Evidentialism is the view that facts about whether or not an agent is justified in having a particular belief are entirely determined by facts about the agent’s evidence; the agent’s practical needs and interests are irrelevant. I examine an array of arguments against evidentialism (by Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, David Owens, and others), and demonstrate how their force is affected when we take into account the relation between degrees of belief and outright belief. Once we are sensitive to one of (...) the factors that secure thresholds for outright believing (namely, outright believing that p in a given circumstance requires, at the minimum, that one’s degree of belief that p is high enough for one to be willing to act as if p in the circumstances), we see how pragmatic considerations can be relevant to facts about whether or not an agent is justified in believing that p—but largely as a consequence of the pragmatic constraints on outright believing. (shrink)

More than 50 years ago, Bongard introduced 100 visual concept learning problems as a challenge for artificial vision systems. These problems are now known as Bongard problems. Although they are well known in cognitive science and artificial intelligence, only very little progress has been made toward building systems that can solve a substantial subset of them. In the system presented here, visual features are extracted through image processing and then translated into a symbolic visual vocabulary. We introduce a formal language (...) that allows representing compositional visual concepts based on this vocabulary. Using this language and Bayesian inference, concepts can be induced from the examples that are provided in each problem. We find a reasonable agreement between the concepts with high posterior probability and the solutions formulated by Bongard himself for a subset of 35 problems. While this approach is far from solving Bongard problems like humans, it does considerably better than previous approaches. We discuss the issues we encountered while developing this system and their continuing relevance for understanding visual cognition. For instance, contrary to other concept learning problems, the examples are not random in Bongard problems; instead they are carefully chosen to ensure that the concept can be induced, and we found it helpful to take the resulting pragmatic constraints into account. (shrink)

Citing some recent experimental findings, I argue for the surprising claim that in some cases the less time you have the more you know. More specifically, I present some evidence to suggest that our ordinary knowledge ascriptions are sometimes sensitive to facts about an epistemic subject's truth-irrelevant time constraints such that less is more. If knowledge ascriptions are sensitive in this manner, then this is some evidence of pragmatic encroachment. Along the way, I consider comments made by Jonathan Schaffer (...) and Jennifer Nagel to construe a purist contextualist and a strict invariantist explanation of the data respectively, before giving reasons to resist them in favor of an account that indicates pragmatic encroachment. If successful, this may suggest a new way to argue for the controversial thesis that there is pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. (shrink)

My focus is on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on his beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be exposed to a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent himself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of this kind (...) are synchronic Dutch Books, for the standard probability axioms, diachronic Dutch Books, for the more controversial principles of reflection and conditionalization, and Money Pumps, for the transitivity requirement on preferences. It is suggested that the proposed exploitation set-ups share a common feature. If the violator of a given constraint is logically and mathematically competent, she can be exploited only if she is disunified in his decision-making, i.e., only if she makes decisions on various issues she confronts separately rather than jointly. In other words, exploitation is possible only if the decision problem has been framed in a certain way. Unification in decision making is relatively unproblematic in synchronic contexts, but it may be quite costly and inconvenient diachronically, especially when the issues under consideration are widely spread over time. On my view, therefore, pragmatic arguments should be seen as delivering conditional recommendations: If you want to afford disunification, then you’d better satisfy these constraints. The arguments of this kind fail to establish the inherent rationality of the constraints under consideration. Isaac Levis view of the status of pragmatic arguments is diametrically opposed to mine. According to him, only synchronic pragmatic arguments are valid. The diachronic ones, he argues, lack any validity at all. This line of reasoning is questioned in my paper. (shrink)

