordance with our historical-cultural situation and needs. Of course, Rorty’s point in saying that reality is made by language is by no means that we create reality arbitrarily and as we wish; rather, what is happening is that we are responding to an external stimulus, a response of various sentence types that manifests itself as linguistic reactions. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to consider the phenomenon of philosophical “turn” in the framework of descriptive metaphilosophy. Using the example of analytical, linguis­tic, pragmatic and ontological turns, an attempt is made to highlight the characteristic fea­tures of “turns”. The author shows that the analytical turn is associated with the develop­ment of methods of philosophy, primarily with the diversification of the concept of analy­sis itself. Consideration of the linguistic turn leads to the position that (...) its characterization as a change in the subject of philosophy is not quite adequate – in fact, it is a change in the methods of philosophical analysis, which leads to the emergence of new problem areas not only in philosophy, but also in linguistics. The pragmatic turn is characterized by emphasizing the role of pragmatism in overcoming the existing opposition of analytic and continental philosophy through the use of both logical and, for example, axiological methods or the “pragmatic principle”. The ontological turn, characteristic of anthropol­ogy, the philosophy of technology, as well as for “general” philosophy, is associated with a change in the methods of analysis in the direction of solving the problem of seeing “things in a new way” and how “they really are”. The analysis in the case of an ontologi­cal turn is aimed not so much at “multiculturalism” as at “multi-naturalism”, at taking into account the active role of the subject and building the research models capable of taking this into account. The final position of the author is that according to which a “turn” is a change in research methods that leads to the formation of a new subject area and the formulation of new problems. They, in turn, stimulate the next “turn” and the de­velopment of new methods and methodologies. (shrink)

This book explores new territory at the interface between semantics and pragmatics, reassessing a number of linguistic phenomena in the light of recent advances in pragmatic theory and presenting stimulating insights by experts in linguistics and philosophy. The authors begin by reassessing the definition of four theoretical concepts: saturation, free pragmatic enrichment, completion and expansion. They go on to confront disciplines that have addressed similar issues but that have not necessarily been in close contact, and then (...) class='Hi'>turn to questions related to reported speech, modality, indirect requests and prosody. Chapters investigate lexical pragmatics and lexical semantics and other interactions involving experimental pragmatics, construction grammar, clinical linguistics, and the distinction between mental and linguistic content. The authors bridge the gap between different disciplines, subdisciplines and methodologies, supporting cross-fertilization of ideas and indicating the empirical studies that are needed to test current theoretical concepts and push the theory further. Readers will find overviews of the ways in which concepts are defined, empirical data with which they are illustrated and explorations of the theoretical frameworks in which concepts are couched. This exciting exchange of ideas has its origins in the editors’ workshop series on the theme ‘The semantics/pragmatics interface: linguistic, logical and philosophical perspectives’, held at the University of Lille 3 in 2012-13. Scholars of linguistics, logic and philosophy and those interested in the research benefits of crossing disciplines will find this work both accessible and thought-provoking, especially those with an interest in pragmatic theory or semantics. (shrink)

: In the 1980s, the analysis of presupposition projection contributed to a ‘dynamic turn’ in semantics: the classical notion of meanings as truth conditions was replaced with a dynamic notion of meanings as Context Change Potentials. We argue that this move was misguided, and we offer an alternative in which presupposition projection follows from the combination of a fully classical semantics and a new pragmatic principle, which we call Be Articulate. This principle requires that a meaning pp’ conceptualized (...) as involving a pre-condition p should be articulated as … … rather than as … pp’ …, unless the full conjunction is ruled out because the first or the second conjunct is semantically idle. In particular, … … is infelicitous - and hence … pp’ … is acceptable - if one can determine as soon as p and is uttered that no matter how the sentence ends these words could be eliminated without affecting its contextual meaning. An equivalence theorem guarantees that this condition suffices to derive Heim’s results in almost all cases. Extensions of the condition lead to several new predictions, in particular concerning some ‘symmetric readings’, as well as presupposition projection in quantified structures, which displays a complex interaction between the nature of the trigger and the monotonicity of the quantifier. (shrink)

In the second half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century, philosophy marched forward under the slogans of “turns”: the pragmatic turn, the linguistic turn, the realistic tu...

The public release of datasets on the internet by government agencies, environmental scientists, political groups and many other organizations has fostered a social practice of data visualization. The audiences have expectations of production values commensurate with their daily experience of professional visual media. At the same time, access to this data has allowed visual designers and artists to apply their skills to what was previously a field dominated by scientists and engineers. The ‘aesthetic turn’ in data visualization has sparked (...) debates between the new wave and older more scientifically grounded schools of thought on the topic. Sonification is not as well known or commonly practiced as visualization. But sound is a naturally affective, aesthetic and cultural medium. The extension of the aesthetic turn to sonification could transform this field from a scientific curiosity and engineering instrument into a popular mass medium. This paper proposes that a design approach can facilitate an aesthetic turn in sonification that integrates aesthetics and functionality by dissolving divisions between scientific and artistic methods. The first section applies the design perspective to the definition of sonification by replacing the linguistic concept of representation with non-verbal concept of functionality. The next section describes applications of the TaDa design method that raised aesthetic issues particular to sonification practice. The final section proposes a pragmatic aesthetics that distinguishes sonification from the auditory sciences and sonic arts. A design perspective may lead to a future where the general public tunes into pop sonifications for listening enjoyment as well as useful information about the world. (shrink)

