Schutz’s references to literature and arts in his theoretical works are manifold. But literature and theory are both a certain kind of a finite province of meaning, that means they are not easily accessible from the paramount reality of everyday life. Now there is another kind of referring to literature: metaphorizing it. Using it, as may be said with Lakoff and Johnson, to understand and to experience one kind of thing in terms of another. Literally metapherein means (...) “to carry over”. Metaphorizing in this view is then a specific kind of border-crossing between different provinces of meaning. That poses two questions: 1. What means finiteness of those provinces of meaning, what kind of border crossings are possible? What is the ground for metaphorizing meaning? 2. Could this concept used for founding a theory of the constitution of the societal and of society, that overcomes the dichotomy of structure/agency? These questions will be answered with one example in view: Schutz’ report to Kaufmann of his first visit of Husserl describing his experience as feeling like Wilhelm Meister at the Society of the Tower. In a first step this metaphor is presented together with some crumbs of metaphor theory. In a second step these crumbs will be connected to Husserl’s concept of experience. After developing a short overview over Schutz’ “finite provinces of meaning,” the relation of experience, metaphors to the intersubjectivity of these provinces in their dependence from writing and printing is discussed. (shrink)

This essay describes some of the basic pragmatic tendencies at work in the world of working and then shows how the finite provinces of meaning of theoretical contemplation and literature act against those pragmatic tendencies. This analysis prepares the way to see how the religious province of meaning in a similar but also distinctive way acts back against these pragmatic tendencies. These three finite provinces of meaning make it possible to see the world from another (...) center of orientation than that of the ego agens and its proclivity to bring transcendences within reach, thereby freeing oneself to a degree from the fundamental anxiety and revealing the uniqueness of oneself and others, who are no longer subjected to working’s pragmatic imperatives. (shrink)

"The thought of Immanuel Kant has had incalculable - and, many would say, negative - impact on the modern estimation of religion, religious belief, and religious knowledge. Yet, Davidovich argues in the strikingly original interpretation, the chief lines and import of Kant's work on religion have been crippingly misunderstood." "Davidovich radically refigures Kant scholarship by focusing decisively on his Third Critique, long thought his weakest, where she finds Kant confronting the results of his strong distinction between theoretical and practical (...) reason. There he attempts a comprehensive theory of reflective judgment, in which contemplative thought of a moral designer of the universe is a principle that overcomes the bifurcation of scientific (rational) and moral (practical) activities." "Moreover, this specifically religious consciousness, which harmonizes the lawfulness of nature with the purposiveness of freedom, is further developed, Davidovich maintains, by Rudolf Otto's and Paul Tillich's influential theories of religion. Today it can safeguard the status of religion and a normative science of religion." "Davidovich's work is an outstanding contribution, breaking new ground in both Kantian scholarship and the theory of religion."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved. (shrink)

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

Based on the work of Alfred Schutz, this article develops a theory of intersubjectivity—one of the basic building blocks of social experience—and shows how such a theory can be empirically leveraged in sociological work. Complementing the interactionist and ethnomethodological emphasis on the situated production of intersubjectivity, this paper revisits the basic theoretical assumptions undergirding this theory. Schutz tied intersubjectivity to the way people experience the world of everyday life: a world that he held as distinct from other provinces of (...) meaning, such as religious experience, humor, or scientific reasoning. However, as this article shows, such neat distinctions are problematic for both empirical and theoretical reasons: The cognitive styles that define different provinces of meaning often bleed into one another; people often inhabit multiple provinces of meaning simultaneously. Intersubjectivity may thus be simultaneously anchored in multiple worlds, opening a host of empirical research questions: not only about how intersubjectivity is done in interaction, but about how different kinds of intersubjective experiences are constructed, how multi-layered they are, as well as opening up questions about possible asymmetries in the experiences of intersubjectivity. (shrink)

This essay considers social science as a finite province of meaning. It is argued that teasing out common-sense meanings from social scientific conceptions is difficult because the meanings of scientific concepts are often veiled in life-worldly taken-for-grantedness. If social scientists have successfully created a scientific province of meaning, attempts to communicate findings outside of this reduced sphere of science should be somewhat problematic.