My focus is on pragmatic arguments for various rationality constraints on a decision maker’s state of mind: on his beliefs or preferences. An argument of this kind purports to show that a violator of a given constraint can be exposed to a decision problem in which she will act to her guaranteed disadvantage. Dramatically put, she can be exploited by a clever bookie who doesn’t know more than the agent himself. Examples of pragmatic arguments of this kind (...) are synchronic Dutch Books, for the standard probability axioms, diachronic Dutch Books, for the more controversial principles of reflection and conditionalization, and Money Pumps, for the transitivity requirement on preferences. It is suggested that the proposed exploitation set-ups share a common feature. If the violator of a given constraint is logically and mathematically competent, she can be exploited only if she is disunified in his decision-making, i.e., only if she makes decisions on various issues she confronts separately rather than jointly. In other words, exploitation is possible only if the decision problem has been framed in a certain way. Unification in decision making is relatively unproblematic in synchronic contexts, but it may be quite costly and inconvenient diachronically, especially when the issues under consideration are widely spread over time. On my view, therefore, pragmatic arguments should be seen as delivering conditional recommendations: If you want to afford disunification, then you’d better satisfy these constraints. The arguments of this kind fail to establish the inherent rationality of the constraints under consideration. Isaac Levis view of the status of pragmatic arguments is diametrically opposed to mine. According to him, only synchronic pragmatic arguments are valid. The diachronic ones, he argues, lack any validity at all. This line of reasoning is questioned in my paper. (shrink)

Abstract: An indirect report typically takes the form of a speaker using the locution “said that” to report an earlier utterance. In what follows, I introduce the principal philosophical and pragmatic points of interest in the study of indirect reports, including the extent to which context sensitivity affects the content of an indirect report, the constraints on the substitution of co-referential terms in reports, the extent of felicitous paraphrase and translation, the way in which indirect reports are opaque, and (...) the use of indirect reports as pragmatic vehicles for other speech acts such as humor, insult, or irony. Throughout I develop several positions: (i) that a semantic analysis of indirect reports is insufficient, (ii) that the distinction between direct and indirect reports is not clear and that indirect reports are the predominate way of reporting while direct reports may be a para-linguistic variation on them, (iii) that most questions about the semantics and pragmatics of indirect reports will rely on a full understanding of the nature of what is reported and how it gets reported, (iv) that an analysis of reporting requires the pragmatic tools of metarepresentation and a social, inter-personal understanding of relevance and shared knowledge. (shrink)

I argue that the offense generation pattern of slurring terms parallels that of impoliteness behaviors, and is best explained by appeal to similar purely pragmatic mechanisms. In choosing to use a slurring term rather than its neutral counterpart, the speaker signals that she endorses the term. Such an endorsement warrants offense, and consequently slurs generate offense whenever a speaker's use demonstrates a contrastive preference for the slurring term. Since this explanation comes at low theoretical cost and imposes few constraints (...) on an account of the semantics of slurs, this suggests that we should not require semantic accounts to provide an independent explanation of the offense profile. (shrink)

Life scientists increasingly rely upon abstraction-based modeling and reasoning strategies for understanding biological phenomena. We introduce the notion of constraint-based reasoning as a fruitful tool for conceptualizing some of these developments. One important role of mathematical abstractions is to impose formal constraints on a search space for possible hypotheses and thereby guide the search for plausible causal models. Formal constraints are, however, not only tools for biological explanations but can be explanatory by virtue of clarifying general dependency-relations and patterning (...) between functions and structures. We describe such situations as constraint-based explanations and argue that these differ from mechanistic strategies in important respects. While mechanistic explanations emphasize change-relating causal features, constraint-based explanations emphasize formal dependencies and generic organizational features that are relatively independent of lower-level changes in causal details. Our distinction between mechanistic and constraint-based explanations is pragmatically motivated by the wish to understand scientific practice. We contend that delineating the affordances and assumptions of different explanatory questions and strategies helps to clarify tensions between diverging scientific practices and the innovative potentials in their combination. Moreover, we show how constraint-based explanation integrates several features shared by otherwise different philosophical accounts of abstract explanatory strategies in biology. (shrink)

I argue that fallibilism, single-premise epistemic closure, and one formulation of the “knowledge-action principle” are inconsistent. I will consider a possible way to avoid this incompatibility, by advocating a pragmatic constraint on belief in general, rather than just knowledge. But I will conclude that this is not a promising option for defusing the problem. I do not argue here for any one way of resolving the inconsistency.

