As a discourse genre, statements of purpose are characterized by their occluded status in the academy and by their hybrid nature. Statements of purpose are required in applications for a place in a postgraduate course, and they are requested to obtain information about the academic and professional background and skills of each applicant. A study of the genre’s linguistic and textual features is needed in Spanish to discover and understand writers’ and readers’ perception of this genre. A corpus of 50 (...) motivation letters in Spanish is analyzed here. We study the distinguishing macro- and microtextual features of this particular genre and co-occurrences between both kinds of features. At the macrotextual level, statements of purpose display prototypical rhetorical moves, which can be classified as writers’ moves and readers’ moves. On the microtextual level, modalization resources and discourse markers are discussed. This multiple perspectives analysis of the corpus shows evidence of significant co-occurrences among modalization, discourse markers, and rhetorical moves. Writers’ ideal representations of this discourse genre, which spans the academic and professional fields, can also be deduced. (shrink)

This article deals with the form and use of reformulation markers in research papers written in English, Spanish and Catalan. Considering the form and frequency of the markers, English papers tend to prefer simple fixed markers and include fewer reformulators than Spanish and Catalan. On the contrary, formal Catalan and Spanish papers include more markers, some of which are complex and allow for some structural variability. As for use, reformulation markers establish dynamic relationships between portions of discourse which can be (...) identified in our corpus with expansion, reduction and permutation. The analysis of the corpus shows that English authors usually reformulate to add more information to the concept, whereas Catalan and Spanish authors reduce the contents or the implicatures of the previous formulation more frequently than English. (shrink)

There are many mean and nasty things to say about mean and nasty talk, but I don't plan on saying any of them. There's a specific problem about slurring words that I want to address. This is a semantic problem. It's not very important compared to the real-world problems presented by bigotry, racism, discrimination, and worse. It's important only to linguistics and the philosophy of language.

This book describes Carmeli's cosmological general and special relativity theory, along with Einstein's general and special relativity. These theories are discussed in the context of Moshe Carmeli's original research, in which velocity is introduced as an additional independent dimension. Four- and five-dimensional spaces are considered, and the five-dimensional braneworld theory is presented. The Tully-Fisher law is obtained directly from the theory, and thus it is found that there is no necessity to assume the existence of dark matter in the halo (...) of galaxies, nor in galaxy clusters.The book gives the derivation of the Lorentz transformation, which is used in both Einstein's special relativity and Carmeli's cosmological special relativity theory. The text also provides the mathematical theory of curved space?time geometry, which is necessary to describe both Einstein's general relativity and Carmeli's cosmological general relativity. A comparison between the dynamical and kinematic aspects of the expansion of the universe is made. Comparison is also made between the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker theory and the Carmeli theory. And neither is it necessary to assume the existence of dark matter to correctly describe the expansion of the cosmos. (shrink)

Once upon a time it was assumed that speaking literally and directly is the norm and that speaking nonliterally or indirectly is the exception. The assumption was that normally what a speaker means can be read off of the meaning of the sentence he utters, and that departures from this, if not uncommon, are at least easily distinguished from normal utterances and explainable along Gricean lines. The departures were thought to be limited to obvious cases like figurative speech and conversational (...) implicature. However, people have come to appreciate that the meaning of a typical sentence, at least one we are at all likely to use, is impoverished, at least relative to what we are likely to mean in uttering it. In other words, what a speaker normally means in uttering a sentence, even without speaking figuratively or obliquely, is an enriched version of what could be predicted from the meaning of the sentence alone. This can be because the sentence expresses a “minimal” (or “skeletal”) proposition or even because it fails to express a complete proposition at all.1 Indeed, it is now a platitude that linguistic meaning generally underdetermines speaker meaning. That is, generally what a speaker means in uttering a sentence, even if the sentence is devoid of ambiguity, vagueness, or indexicality, goes beyond what the sentence means. The question is what to make of this Contextualist Platitude, as I’ll call it. It may be a truism, but does it require a radical revision of the older conception of the relation between what sentences mean and what speakers mean in uttering them? Does it lead to a major modification, or perhaps even outright rejection, of the semantic-pragmatic distinction? I think.. (shrink)