In this paper I offer a proof-theoretic defence of meaning-invariant logical pluralism. I argue that there is a relation of co-determination between the operational and structural aspects of a logic. As a result, some features of the consequence relation are induced by the connectives. I propose that a connective is defined by those rules which are conservative and unique, while at the same time expressing only connective-induced structural information. This is the key to stabilizing the meaning of the (...) connectives across multiple determinations of the consequence relation. (shrink)

​This book illustrates how non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning emancipate one from pragmatic everyday pressures. Barber portrays everyday life originally, as including the interplay between intrinsic and imposed relevances, the unavoidable pursuit of pragmatic mastery, and the resulting tensions non-pragmatic provinces can relieve. But individuals and groups also inevitably resort to meta-level strategies of hyper-mastery to protect set ways of satisfying lower-level relevances—strategies that easily augment individual anxiety and social pathologies. After creatively interpreting the Schutzian dialectic between the world (...) of working and non-pragmatic provinces, Barber describes the experience of reality in the finite provinces of religion and humor. Schutz, who only mentioned these provinces, laid out the six features of the cognitive style that characterize any finite province of meaning. This book is the first to follow up on these suggestions and depict two new finite provinces of meaning beyond those in “On Multiple Realities.” While entrance into these provinces reduces everyday life tensions, it does not suffice since pragmatic relevances infiltrate the provinces, as when one uses humor to belittle competing cultural groups or one deploys religion only as an instrument to ensure crop productivity. Instead, liberation from anxieties and pathologies is brought to completion when the ego agens, the 0-point of all its coordinates, discovers its value in relation to the transcendent, even if it fails to realize its pragmatic purposes, or when one becomes comical to oneself through the eyes of another different from oneself. This book, aimed at advanced undergraduate, graduate, or scholarly audiences, presents stimulating analyses of the religious “appresentative mindset” or of the healing potential of interracial humor. Drawing heavily on interdisciplinary resources, the book also illustrates the relevance of phenomenological methods and concepts for concrete human experience. Barber offers a fresh understanding of pragmatic everyday life, original descriptions of the religious and humorous provinces of meaning, and a picture of how the overarching intentional stances of meaning-provinces, along with exposure to another perspective, can diminish the pressures everyday life engenders. (shrink)

Referring to basic Weberian notions of rationalization and secularization, I try to find a more accurate sense of the term “secularization”, intending to describe adequately the position of religion in modernity. The result of this query is—or at least should be—a new, original conceptualization of religion as one of finite provinces of meaning within one paramount reality of the life-world, as defined by Alfred Schutz. I proceed by exposing a well known, major oversimplification of the Weberian concept of secularization, (...) very well outlined in Peter Berger’s The sacred canopy, in order to point to the genuine, much more differentiated position of Max Weber in this matter (especially from the period of Foundations of social economic and Economy and society), and, consequently, to return to the roots of Berger’s thought: phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz, an attempt to assure the philosophical foundations of Weber’s sociological theory. At a closer glimpse, transformation of religion in the modern process of rationalization does not consist—according to Weber—in eliminating religion and thus depriving society of the religious source of meaning, but in parallel emancipation of many different domains of rationality, including religion itself. Using Schutz’s analysis of the social world as a complex structure of many different final provinces of meaning, I describe religion as such a province and show what does the process of rationalization of this province consist and what it should consist in: a complex, ongoing exchange of cognitive relevances and contents, combined with growing autonomy of many different sub-worlds. Schutz’s theory of symbol, rooted in Edmund Husserl’s description of constitution of complex objects in mono- and polythetic acts of consciousness, moves the analysis to the epistemological level, pointing to a chance of intensifying our cognitive relation to reality through increasing interpenetration of various sub-universes of meaning. (shrink)