The roles of linguistic, cognitive, and social-pragmatic processes in word learning are well established. If statistical mechanisms also contribute to word learning, they must interact with these processes; however, there exists little evidence for such mechanistic synergy. Adults use co-occurrence statistics to encode speech–object pairings with detailed sensitivity in stochastic learning environments (Vouloumanos, 2008). Here, we replicate this statistical work with nonspeech sounds and compare the results with the previous speech studies to examine whether exclusion constraints contribute equally to (...) the statistical learning of speech–object and nonspeech–object associations. In environments in which performance could benefit from exclusion, we find a learning advantage for speech over nonspeech, revealing an interaction between statistical and exclusion processes in associative word learning. (shrink)

We present a minimal pragmatic restriction on the interpretation of the weights in the “Equal Weight View” regarding peer disagreement and show that the view cannot respect it. Based on this result we argue against the view. The restriction is the following one: if an agent, $$\hbox {i}$$ i, assigns an equal or higher weight to another agent, $$\hbox {j}$$ j,, he must be willing—in exchange for a positive and certain payment—to accept an offer to let a completely rational (...) and sympathetic $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him whether to accept a bet with positive expected utility. If $$\hbox {i}$$ i assigns a lower weight to $$\hbox {j}$$ j than to himself, he must not be willing to pay any positive price for letting $$\hbox {j}$$ j choose for him. Respecting the constraint entails, we show, that the impact of disagreement on one’s degree of belief is not independent of what the disagreement is discovered to be. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the processing of the implicature associated with some using a “gumball paradigm.” On each trial, participants saw an image of a gumball machine with an upper chamber with 13 gumballs and an empty lower chamber. Gumballs then dropped to the lower chamber and participants evaluated statements, such as “You got some of the gumballs.” Experiment 1 established that some is less natural for reference to small sets and unpartitioned sets compared to intermediate sets. Partitive some of was (...) less natural than simple some when used with the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 2, including exact number descriptions lowered naturalness ratings for some with small sets but not for intermediate size sets and the unpartitioned set. In Experiment 3, the naturalness ratings from Experiment 2 predicted response times. The results are interpreted as evidence for a Constraint-Based account of scalar implicature processing and against both two-stage, Literal-First models and pragmatic Default models. (shrink)

The quotational theory of free indirect discourse postulates that pronouns and tenses are systematically unquoted. But where does this unquotation come from? Based on cases of apparent unquotation in direct discourse constructions (including data from Kwaza speakers, Catalan signers, and Dutch children), I suggest a general pragmatic answer: unquotation is essentially a way to resolve a conflict that arises between two opposing constraints. On the one hand, the reporter wants to use indexicals that refer directly to the most salient (...) speech act participants and their surroundings (Attraction). On the other hand, the semantics of direct discourse (formalized here in terms of event modification) entails the reproduction of referring expressions from the original utterance being reported (Verbatim). Unquotation (formalized here also in terms of event modification), allows the reporter to avoid potential conflicts between these constraints. Unquotation in free indirect discourse then comes out as a special case, where the salient source of attraction is the story protagonist and her actions, rather than the reporting narrator and his here and now. (shrink)

In this paper, we offer a novel analysis of presuppositions, paying particular attention to the interaction between the knowledge resources that are required to The analysis has two main features. First, we capture an analogy between presuppositions, anaphora and scope ambiguity (cf. van der Sandt 1992), by utilizing semantic under-specification (c£ Reyle 1993). Second, resolving this underspecification requires reasoning about how the presupposition is rhetorically connected to the discourse context. This has several consequences. First, since pragmatic information plays a (...) role in computing the rhetorical relation, it also constrains the interpretation of presuppositions. Our account therefore provides a formal framework for analysing problematic data, which require pragmatic reasoning. Second, binding presuppositions to the context via rhetorical links replaces accommodating them, in the sense of adding them to the context (cf. Lewis 1979). The treatment of presupposition is thus generalized and integrated into the discourse update procedure. We formalize this approach in SDRT (Asher 1993; Lascarides & Asher 1993), and demonstrate that it provides a rich framework for interpreting presuppositions, where semantic and pragmatic constraints are integrated. (shrink)