There is a simple view of motivation on which desires are like pain-killers; they come in different strengths, and their strength determines their efficacy. That is, the stronger a desire the greater its motivational force and, when two desires conflict, the stronger one “wins out” over the weaker. This view makes it puzzling how anyone could ever exhibit “strength of will” and act on the weaker desire, even when it is a desire for something more highly valued than what is (...) more strongly desired. When the will, as the agent of reason, enters the fray, an explanation of what a person is motivated enough to do must reckon not only with competing desires and their motivational forces, but also with the will’s capacity to be affected by different ones in ways not proportional to their force. However, this complication sheds little light, for if the will must bestow its stamp of approval on a desire before the desire leads to action, then, it would seem, motivational force should be measured by strength of effect on the will. And if that’s the way to measure motivational force, then, since by that measure one always acts on the desire that affects one’s will most, there is no problem of strength of will after all. But the problem seems real, however inapt the label. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy involves subjecting philosophical methods and judgments to empirical scrutiny. I begin by exploring conceptual, confirmational, and empirical factors that limit the significance of experiment-based and survey-based approaches to the evaluation of philosophical epistemic activities. I then consider specific criticisms of experimental philosophy: its experimental conditions lack ecological validity; it wrongly assumes that philosophers rely on psychologized data; it overlooks the reflective and social elements of philosophical case analysis; it misconstrues the importance of both procedural and evaluative forms of (...) philosophical expertise; it incorrectly views psychological bias as incompatible with reliability; and it generalizes to a global, self-defeating skepticism about case judgment. I explain why these criticisms should be understood as converging and interdependent. I also set out a three-level model of philosophical case judgment that frames the criticisms. (shrink)

Die sich um 1800 neu konstituierende Disziplin der Biologie und die idealistische Naturphilosophie Schellings bemuhen sich in ihrer Frontstellung gegen einen unkritisch und ontologisch verstandenen Mechanismus um eine dem Leben angemessene Beschreibung und Erklarung der Lebensphanomene. Vor diesem Hintergrund wird im ersten Teil der vorliegenden Studie das Werk des Naturforschers Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer im Kontext der zeitgenossischen philosophischen und naturforschenden Diskussionen verortet, bevor im zweiten Teil die Bedeutung von Kielmeyers Phanomenologie des Organischen fur die systematische Ausarbeitung des Schelling'schen Systems der (...) Naturphilosophie aufgezeigt wird. In their animosity towards an uncritical and ontology-based mechanism, both the new discipline of biology, which was becoming established around 1800, and Schellings idealistic natural philosophy strove for a description and explanation of the phenomena of life which were pertinent to life. Against this backdrop, the work of the naturalist Carl Friedrich Kielmeyer is placed in the context of contemporary philosophical and naturalist discussions of the time in the first part of this study before the significance of Kielmeyers phenomenology of the organic for the systematic development of Schellings system of natural philosophy is shown in the second part. (shrink)

Think of linguistification by analogy with personification: attributing linguistic properties to nonlinguistic phenomena. For my purposes, it also includes attributing nonlinguistic properties to linguistic items, i.e., treating nonlinguistic properties as linguistic. Linguistification is widespread. It has reached epidemic proportions. It needs to be eradicated. That’s important because the process of communication is not simply a matter of one person putting a thought into words and another decoding them back into the same thought. Much of what a speaker means cannot be (...) traced to what his words mean or to their possibly context-sensitive semantic contents. Words carry information all right, but that information hardly determines what speakers mean in uttering them. They leave plenty of pragmatic gaps and sometimes even semantic slack. I’ll mention various reasons for that, but the important thing is to recognize how much people exploit extralinguistic information in communicating and to avoid confusing this process with semantic context sensitivity. To appreciate the limitations of semantics, we shouldn’t fall for the fallacy of misplaced information or for the more specific fallacies enumerated below. (shrink)

Las teorías clásicas de estratificación social se bao basado en la familia como unidad de estratificación, utilizándose la ocupación del hombre como medida de clase social. Estas teorías fueron criticadas sobre todo desde el feminismo, reclamando la visualización de las mujeres en el análisis de la estratificación social. Este artículo describe el concepto de clase social, debate sobre la medida de la clase social en las mujeres y revisa el impacto de las distintas medidas en las desigualdades en salud según (...) clase social en las mujeres. (shrink)

Influenced by the Wittgensteinian slogan “Don’t look for the meaning, look for the use,” ordinary language philosophers aimed to defuse various philosophical problems by analyzing key words in terms of what they are used to do or the conditions for appropriately using them. Although Moore, Grice and Searle exposed this error – mixing pragmatics with semantics – it still gets committed, now to a different end. Nowadays the aim is to reckon with the fact that the meanings of a great (...) many sentences underdetermine what we would normally mean in using them – even if the sentence is free of indexicality, ambiguity, and vagueness. This can be so because the sentence expresses a “minimal” proposition or even because it doesn’t fully express any proposition. Many theorists are led to defend “truth-conditional pragmatics” (or linguistic “contextualism”), to find a hidden indexical in every syntactic nook or semantic cranny, or otherwise to pay undue respect to seemingly semantic intuitions and intentions. This paper identifies various such moves and explains what’s regressive about them. (shrink)

This article makes a number of points about reference, both speaker reference and linguistic reference. The bottom line is simple: reference ain't easy — at least not nearly as easy as commonly supposed. Much of what speakers do that passes for reference is really something else, and much of what passes for linguistic reference is really nothing more than speaker reference. Referring is one of the basic things we do with words, and it would be a good idea to understand (...) what that involves and requires before worrying about the linguistic means by which this is done. (shrink)

a comprehensive, somewhat Gricean theory of speech acts, including an account of communicative intentions and inferences, a taxonomy of speech acts, and coverage of many topics in pragmatics -/- .