This book extends Alfred Schutz’s “On Multiple Realities” by describing the provinces of meaning of play, music, religious ritual, and African-American folkloric humor. Throughout these provinces, the author traces two themes: resilience and responsiveness. In resilience, individuals or communities run up against obstacles, imposed relevances, which they come to terms with, or give meaning to (in phenomenological parlance), by modifying, evading, overcoming, or accepting them. Responsiveness emerges from Schutz’s idea of making music together, which the author takes further (...) by analyzing the mimetic encounter with the other and the asymmetries in listening to music, and, especially, by showing how the features of the cognitive style of music as a province of meaning affect sociality, disposing us to be more vulnerable and attentive to each other’s non-conceptual, musical meanings. This text appeals to upper-level undergraduate students and graduate students as well as to faculty in philosophy. (shrink)

Richard Rorty challenges Jurgen Habermas's belief that validity-claims raised within context-bound discussions contain a moment of universality validity. Rorty argues that immersion within contingent languages prohibits any neutral, context-independent ground, that one cannot predict the defense of one's assertions before any audience, and that philosophy can no more escape its contextual limitations than strategic counterparts. Alfred Schutz's phenomenological account of motivation, the reciprocity of perspectives, and the theoretical province of meaning can articulate Habermas's intuitions.Since any claim can (...) be analyzed from an observer's perspective for its because-motives, it can always be shown to be context-related; but to the participant involved in the in-order-to project of establishing a claim's validity, the claim appears objectively valid until counter-evidence surfaces. Rorty, even when explaining what it is to make a truth claim, resorts to the observer perspective and omits reference to the in-order-to perspective, within which alone unconditional validity becomes visible. Furthermore, the expectation that one's claim is universally valid depends not on an empirical prediction that one''s claim can survive hypothesized future possible audiences. Rather, because of the reciprocity of perspectives, making possible communication and a common life, theoreticians assume that others will recognize what they take to be objective or valid, independently of diverse biographical circumstances. Finally, within the theoretical province requiring relevances different from those of everyday life, philosophy articulates claims with a greater potential to arrive at universal validity than projects that aim less universally, in spite of the fact that its theoretical context is always susceptible to because motive analysis. (shrink)

The Province of Jurisprudence Democratized explores the implications of taking a vigorously democratic approach to issues of traditional legal theory. Allan C. Hutchinson introduces the democratic vision and examines the complementary philosophy of a Dewey-inspired pragmatism. This is followed by an examination from a pragmatic perspective of the dominant theories of analytical jurisprudence in both their positivist and naturalist forms. He emphasizes the contested concepts of 'truth', 'facts' and 'law/morality relation' and explores what a more uncompromising democratic/pragmatic agenda for (...) law and legal theory would entail. The Author's intent is to contribute to the shift away from a technical and elite philosophical approach to jurisprudence to a more democratic engagement. It advances and follows through on the critical claim that there is no position of theoretical or political innocence. Like the law it seeks to illuminate, legal theory must recognize its own political and social setting as well as its own responsibilities. Moreover, whatever else democracy might entail or imply, it opposes elite rule whether by autocrats, functionaries or theorists, however enlightened or principled their proposals or interventions may be: authority must come from below, not above. (shrink)

Theories of meaning developed within the analytic tradition, starting with Gottlob Frege, and within continental philosophy, starting with Husserl, can be distinguished by their disagreement about the phenomenon of collapse or failure of meaning. Our text focuses on Frege’s legacy, taken up by Rudolph Carnap, which culminated in a view of the collapse of meaning defined first by a purely syntactic conception of categorial error and second, when Tarski entered the scene, by the paradoxes created by the (...) conflict between the use of the predicate truth and the concept of proof. As positivism’s conventionalism and late model-theoretic semantics became the paradigms derived from this position, the result, in our view, was a conception of meaning success and meaning failure dominated by dependence on a technological conception. We will argue that this dependence leads to the inability to evaluate the breaks in rational parameters and crises of meaning addressed by the phenomenological and transcendental perspectives. Husserl’s critique of logic as technology is the basis for the reflexive standpoint on the phenomena of meaning failure that leads to a theoretical and eidetic ideal approach to that phenomenon. It is then suggested that this phenomenological reflective standpoint on the problem of meaning failure is the origin of the doors that lead to the divergent paths between the analytic and continental traditions. Thus, this is an article with three argumentative phases connected into a larger unity. The first phase presents Husserl’s critique of a purely extensional, syntactic, and recursive conception of logical consequence and the concept of truth; the second presents Hussel’s larger conception of meaning-failure; the third—presented in an appendix— presents a lesson on the division between continental and analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Brandom's method of analyzing pragmatic relations among different practices and vocabularies through meaning-use diagrams is used to specify how Laruelle's nonphilosophical suspension of the Principle of Sufficient Philosophy may be distinguished from the philosophical auto-critiques of such thinkers as Badiou and Derrida. A superposition of diagrams modeling philosophical sufficiency on the one hand and supplementation through the Other on the other provides a schematic representation of the core duality of what Laruelle calls The-Philosophy. In contrast to this self-implicating and (...) self-reproducing structure, Laruelle's axiomatic method is shown to enable a unilateral usage of the practices and vocabularies of philosophy as mere material that is no longer subject to the presuppositions or ineluctable restitution of philosophy as such. (shrink)