In order to investigate whether addressees can make immediate use of speaker‐based constraints during reference resolution, participant addressees' eye movements were monitored as they helped a confederate cook follow a recipe. Objects were located in the helper's area, which the cook could not reach, and the cook's area, which both could reach. Critical referring expressions matched one object (helper's area) or two objects (helper's and cook's areas), and were produced when the cook's hands were empty or full, which defined the (...) cook's reaching ability constraints. Helper's first and total fixations showed that they restricted their domain of interpretation to their own objects when the cook's hands were empty, and widened it to include the cook's objects only when the cook's hands were full. These results demonstrate that addressees can quickly take into account task‐relevant constraints to restrict their referential domain to referents that are plausible given the speaker's goals and constraints. (shrink)

The pragmatic turn away from epistemology could mean a number of things for the definition of the future of political theory. First, political liberalism would mark a distinct departure from comprehensive liberalism that is based solely on epistemological justification of fundamental liberal notions. Second, the pragmatic turn would cause Rawls to modify his long-time emphasis on constructivism, moving from Kantian constructivism to political constructivism, and implicitly adopting more substantive approach. Third, the fact of pluralism would radically open up (...) the question of the foundation for consensus, which would lead to an emphasis on constitutionalism. Fourth, this move, innovative as it was, would lead to the establishment of an association between constitutional interpretation and public reason. Finally, this set of moves associated with the pragmatic turn would essentially set up a series of constraints when it comes to evaluating public reason from an international perspective. (shrink)

This paper provides evidence for a contrastive account of explanation that is motivated by pragmatic theories that recognize the contribution that context makes to the interpretation of a prompt for explanation. This study replicates the primary findings of previous work in explanation-based category learning, extending that work by illustrating the critical role of the context in this type of learning. Participants interacted with items from two categories either by describing the items or explaining their category membership. We manipulated the (...) feature overlap between the categories and examined both the explanations generated and acquired knowledge of the categories. Explanations for membership in a given category were influenced by the unprompted contrast category, indicating an important role for contrastive processing in the generation of explanations. The influence of the contrast category was similarly seen in the transfer performance of the participants. (shrink)

For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists--Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey--and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, (...) anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Appendix: Necessary Truths.

In this paper I argue against the account Soames offers in Beyond Rigidity of the semantics and pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. I defend a particular constraint for identifying semantic content of phrases based on conditions for semantic competence, and argue that failure of substitutivity is an essential component of our competence conditions with propositional attitude predicates. Given that Soames's account makes no room for this, I conclude that he does not offer an adequate explanation of propositional attitude reports. (...) /// En este trabajo argumento contra la explicación de la semántica y la pragmática de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales que Soames ofrece en Beyond Rigidity. Defiendo una restricción para la identificatión del contenido semántico de las frases de un lenguaje basada en las condiciones de competencia semántica, y argumento que la falla de sustitutividad es un componente esencial de nuestras condiciones de competencia en los predicados de actitudes proposicionales. Dado que la explicación de Soames no respeta esta conditión, concluyo que no es una explicación adecuada de las adscripciones de actitudes proposicionales. (shrink)

The importance of intention reading for communication has already been emphasized many<br>years ago by Paul Grice. More recently, the rich debate on “theory of mind” has convinced many<br>that intention reading may in fact play a key role also in current, cognitively oriented theories of<br>pragmatics: Relevance Th eory is a case in point. On a close analysis, however, it is far from clear<br>that RT may really accommodate the idea that intention reading drives comprehension. Here<br>I examine RT’s diffi culties with that idea, (...) and propose a framework where intention reading is<br>actually assigned a signifi cant role. Th is framework is compatible with RT’s account of a unifi ed,<br>automatic mechanism of interpretation in lexical pragmatics, to the extent that the account<br>shares many features of associative and constraint-based explanations of other linguistic phenomena.<br>In fact, my suggestion is that our sensitivity to others’ intentions depends crucially on the<br>availability of specifi c patterns of intentional behaviour grounded in social regularities. In other<br>words, intention reading would be just a case, though a very special one, of pattern recognition. (shrink)