Linguistic research has revealed several pathways of language change that may guide our understanding of the evolution of mental‐state attribution. In particular, it turns out that, in many languages, quotative verbs have been exapted for attributing a variety of mental states, including beliefs and intentions. In such languages, the literal translation of, “Betty said: ‘There will be war’”, may be used not only to quote Betty's words, but also to convey that she thought or intended there to be war. (...) This paper presents a model of the pragmatic shifts underlying this pathway, and proposes an evolutionary trajectory from quotation to the public practice of attributing beliefs and intentions, and thence to implicit belief/intention attribution. (shrink)

This article examines the pragmatic comprehensibility of indirect reporting. The research problem is to determine how Russian EFL learners (linguists and non-linguists) are able to turn original utterances expressing the intentions of native speakers of American English in direct speech into indirect reports to a third party. Two major issues are analyzed: adequacy of semantic content and preservation of pragmatic enrichment. The study was carried out employing the framework of Kecskes’Socio-Cognitive Approach(2008, 2010, 2014, 2017). Twelve stimulus-utterances belonging (...) to three communicative types (statements, questions, commands/requests) were video-recorded. Qualitative and quantitative analyses revealed that the participants met with some difficulties preserving the speaker’s intention while interpreting attached pragmatic enrichment and perlocutionary effect. Both cohorts of Russian EFL learners were able to preserve the semantic content relatively efficiently, but encountered substantial difficulties inferring a complex pragmatic content. (shrink)

In 1971 Jürgen Habermas delivered the Gauss Lectures at Princeton University. These pivotal lectures, entitled "Reflections on the Linguistic Foundation of Sociology," anticipate The Theory of Communicative Action and offer an excellent introduction to it. They show why Habermas considers the linguistic turn in social philosophy to be necessary and contain the first formulation of formal pragmatics, including an important discussion of truth.In these lectures and two additional essays, Habermas outlines an intersubjective approach to social theory that (...) takes the concepts of meaning and communication to be central. In doing so, he situates his project relative to other influential accounts of how meaning is constituted, in particular those of Edmund Husserl, Wilfrid Sellars, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. He examines the nature of social interaction and its connection to communication, developing a linguistic conception of convention and intentionality. He also offers an account of social and individual pathologies using the concept of systematically distorted communication. Taken together, these analyses contribute significantly to current debates in the philosophy of action and language. (shrink)

This dissertation investigates three related issues---deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and pragmatics of indirect communication---in two great traditions of Chinese philosophy and religious thought. These three issues have drawn contemporary Western thinkers' close attentions and have entailed a variety of discussions. The dissertation attempts to bring the traditions of the Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism into a postmodern focus concerning these three areas. It borrows insights, ideas and terms from contemporary and/or postmodern discourse to rediscover or reinterpret these two traditions. In (...) doing so, it carefully redefines and analyzes those ideas and terms, and places them strictly in the Daoist and Chan Buddhist contexts. It bases its philosophical investigation, its rediscovery or reinterpretation of two traditions, on the solid study and critical examination of ancient texts and history of thought. One thread running through the investigation of these three areas in the Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism is the study and exploration of different linguistic strategies, the otherness of language uses. Although there is no "linguistic turn" in the thought of the Zhuangzi and in the mainstream of Chan, linguistic strategies play an indispensable role and serve the purpose of soteriological practice. The result of this investigation shows that these two traditions are great resources for the study of these three related issues. The treatise not only allows us to understand the central teachings of the Zhuangzi and Chan anew, but also lets these two traditions speak for themselves, addressing postmodern issues from their own perspectives. The conclusion is two-fold. On the one hand, the novel interpretation of the Zhuangzi and Chan challenges many conventional understandings of these two traditions concerning three areas. It highlights certain aspects of these two traditions that we have largely neglected before. On the other hand, the articulation of Daoist and Chan Buddhist views contributes to, enriches, and throws light on contemporary Western discussions of these issues, and even invites certain criticisms of postmodern discourse. (shrink)