In this chapter, we defend the view that Davidson aimed not to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth, or to capture only certain features of the ordinary notion of meaning for certain theoretical purposes, but rather to pursue the traditional project of explaining in the broadest terms “what it is for words to mean what they do” through a clever bit of indirection, namely, by exploiting the recursive structure of a Tarskian‐style truth theory, (...) which meets certain constraints in an illuminating way, to generate theorems that give truth conditions for object language sentences that at the same time provide interpretations of them. (shrink)

The relation between the concepts of the subject of apperception, the phenomenal self, and the noumenal self has long puzzled commentators on Kant’s theoretical account of the self. This paper argues that many of the puzzles surrounding Kant’s account can be resolved by treating the subject of apperception and other transcendental predicates of thinking as a dimension of the noumenal self. Yet this interpretation requires a clarification of how the transcendental predicates of thinking can be attributed to the noumenal (...) self without violating the thesis of noumenal ignorance. The clarification is achieved through a careful analysis of the meaning of the latter thesis. The paper’s interpretation is then shown to be consistent with Kant’s rejection of traditional ontology and with the dual-aspect view. The paper’s final section argues that transcendental predicates are properly construed as logical predicates but must be distinguished from ordinary examples of the latter. (shrink)

Current textbooks in formal semantics are all versions of, or introductions to, the same paradigm in semantic theory: Montague Grammar. Knowledge of Meaning is based on different assumptions and a different history. It provides the only introduction to truth- theoretic semantics for natural languages, fully integrating semantic theory into the modern Chomskyan program in linguistic theory and connecting linguistic semantics to research elsewhere in cognitive psychology and philosophy. As such, it better fits into a modern graduate or undergraduate program (...) in linguistics, cognitive science, or philosophy. Furthermore, since the technical tools it employs are much simpler to teach and to master, Knowledge of Meaning can be taught by someone who is not primarily a semanticist. Linguistic semantics cannot be studied as a stand-alone subject but only as part of cognitive psychology, the authors assert. It is the study of a particular human cognitive competence governing the meanings of words and phrases. Larson and Segal argue that speakers have unconscious knowledge of the semantic rules of their language, and they present concrete, empirically motivated proposals about a formal theory of this competence based on the work of Alfred Tarski and Donald Davidson. The theory is extended to a wide range of constructions occurring in natural language, including predicates, proper nouns, pronouns and demonstratives, quantifiers, definite descriptions, anaphoric expressions, clausal complements, and adverbs. Knowledge of Meaning gives equal weight to philosophical, empirical, and formal discussions. It addresses not only the empirical issues of linguistic semantics but also its fundamental conceptual questions, including the relation of truth to meaning and the methodology of semantic theorizing. Numerous exercises are included in the book. (shrink)

We summarize some of the classic theoretical underpinnings of the emerging psychology of meaning, with special emphasis on the existentialist perspective that understood meaning in a way that converges with our present understanding and provides a blueprint for subsequent efforts. As we go on to describe, all of these perspectives intersect at a central understanding of meaning making: the ways that we make sense of ourselves and our environment, the feelings that are aroused when these understandings (...) are constructed or violated, and the common ways in which we respond to these violations. In particular, we focus on a general distinction within the notion of meaning that can often obscure what meaning always is—a sense of what is, and a sense of why this should be so. To a remarkable extent, the chapters that constitute this volume on meaning mirror this distinction, focusing on both the what and the why of sense making. In particular, these chapters also describe a strikingly analogous account of the feelings and behaviors that follow from violations of either the whats or the whys of sense making. (shrink)