Trust should be able to explain cooperation, and its failure should help explain the emergence of cooperation-enabling institutions. This proposed methodological constraint on theorizing about trust, when satisfied, can then be used to differentiate theories of trust with some being able to explain cooperation more generally and effectively than others. Unrestricted views of trust, which take trust to be no more than the disposition to rely on others, fare well compared to restrictive views, which require the trusting person to (...) have some further attitude in addition to this disposition. The same methodological constraint also favours some restrictive views over others. (shrink)

This paper describes a theory that explains both the creativity and the efficiency of people's conceptual combination. In the constraint theory, conceptual combination is controlled by three constraints of diagnosticity, plausibility, and informativeness. The constraints derive from the pragmatics of communication as applied to compound phrases. The creativity of combination arises because the constraints can be satisfied in many different ways. The constraint theory yields an algorithmic model of the efficiency of combination. The C3 model admits the full (...) creativity of combination and yet efficiently settles on the best interpretation for a given phrase. The constraint theory explains many empirical regularities in conceptual combination, and makes various empirically verified predictions. In computer simulations of compound phrase interpretation, the C3 model has produced results in general agreement with people's responses to the same phrases. (shrink)

The complex characteristics of lexical blending have long troubled mainstream word formation research to the extent that it has typically been considered a peripheral issue in linguistics. In recent years this has begun to change, and there is currently a growing body of evidence uncovering the intriguing nature of this word formation process. In the present study, underlying principles and usage-based aspects of lexical blends were examined. Analyses of derivatives of three matrix words,republican, liberal, andvegetarian, revealed the impact of three (...) cognitive constraints on the use of lexical blends: schema transfer effects, neighborhood effects, and effects of the influence from morphological lexicalization. The first constraint fueled blend formation, while the other two displayed a hampering effect on the use of lexical blending. Furthermore, a study of the word class distribution in the datasets showed that there were significant differences in the grammar of lexical blending and compounding, respectively. (shrink)

Paul Grice’s account of the nature of intentional communication has often been supposed to be cognitively too complex to work as an account of the communicative interactions of pre-verbal children. This chapter is a (fairly uncritical) review of a number of responses to this challenge that others have developed. I discuss work on Relevance Theory (by Sperber and Wilson), Pedagogy Theory (by Gergely and Csibra), and Expressive Communication (by Green and Bar-On). I also discuss my own response to the challenge (...) of Gricean communication. (shrink)

The world’s diverse written numeral systems are affected by human cognition; in turn, written numeral systems affect mathematical cognition in social environments. The present study investigates the constraints on graphic numerical notation, treating it neither as a byproduct of lexical numeration, nor a mere adjunct to writing, but as a specific written modality with its own cognitive properties. Constraints do not refute the notion of infinite cultural variability; rather, they recognize the infinity of variability within defined limits, thus transcending the (...) universalist/particularist dichotomy. In place of strictly innatist perspectives on mathematical cognition, a model is proposed that invokes domain-specific and notationally-specific constraints to explain patterns in numerical notations. The analysis of exceptions to cross-cultural generalizations makes the study of near-universals highly productive theoretically. The cross-cultural study of patterns in written numbers thus provides a rich complement to the cognitive analysis of writing systems. (shrink)