[[[ (Here only the chapters 3 – 8, see *** ) First I argue that the prohibition of linguistic self-reference as a solution to the antinomy problem contains a pragmatic contradiction and is thus not only too restrictive, but just inconsistent (chap.1). Furthermore, the possibilities of non-restrictive strategies for antinomy avoidance are discussed, whereby the explicit inclusion of the – pragmatically presuposed – consistency requirement proves to be the optimal strategy (chap.2). ]]] The central question here is that (...) about the actual reason for antinomic structures. It turns out to be a form of negative self-conditioning (chap.3). This makes it necessary to clarify the status of negative concepts (chap.4). The generalization of these considerations (chap.5) leads to the actual analysis of the antinomic basic structure (chap.6): Decisively for the pragmatics of the concept is that it positively owns a meaning, so that positivity is always constituted by the concept qua concept. Thus a negative concept is characterized by a fundamental ambivalence: From a semantic point of view it has negative character, in its pragmatic status as a concept, however, it has positive character. If the meaning is especially that of a negative self-reference, the ambivalence leads to the antinomic constellation of a negative self-condition – that is the crux of the matter here! The concept thus possesses the property defined by it exactly when it does not possess it and vice versa. A closer analysis shows that the function of reflective structures for the occurrence of antinomies has to be judged much more differentiated than previous opinions suggest. Not only are four forms of reflectivity to be distinguished in this context – ontic, semantic, pragmatic reflectivity, and especially the form of negative self-condition; but it is also apparent that these are intertwined with each other in a way that is difficult to be understood. The astonishing variety of relationships associated with this makes the irritation that has always emanated from the antinomy problem appear more comprehensible. In the developed pragmatic perspective furtheron parallels to the structure of self-consciousness become visible (chap.7). I conclude with considerations about the significance of the antinomic structure for the problem of dialectics, especially for the synthesis formation of mutually exclusive terms (chap.8). (shrink)

Richard J. Bernstein argues that many of the important themes in philosophy during the past 150 years are variations and developments of ideas that were prominent in the classical American pragmatists: Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. The pragmatic thinkers reject a sharp dichotomy between subject and object, mind-body dualism, the quest for certainty, and the spectator theory of knowledge. They seek to bring about a sea change in philosophy that highlights the social character (...) of human experience and normative social practices, the self-correcting nature of all inquiry, and the continuity of theory and practice. And they - especially James, Dewey, and Mead - emphasize the democratic ethical-political consequences of a pragmatic orientation. Many of the themes developed by the pragmatic thinkers were central to the work of major twentieth-century philosophers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger, but the so-called analytic/Continental split obscures this underlying continuity. Bernstein develops an alternative reading of contemporary philosophy that brings out the persistence and continuity of pragmatic themes. He explains why the discussion of pragmatism is alive, varied, and widespread"--Jacket. (shrink)

The article seeks a rapprochement between pragmatic and semantic theories of language by returning to a breaking point in the history of philosophy, the middle of the twentieth century, when these theoretical models began to evolve into distinct schools of thought. Philosophical accounts of this period explore various and intertwined dependencies between semantics and context; however, they only implicitly examine the potential of sounds and bodily gestures in bringing descriptive clarity to the modes and limits of such dependencies. The (...) article first investigates the way W. V. Quine conceptualized linguistic reference by combining behavioral models of language acquisition with more systematic explorations of syntax. It then turns to P. F. Strawson’s revisionary accounts of Kantian philosophy which reassess the silent strains of empiricism in Kant’s framework in order to identify possible grounds of reconciliation between pragmatic and semantic theories of language. Sound and gesture, two aspects that supplement language and give it an embodied feeling, are suggested as possible devices for formalizing intersections between context and semantic-oriented approaches. Poems by Wallace Stevens are used to think about the endurance of reference and how this endurance can find more compelling demonstration through an investigation of language as an embodied phenomenon. (shrink)

One of the major problems for Critical Discourse Analysts is how to move on from their insightful critical analyses to successfully ‘acting on the world in order to transform it’. This paper discusses, with detailed exemplification, some of the areas where linguists have moved beyond description to acting on and changing the world. Examples from three murder trials show how essential it is, in order to protect the rights of witnesses and defendants, to have audio records of significant interviews with (...) police officers. The article moves on to discuss the potentially serious consequences of the many communicative problems inherent in legal/lay interaction and illustrates a few of the linguist-led improvements to important texts. Finally, the article turns to the problems of using linguistic data to try to determine the geographical origin of asylum seekers. The intention of the article is to act as a call to arms to linguists; it concludes with the observation that ‘innumerable mountains remain for those with a critical linguistic perspective who would like to try to move one’. (shrink)

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as "enactive." This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence (...) show that an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. ContributorsMoshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that the search for explainable models and interpretable decisions in AI must be reformulated in terms of the broader project of offering a pragmatic and naturalistic account of understanding in AI. Intuitively, the purpose of providing an explanation of a model or a decision is to make it understandable to its stakeholders. But without a previous grasp of what it means to say that an agent understands a model or a decision, the explanatory strategies (...) will lack a well-defined goal. Aside from providing a clearer objective for XAI, focusing on understanding also allows us to relax the factivity condition on explanation, which is impossible to fulfill in many machine learning models, and to focus instead on the pragmatic conditions that determine the best fit between a model and the methods and devices deployed to understand it. After an examination of the different types of understanding discussed in the philosophical and psychological literature, I conclude that interpretative or approximation models not only provide the best way to achieve the objectual understanding of a machine learning model, but are also a necessary condition to achieve post hoc interpretability. This conclusion is partly based on the shortcomings of the purely functionalist approach to post hoc interpretability that seems to be predominant in most recent literature. (shrink)