The practice of conceptual analysis has undergone a revival in recent years. Although the extent of its role in philosophy is controversial, many now accept that conceptual analysis has at least some role to play. Granting this, I consider the relevance of empirical investigation to conceptual analysis. I do so by contrasting an extreme position (anti-empirical conceptual analysis) with a more moderate position (non-empirical conceptual analysis). I argue that anti-empirical conceptual analysis is not a viable position because it has no (...) means for resolving conceptual disputes that arise between seemingly competent speakers of the language. This is illustrated by considering one such dispute that has been pressed by a prominent advocate of anti-empirical conceptual analysis: Bennett and Hacker ( 2003 ) assert that psychological predicates only logically apply to whole living animals, but many scientists and philosophers use the terms more broadly. I argue that to resolve such disputes we need to empirically investigate the common understanding of the terms at issue. I then show how this can be done by presenting the results of three studies concerning the application of “calculates” to computers. (shrink)

This is an empirical phenomenological interview study into the experiences of professional actors as they create and perform roles for the stage. Prior research was inadequate for capturing actors’ changing life worlds over time. Analyzing the interviews using the descriptive phenomenological method yielded general structural descriptions and pointed to the relevance of Schütz’s description of multiple realities. Being cast in a role changes the pace and goals of actors’ everyday worlds and leads the actors intermittently and with intention to enter (...) other realities—fictional, theoretical, and/or pictorial. A province unique to acting is the drama world in which the actors live incarnate as their characters. The drama world is infused pre-reflectively with discoveries from other provinces of meaning, unfolds spontaneously, and, in performance, has the audience as horizon. The drama world and the experiences that give rise to it provide new material for comparative phenomenological analysis of various forms of imagining. (shrink)

I show that in the context of proof-theoretic semantics, Dummett’s distinction between the assertoric meaning of a sentence and its ingredient sense can be seen as a distinction between two proof-theoretic meanings of a sentence: 1.Meaning as a conclusion of an introduction rule in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system. 2.Meaning as a premise of an introduction rule in a meaning-conferring natural-deduction proof system. The effect of this distinction on compositionality of proof-theoretic meaning is discussed.

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

In recent writings Paul Horwich has pursued two related aims: (i) To show “how small a constraint is provided by compositionality” (Horwich 1998, chapter 7, p. 183). “The compositionality of meaning imposes no constraint at all on how the meaning properties of words are constituted” (p. 154). (ii) To present a deflationary alternative to the “Davidsonian truth-theoretic perspective” (Horwich 2001) The paper has three sections: in section 1 I make some comments on compositionality, in section 2 I argue (...) that Horwich does not succeed in achieving aim (i), and in section 3 I argue that he does not succeed either in achieving aim (ii). (shrink)