The world’s diverse written numeral systems are affected by human cognition; in turn, written numeral systems affect mathematical cognition in social environments. The present study investigates the constraints on graphic numerical notation, treating it neither as a byproduct of lexical numeration, nor a mere adjunct to writing, but as a specific written modality with its own cognitive properties. Constraints do not refute the notion of infinite cultural variability; rather, they recognize the infinity of variability within defined limits, thus transcending the (...) universalist/particularist dichotomy. In place of strictly innatist perspectives on mathematical cognition, a model is proposed that invokes domain-specific and notationally-specific constraints to explain patterns in numerical notations. The analysis of exceptions to cross-cultural generalizations makes the study of near-universals highly productive theoretically. The cross-cultural study of patterns in written numbers thus provides a rich complement to the cognitive analysis of writing systems. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these clauses introduce (...) a proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent. (shrink)

We agree with Heintz & Scott-Phillips that pragmatics does not supplement, but is prior to and underpins, language. Indeed, human non-linguistic communication is astonishingly rich, flexible, and subtle, as we illustrate through the game of charades, where people improvise communicative signals when linguistic channels are blocked. The route from non-linguistic charade-like communication to combinatorial language involves (1) local processes of conventionalization and grammaticalization and (2) spontaneous order arising from mutual constraints between different communicative signals.

A framework for pragmatic analysis is proposed which treats discourse as a game, with context as a scoreboard organized around the questions under discussion by the interlocutors. The framework is intended to be coordinated with a dynamic compositional semantics. Accordingly, the context of utterance is modeled as a tuple of different types of information, and the questions therein — modeled, as is usual in formal semantics, as alternative sets of propositions — constrain the felicitous flow of discourse. A requirement (...) of Relevance is satisfied by an utterance (whether an assertion, a question or a suggestion) iff it addresses the question under discussion. Finally, it is argued that the prosodic focus of an utterance canonically serves to reflect the question under discussion (at least in English), placing additional constraints on felicity in context. (shrink)

Migration often causes what I refer to in this paper as ‘anti-immigration backlashes’ in receiving countries. Such reactions have substantial costs in terms of the undermining of national solidarity and the diffusion of political distrust. In short, anti-immigration backlashes can threaten the social and political stability of receiving countries. Do such risks constitute a reason against permissive immigration policies which are otherwise desirable? I argue that a positive answer may depend on a skeptical view based on the alleged constraints that (...) certain political facts - especially facts about human nature - pose on political intervention. This view does not stand conceptual and empirical scrutiny in the case of anti-immigration backlashes, where feasibility comes in degree. Yet focusing on the recalcitrance to change of these facts is practically important when devising action plans. This pragmatic core of the skeptical view yields a gradualist and naturalistic way of thinking about constraints in political theorising about migration, and elsewhere. (shrink)

As the accompanying articles in the Special Issue on Semiotic Scaffolding will attest, my colleagues in biosemiotics have done an exemplary job in showing us how to think about the critically generative role that semiotic scaffolding plays “vertically” – i.e., in evolutionary and developmental terms – by “allowing access to the upper floors” of biological complexity, cognition and evolution.In addition to such diachronic considerations of semiotic scaffolding, I wish to offer here a consideration of semiotic scaffolding’s synchronic power, as well (...) – and in particular the ability that it can afford its users to access new and other sign relations “horizontally” as a function of the way that multiple semiotically scaffolded relations intertwine to result in a “definite semantic topology that determines the ways that symbols modify each other’s referential functions in different combinations”.Taking up, in turn, Terrence Deacon’s later challenge that what the sciences of cognition – and biology more generally – needs to “come to grips with [is] the process of semiosis; the dynamic of interpretive activity by which semiotic relationships emerge from other semiotic relationships [as] intrinsically dynamic phases in a generative process”, I attempt here to show how Deacon’s own Peirce-inspired matrix of referential sign relations as presented in The Symbolic Species, when viewed as a semiotic scaffold of interactional constraints and possibility biases, provides the key to understanding the essentially thirdness-manifesting nature of symbol reference, formation and growth. (shrink)