En este artículo trabajamos dentro del campo de la música tradicional, vinculándola con la perspectiva de género a través del análisis de los roles establecidos tanto en la tradición como en la actualidad. Para ello establecemos una metodología basada en la realización de entrevistas como medio para suplir la falta de referencias bibliográficas. Nuestros resultados se centran en la continuidad de los roles de género y su distribución a través de relaciones de poder, independientemente de los cambios de contexto acaecidos (...) entre la tradición y la actualidad. Por último reflejaremos el interés actual y las posibilidades didácticas sobre el tema. (shrink)

En este artículo tratamos el “romance do Comandante Moreno” como parte de la música de tradición oral gallega y de la memoria histórica en relación a la Guerra Civil española. Metodológicamente trabajamos con análisis de corte etnomusicológico que se centran en parámetros musicales, literarios y de contexto, además de trabajar con referencias bibliográficas y audiovisuales. Así, nos encontramos con características propias de la música de tradición gallega y una descripción concisa de los hechos, siendo este romance un testigo fidedigno de (...) los asesinatos ocurridos en 1937 y, por ello, un elemento con oportunidades didácticas para la creación de proyectos interdisciplinares. (shrink)

The relation between noise and disturbance is investigated within the general framework of Galois connections. Within this framework, we introduce the notion of leak of information, mathematically defined as one of the two closure maps arising from the observable-channel compatibility relation. We provide a physical interpretation for it, and we give a comparison with the analogous closure maps associated with joint measurability and simulability for quantum observables.

Confusion in terms inspires confusion in concepts. When a relevant distinction is not clearly marked or not marked at all, it is apt to be blurred or even missed altogether in our thinking. This is true in any area of inquiry, pragmatics in particular. No one disputes that there are various ways in which what is communicated in an utterance can go beyond sentence meaning. The problem is to catalog the ways. It is generally recognized that linguistic meaning underdetermines speaker (...) meaning because of the need for disambiguation and reference assignment and because people can speak figuratively or indirectly. But philosophers and linguists are coming to recognize that these are not the only ways. The situation may be described in Gricean terms: the distinction between what is said and what is implicated is not exhaustive. Charting the middle ground between the two will require attending to specific examples, noting their distinctive features, and articulating the relevant concepts. That is what I aim to do here. The basic idea will be to distinguish not only the implied from the explicit but the implicit from the implied. (shrink)

While studies have investigated the moral issue associated with downsizing, little research attention has been directed to leaders’ behaviors that result in organizational decline and eventually lead them to make a downsizing decision. This study tests a sequence-based model to assess (1) the impact of leaders’ risk-aversion and self-centeredness on organizational decline and downsizing and (2) the impact of organizational and industry decline on organizational downsizing. We address a gap in the decline literature that has only implicitly alluded to leadership (...) characteristics as forerunners of decline. Data collected from 85 firms indicate that both leadership risk-aversion and self-centeredness are significantly related to organizational decline. This results in intensified organizational downsizing. However, industry decline affects downsizing more significantly. (shrink)

This paper offers a smattering of applications of pragmatics to epistemology. In most cases they concern recent epistemological claims that depend for their plausibility on mistaking something pragmatic for something semantic. After giving my formulation of the semantic/pragmatic distinction and explaining how seemingly semantic intuitions can be responsive to pragmatic factors, I take up the following topics: 1. Classic Examples of Confusing Meaning and Use 2. Pragmatic Implications of Hedging or Intensifying an Assertion 3. Belief Attributions 4. Knowledge-wh 5. The (...) Knowledge Rule on Assertion 6. Testimony 7. Asserting and Thinking of Possibilities 8. Concessive Knowledge Attributions 9. “Pragmatic Encroachment” 10. Epistemic Contextualism.. (shrink)

This article deals with interactions between citizenship and political ecology by examining the ‘pulp mills conflict’ in Gualeguaychú, Argentina. The conflict burst in 2003 when the Uruguayan authorities announced the construction of a cellulose plant on the shore of the Uruguay River. The citizens of Gualeguaychú, a city right across the border, initiated a movement of protest that soon transcended the local dimension. I argue that this protest was a battle over sovereignty and an environmental conflict between different conceptions of (...) development and diverse views of the use of a common resource, the river. The notion of ecological citizenship formed in this process is assessed by examining how this concept was constructed by local stakeholders and by unveiling the motivations informing citizens’ engagement. (shrink)

Grice’s distinction between what is said and what is implicated has greatly clarified our understanding of the boundary between semantics and pragmatics. Although border disputes still arise and there are certain difficulties with the distinction itself (see the end of §1), it is generally understood that what is said falls on the semantic side and what is implicated on the pragmatic side. But this applies only to what is..