This book present interdisciplinary research in the social sciences and humanities by connecting seemingly disparate sources through a sensitivity to endangered human values. It links reflections on the contemporary relationship between art and technology in a post-modern context, seeing art in terms of crossing boundaries and exploring virtuality. It deals with the consequences of economics colonising other disciplines, in terms of the processes by which the social becomes the economic. Using Jantsch''s evolutionary paradigm, the concept of self-transcendence is seen as (...) crucial for the understanding of human beings and their social systems. Incorporating recent thinking from the natural sciences, the learning process can be conceived as the life and activity of all complex systems, including those once conceived as organisms, machines, cultures or economies. Without the societal embrace of scientific and technological development no collective or individual meaning can be assigned to the production of new knowledge. The book seeks to recognise the point where a collective learning process becomes the heart of productivity, and where the shift from the hegemony of material labour to immaterial labour becomes fundamental. The author brings new understandings of art, the social, and technology together, based on the idea that history is not a story told in separate physical, social and spiritual spaces and that the most fundamental problem of today is how to find some shared meaning in a fractured world. The author analyses, at a global level, the process of the co-production of scientific and social order, of culture and technology, of life sciences and economic and political regimes. It rightly identifies the rise of the role of knowledge and the move of capital into life sciences as a new stage in the history of capitalism: what we can qualify as cognitive capitalism or biocapitalism. In this new era of capitalism, what is being manufactured and sold are not just tangible and non-tangible goods, whose increasing importance, as the author shows, poses unsurmountable theoretical problems to the theoretical apparatus of economic science. The increasing mercantilisation of the world appears at the same time as a bio-power, i.e. a set of instruments creating and controlling different forms of life, forms of communication, standards of socialisation, education, the individual and collective imaginary, etc. More fundamentally, the encounter of life sciences and the information technology integrates and subjects the most essential mechanisms of biological and social reproduction to the logic of capital valorization. To understand the complexity of these changes and the ethical and philosophical questions that the development of technology and sciences poses to the future of mankind one must break through the disciplinary barriers delineating different disciplines in social sciences and those separating social sciences from natural sciences. Professor Matko Mestrovic manages to tackle this challenge not only because of his impressive and masterful knowledge of different disciplines in the social and natural sciences, but he does it also owing to his capacity for theoretical elaboration that allows him to lay the foundations of a new transdisciplinary paradigm. This is why his work can raise the awareness of the general public on two issues: on a global and profound vision of the challenges posed by the new millennium; and on the need for a radical theoretical innovation bringing into question the disciplinary certitudes in develop a social science able to better understand the movement and the ambiguity of history. - Carlo Vercellone, Universite de Paris 1, Pantheon-Sorbonne Mestrovic provides a unique insight into the often forgotten relation between economics on the one hand and arts and culture on the other, demonstrating that these adomains function as a total social facticity and not as separate, entirely independent elements thereof. In doing so he is dispelling the illusions about the disciplinary self-containdness of individual forms of knowledge and is relying on those paradigms of contemporary scientific thought whose aepistemiological programs are based on close cooperation and aopening up and not on the persuasion about one''s own positions and dispositions. - Prof. dr. Rade Kalanj, Redovni profesor na Odjelu za sociologiju. (shrink)

Many of the key issues that the later papers address are contained in his 1962 paper “A mistake about causality in social science,” which I will show, was an important seed bed for his later thought. The concept of practices MacIntyre developed was itself a social theory: the “philosophical” conclusions are dependent on its validity as an account of practices as a social phenomenon. There is a question of philosophical or social theoretical method that bears on the status of (...) this theory, one of which is critical: the validity of a form of argument that figures throughout MacIntyre’s work, in which characterizations of a topic, “identifications,” are used to exclude alternative explanations. In the end, I will argue, arguments of this form are intrinsically misleading or incomplete. (shrink)

This article aims to examine existential meaning constructions from an action theoretical perspective in a specific Internet environment: the personal homepage. Personal homepages are on-line multi-media documents addressing the question ‘Who am I?’ Authors of personal homepages provide information on both their personal and public identity. These identity constructions sometimes include reflections on the meaning of life. Answers to questions on the meaning of life reflect the way in which individuals assign ultimate meanings to human life, (...) and consist of three key components: orientation, beliefs, and experience. This paper aims to examine existential meaning constructions from a action theoretical perspective in a specific Internet environment: the personal homepage. Findings are reported of a qualitative content analysis of answers to the meaning of life provided in a sample of 42 personal homepages. We found that most answers to the meaning of life could be interpreted either as ‘divine/religious’, ‘experience centered’, ‘cosmic’, or ‘social utopian’. The answers provided on the homepages showed similarities with findings reported in other studies on existential meaning. In addition, we found that this Internet environment offers new venues for expressing orientation, beliefs, and experience reflecting answers to the meaning of life. (shrink)