Do AI programs just make it quicker and easier for humans to do what they can do already, or can the range of do-able things be extended? This paper suggests that cognitively-oriented technology can make it possible for humans to construct and carry out mental operations, which were previously impossible. Probable constraints upon possible human mental operations are identified and the impact of cognitive technology upon them is evaluated. It is argued that information technology functions as a cognitive prosthetic enhancing (...) human intelligence and planning capabilities. Boundaries and constraints which Kant, Whorf, and many post-modernist theorists have seen as intrinsic to human cognition now cease to apply. (shrink)

This pragmatic study addresses the question of the plural realities that emerge from perception, based on an empirical analysis of the tasting activity of wine amateurs and olfactory experts. Though they share the same requirement of rooting taste in the product under scrutiny, they also significantly differ regarding the constraints with which their tasting results have to comply: repeatability for experts’ tasting results, and activity contiunuation for amateurs. Both therefore foster the emergence of two contrasting realities: a stabilized one (...) for experts; an ‘un-stabilized’ one for amateurs. Both happen to fit with the ‘fiction’ and the ‘reference’ modes of existence of Latour’s inventory, which extends and relaunches the analysis of the coexistence of activities initiated by the works on ‘boundary objects’ some decades ago. Finally, the notion of taste is reinterpreted as a translation operator between tasting realities. (shrink)

Teaching pragmatism effectively in a college setting is not easy. Institutions of higher learning are typically resistant to the application of pragmatic methods in the classroom. Teachers of pragmatism themselves may not be fully aware of the intellectualistic influences and constraints on their own pedagogy. This report of experiments in applying pragmatic pedagogy to character development may inspire teachers of pragmatism to develop further their own methods for teaching pragmatism more pragmatically. Character educators may see pragmatism as an (...) effective method for a new and powerful approach to the cultivation of character in the classroom. (shrink)

How to model meaning processes (semiosis) in artificial semiotic systems? Once all computer simulation becomes tantamount to theoretical simulation, involving epistemological metaphors of world versions, the selection and choice of models will dramatically compromise the nature of all work involving simulation. According to the pragmatic Peircean based approach, semiosis is an interpreter-dependent process that cannot be dissociated from the notion of a situated (and actively distributed) communicational agent. Our approach centers on the consideration of relevant properties and aspects of (...) Peirce’s pragmatic concept of semiotics. Upon developing this approach, we have no pretensions of our being able to present an exhaustive analysis of the differences between Peirce and other theoretical positions. Nevertheless, our contribution will serve to demonstrate how theorists contribute toward revealing certain fundamental ‘semiotic constraints’ that will be of interest and importance. (shrink)

The French molecular biologist François Jacob outlined a theory of evolution as tinkering. From a methodological point of view, his approach can be seen as a biologic specification of the relation between laws, describing coherently the dynamics of a system, and contingent boundary conditions on this dynamics. From a semiotic perspective, tinkering is a pragmatic concept well-known from the information-theoretic anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss. In idealized contrast to an engineer, the tinkerer has to accept the concrete restrictions on his (...) material resources as only gradually changeable constraints on his projects. Jacobian biopragmatics examines evolution as a biologic analogue to human tinkering devoid of any projecting subjectivity. To validate this analogy, four basic principles concerning main formal aspects of evolutionary objects, agents, histories, and consistency criteria are proposed. (shrink)

In his new book, Logical Form, Andrea Iacona distinguishes between two different roles that have been ascribed to the notion of logical form: the logical role and the semantic role. These two roles entail a bifurcation of the notion of logical form. Both notions of logical form, according to Iacona, are descriptive, having to do with different features of natural language sentences. I agree that the notion of logical form bifurcates, but not that the logical role is merely descriptive. In (...) this paper, I focus on formalization, a process by which logical form, on its logical role, is attributed to natural language sentences. According to some, formalization is a form of explication, and it involves normative, pragmatic, as well as creative aspects. I present a view by which formalization involves explicit commitments on behalf of a reasoner or an interpreter, which serve the normative grounds for the evaluation of a given text. In previous work, I proposed the framework of semantic constraints for the explication of logical consequence. Here, I extend the framework to include formalization constraints. The various constraints then serve the role of commitments. I discuss specific issues raised by Iacona concerning univocality, co-reference and equivocation, and I show how our views on these matters diverge as a result of our different starting assumptions. (shrink)