The book develops the metaphysics of meaning along the lines set up by Paul Grice, defining the three central notions of what is meant, said and implicated. The Gricean notion of what is said is threatened by semantic underdetermination: If the sentence underdetermines the thought it is used to express, what is said cannot be the proposition expressed by the sentence and meant by the speaker. This leads to a number of questions: How far does semantic underdetermination reach? Do (...) we have to extend or restrict the Gricean notion? Is what is said semantic or pragmatic? Keeping these metaphysical questions separate from the epistemological question of how the hearer understands what is meant, which is best explained by generalizing the Gricean theory of implicature derivation and combining it with a game-theoretic model, the book provides an original defense of a Gricean view in the ongoing debate about semantics and pragmatics. (shrink)

theories. What was Freud thinking, when, and why and what were the major influences which shaped his ideas? We follow the inner movement of his theory construction, its meaning and coherence, as well as his conceptual logic and personal directions concerning his evolving views of the reciprocal interactions between mind and body, the motivational force of instinctual drives, and the dominant role of sexuality rooted in evolutionary biology in human development, behaviour, and the creation of neurotic disturbances. We follow (...) Freud's construction and sequential reconstructions of his theoretical models concerning the nature, dynamics, and principles of unconscious mental functioning, including his changing concepts on the nature and purpose of dreams. We trace his changing views on the role of deferred action of early childhood experiences and the determining role of unconscious fantasy, psychic reality, in the formation of adult character structure and neuroses. Through such historical analysis this book provides grounding for a meaningful understanding of Freud's familiar concepts: id, ego, superego, and the Oedipus complex. We explore what these concepts meant to Freud, why he conceived them, and what functions they served in his theory of mind. This is the perfect book for students and trainees wanting to learn more about the development of Freud's ideas, as well as for established psychoanalysts and psychotherapists interested in expanding their knowledge of Freud's theories. (shrink)

learning about language is an exciting and ambitious new series of introductions to fundamental topics in language, linguistics and related areas. The books are designed for students of linguistics and those who are studying language as part of a wider course. In Realms of Meaning Thomas Hofmann provides an introduction to semantics that will be accessible to a student without any formal knowledge of the subject. This book provides an understanding of the way meaning works in natural languages (...) against a background of how we communicate with language. Thomas Hofmann has designed his text with particular attention to the needs and interests of the layman, whether student or interested general reader. To that end he avoids theoretical terminology and elaborate technical apparatus, and his survey also avoids commitment to specific linguistic theories which might limit the general usefulness of the book, or be vulnerable to the changes and developments over time. Contentious issues are mentioned only lightly but analysis of meaning is taken nevertheless to the frontiers of current knowledge, and the book has new ideas and perspectives that will be of real interest to specialists of semantics, linguistics and neighbouring areas especially psychology, philosophy and sociology. The fifteen chapters of the book cover many different aspects of the subject and how meaning is conveyed in linguistic communication. Examples are chosen mainly from English to provide material for the wider discussion of the principles in the subject, but European, East Asian and other languages also provide illuminating examples. (shrink)

Five concepts are presented which together form elements of a theoretical framework for American history: 1) persistent inequality from one stage of history to another under the impact of massive transforming social and political influences; 2) systematization, referring to the way in which people sought to organize institutions in both private and public affairs so as to integrate people and resources into ever larger systems of human action; 3) differentiation, which is the realm of human identity and meaning, (...) of understanding personal possibilities and limitations, and of choosing whether one seeks to be similar to or different from others; 4) interactions among levels of scale, of which the aspects of perception, personal networks, and institutions are especially important; and 5) innovation and response, or change and response to change. Each concept is well rooted in recently accumulated evidence. Together they constitute useful building blocks of theory which enable one to integrate the vast and often diffuse outpouring of literature in both social and political history. (shrink)

The relation between the concepts of the subject of apperception, the phenomenal self, and the noumenal self has long puzzled commentators on Kant’s theoretical account of the self. This paper argues that many of the puzzles surrounding Kant’s account can be resolved by treating the subject of apperception and other transcendental predicates of thinking as a dimension of the noumenal self. Yet this interpretation requires a clarification of how the transcendental predicates of thinking can be attributed to the noumenal (...) self without violating the thesis of noumenal ignorance. The clarification is achieved through a careful analysis of the meaning of the latter thesis. The paper’s interpretation is then shown to be consistent with Kant’s rejection of traditional ontology and with the dual-aspect view. The paper’s final section argues that transcendental predicates are properly construed as logical predicates but must be distinguished from ordinary examples of the latter. (shrink)

By creating certain marks on paper, or by making certain sounds-breathing past a moving tongue-or by articulation of hands and bodies, language users can give expression to their mental lives. With language we command, assert, query, emote, insult, and inspire. Language has meaning. This fact can be quite mystifying, yet a science of linguistic meaning-semantics-has emerged at the intersection of a variety of disciplines: philosophy, linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Semantics is the study of meaning. But what (...) exactly is "meaning"? What is the exact target of semantic theory? Much of the early work in natural language semantics was accompanied by extensive reflection on the aims of semantic theory, and the form a theory must take to meet those aims. But this meta-theoretical reflection has not kept pace with recent theoretical innovations. This volume re-addresses these questions concerning the foundations of natural language semantics in light of the current state-of-the-art in semantic theorising. (shrink)

This article explores the ‘lack of meaning’ in contemporary society as a consequence of Western dualist thought paradigms and ontologies, via Gilles Deleuze’s concept of ‘reactive nihilism’ following the colloquial murder of God. The article then explores processual and new materialist approaches in the understanding of the lived and carnal self, arguing for immanent and senseful materiality as an ethical platform for religious, environmental, and societal solidarity for tomorrow. For the theoretical justification of the processual approach in understanding (...) the enfleshed self, the article employs John Dupré’s processual approach in the philosophy of biology, as well as Astrida Neimani’s critical posthumanism, and contextualizes these considerations with Erich Fromm’s ethical distinction of being and having. (shrink)

Appraisal research based on participants' self-report of emotional experiences is predicated on the assumption that the academic community and the lay public share comparable meanings of the emotion terms used. However, this can be a risky assumption to make, as in the case of the emotion disgust which appears in common usage to reflect irritation, or anger, as often as repulsion. To examine the theoretical versus the lay meaning of disgust, 140 undergraduates were asked to recall a time (...) when they felt either angry, disgust, disgusted, revulsion, or grossed out. Analysis of event recall responses and emotional experience measures suggests that the common understanding of the word disgust reflects a combination of the conceptual meanings of disgust and anger whereas the slang term grossed out more closely captures the theoretical construct of disgust. Implications of these findings for emotion research based on self-report are discussed. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the theoretical philosophy of Bukharin as developed in his book Filosofskie arabeski. I analyze three concepts—perception, being, and dialectics—and show that and how they deviate from the meaning that they commonly have among other Russian Marxists. In this work, Bukharin drafts a theory that can be interpreted as a “relational ontology,” since it focuses on the relations between entities and since these relations are considered to be more fundamental than the entities themselves and provide (...) epistemic access to reality. My examination of Bukharin’s theoretical views shows that he continues Lenin’s tradition of materialist and dialectical thought. That is why, in spite of his innovative approach to some key problems of theoretical philosophy, Bukharin did not go far enough in his studies. His theoretical position appears to be an integral part of his political engagement. (shrink)

This volume develops a theory of meaning and a semantics for both mathematical and empirical sentences inspired to Chomsky’s internalism, namely to a view of semantics as the study of the relations of language not with external reality but with internal, or mental, reality. In the first part a theoretical notion of justification for a sentence A is defined, by induction on the complexity of A; intuitively, justifications are conceived as cognitive states of a particular kind. The main (...) source of inspiration for this part is Heyting’s explanation of the intuitionistic meaning of logical constants. In the second part the theory is applied to the solution of several foundational problems in the theory of meaning and epistemology, such as Frege’s puzzle, Mates’ puzzle about synonymy, the paradox of analysis, Kripke’s puzzle about belief, the de re/de dicto distinction, the specific/non-specific distinction, Gettier’s problems, the paradox of knowability, and the characterization of truth. On a more general philosophical level, throughout the book the author develops a tight critique of the neo-verificationism of Dummett, Prawitz and Martin-Löf, and defends a mentalist interpretation of intuitionism. (shrink)