Do bioethicists need yet another theoretical approach with which to frame their disagreements? Many pragmatists contend that pragmatism, unlike its liberal and utilitarian counterparts, is uniquely commendable in (a) beginning from our lived experiences and (b) locating those experiences amid our social relations. In place of an " principlism," pragmatism offers a practical "bedside-bioethic"; in lieu of "autonomy run amuk," pragmatism proposes an ethic rooted in our communal resources. To date, however, efforts to develop such a bioethic have been stymied (...) by pragmatists' own abstract theoretical commitments, commitments that prevent them, most directly, from beginning with the lived experiences and communal resources of those who hold theological commitments. This self-imposed methodological constraint, I argue, has needlessly thwarted pragmatism's most striking methodological promise: its potential to cultivate productive debates among secular and theologically-informed participants. (shrink)

In non-causal explanations, some non-causal facts (such as mathematical, modal or metaphysical) are used to explain some physical facts. However, precisely because these explanations abstract away from causal facts, they face two challenges: 1) it is not clear why would one rather than the other non-causal explanantia be relevant for the explanandum; and 2) why would standing in a particular explanatory relation (e.g., “counterfactual dependence”, “constraint”, “entailment”, “constitution”, “grounding”, and so on), and not in some other, be explanatory. I (...) develop an explanatory relevance account which is based on erotetic constraints and show how it addresses these two challenges. (shrink)

The Light Subject Constraint in Spoken Spanish The purpose of this study is to explore Chafe's hypothesis that grammatical subjects obey the light subject constraint. The data consists of six half-an-hour semiformal interviews with Caracas native speakers recorded in 1987. Chafe's hypothesis is based on the claim that in any given clause one of the referents receives the unique and special status of grammatical subject. Subjects show two types of restrictions: i) from the information load perspective, they tend (...) to code given or accessible rather than new information; and ii) from a referential viewpoint, they can have three degrees of importance: primary, secondary or trivial. Information load and referential importance combined constitute the LSC: Chafe's findings prove that in English subjects tend, on the one hand, to be given or accessible and, on the other, of primary or secondary importance. Heavy subjects, on the contrary, tend to be of trivial importance. Broderick 1999 confirms the LSC's existence in a conversational English corpus. All subjects in the corpus have been coded according to information load and referential importance. The results of the analysis show that spoken Spanish also conforms to LSC. (shrink)

This book presents a new approach to semantics based on Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz’s Directival Theory of Meaning, which in effect reduces semantics of the analysed language to the combination of its syntax and pragmatics. The author argues that the DTM was forgotten because for many years philosophers didn’t have conceptual tools to appreciate its innovative nature, and that the theory was far ahead of its time. The book shows how a redesigned and modernised version of the DTM can deliver a new (...) solution to the problem of defining linguistic meaning and that the theory can be understood as a new type of functional role semantics. The defining feature of the DTM is that it presents meaning as a product of constraints on the usage of words. According to the DTM meaning is not use, but the avoidance of misuse. Readers will see how the DTM was shelved for reasons that we don’t find so dramatic anymore, and how it contains enough original ideas and solutions to warrant developing it into a full-blown contemporary account. It is shown how many of the underlying ideas of the theory have been embraced later by philosophers and treated simply as brute facts about natural languages or even as new philosophical discoveries. Philosophers of language and researchers with an interest in how languages and the mind work will find this book a fascinating read. (shrink)

This article discusses pragmatic aspects of our interpretation of intensional constructions like questions and prepositional attitude reports. In the first part, it argues that our evaluation of these constructions may vary relative to the identification methods operative in the context of use. This insight is then given a precise formalization in a possible world semantics. In the second part, an account of actual evaluations of questions and attitudes is proposed in the framework of bi-directional optimality theory. Pragmatic meaning (...) selections are explained as the result of specific rankings of potentially conflicting generation and interpretation constraints. (shrink)