Online research in philosophy

Introduction: discursive conditions -- Language, philosophy, and sophistry -- Contributions to a conversation about the conversation of humanity: Heidegger and Gadamer, Oakeshott and Rorty -- Lectures and letters as conversation: Cavell as educator in Cities of words -- Conclusion: redeeming words.

With any stage in a well-run conversation, or other process of linguistic interaction, there are associated many things analogous to the components of a baseball score. I shall therefore speak of them collectively as the score of that conversation at that stage… What play is correct depends on the score. Sentences depend for their truth value, or for their acceptability in other respects, on the components of conversational score at the stage of conversation when they are uttered… Score evolves in a more-or-less rulegoverned way. There are rules that specify the kinematics of score…(pp. 344–45).

The concept system around ‘quantity’ and ‘quantity value’ is fundamental for measurement science, but some very basic issues are still open on such concepts and their relations. This paper proposes a duality between quantities and quantity values, a proposal that simplifies their characterization and makes it consistent.

The present essay focuses on the relation between conversation and culture. Through a reading of Plato's "Symposium," it highlights a conversation which reflects on culture while in its midst, combining critique with erotic ritual. Eros, the selected topic of the Symposium, is described by Socrates as a Daimon, a being between God and mortal, whose intermediary state reflects back on conversation itself as daimonic, and on culture as daimonic conversation. This notion of conversation serves as a basis for a cultural critique, on the one hand, of an anthropology that limits itself to an observation of culture as closed and defined forms and, on the other hand, of demonic rather than daimonic notions of conversation.

Understanding a conversation sometimes requires us to keep track of what has been said about the objects under discussion. This fact presents a problem for a familiar account of content, the Russellian theory as advanced by Scott Soames and Nathan Salmon. Here I sketch an account of keeping track of objects in conversation, on which it involves presupposing unexpressed identity statements about the objects under discussion. The account is an application of a Stalnaker-style possible worlds account of assertion content, that treats these unexpressed identities as part of an evolving set of presuppositions. Finally, I propose a two-dimensionalist extension of the basic Stalnakerian account to deal with the sort of case in which utterances are best understood as conveying the diagonal proposition of a two-dimensional propositional concept. These are discourses in which some of all parties to the conversation are confused about exactly which object is being discussed, even though they do keep track of what has been said about it.

Abstract This paper discusses three forms of conversation relevant to moral education: the highly formal conversation of discourse ethics, the so?called ?immortal conversation?, and a form of ordinary conversation between adults and children that seems to be central to moral education. The last has these special characteristics: the adults are reasonably good people; the adults show respect or loving regard for their child partners; the conversational partner is recognized to be more important than the topic, argument, or conclusions.

[p. 45] I wish to represent a certain subclass of nonconventional implicatures, which I shall call CONVERSATIONAL implicatures, as being essentially connected with certain general features of discourse; so my next step is to try to say what these features are. The following may provide a first approximation to a general principle. Our talk exchanges do not normally consist of a succession of disconnected remarks, and would not be rational if they did. They are characteristically, to some degree at least, cooperative efforts; and each participant recognizes in them, to some extent, a common purpose or set of purposes, or at least a mutually accepted direction. This purpose or direction may be fixed from the start (e.g., by an initial proposal of a question for discussion), or it may evolve during the exchange; it may be fairly definite, or it may be so indefinite as to leave very considerable latitude to the participants (as in a casual conversation). But at each stage, SOME possible conversational moves would be excluded as conversationally unsuitable. We might then formulate a rough general principle which participants will be expected (ceteris paribus) to observe, namely: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged. One might label this the COOPERATIVE PRINCIPLE. On the assumption that some such general principle as this is acceptable, one may perhaps distinguish four categories under one or another of which will fall certain more specific maxims and submaxims, the following of which will, in general, yield results in accordance with the Cooperative Principle. Echoing Kant, I call these categories Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. The category of QUANTITY relates to the quantity of information to be provided, and under it fall the following maxims.

H. P. Grice first presented his theory of conversational implicature in “Logic and Conversation.” This theory is comprised of conversational maxims that are based on the Cooperative Principle. Since then, it has become the default theory of implicature in pragmatics. This theory, however, is deeply flawed. Asa Kasher and Wayne Davis present alternative models for conversational implicature, but they both also have shortcomings in their theories. This work attempts to reconcile the Gicean theory of implicature with Kasher’s rationality based theory, and Davis’ theory of implicatures as conventions. The theory presented here creates conversational kinds to distinguish between cooperative conversation and non-cooperative conversation. Conversational implicature is convention based, but the conversational maxims are retained for cooperative conversational kinds. Thus, maxim violations end up as conversational cues informing participants that irrational statements may be better understood within a conventional framework. This provides for the shortcomings of the earlier works, and has greater explanatory power.

Preface: What this strange book is about -- Conversation 1: where's the formula? -- Conversation 2: brain and mind -- Conversation 3: logic and intuition -- Conversation 4: how to open the 'third eye' -- Conversation 5: matter and spirit -- Conversation 6: the data -- Conversation 7: synchronicity -- Conversation 8: waves -- Conversation 9: holism -- Conversation 10: the music of the spheres -- Conversation 11: cultural consequences -- Conversation 12: water magic.

Grice's Quantity maxims have been widely misinterpreted as enjoining a speaker to make the strongest claim that she can, while respecting the other conversational maxims. Although many writers on the topic of conversational implicature interpret the Quantity maxims as enjoining such volubility, so construed the Quantity maxims are unreasonable norms for conversation. Appreciating this calls for attending more closely to the notion of what a conversation requires. When we do so, we see that eschewing an injunction to maximal informativeness need not deprive us of any ability to predict or explain genuine cases of implicature. Crucial to this explanation is an appreciation of how what a conversation, or a given stage of a conversation, requires, depends upon what kind of conversation is taking place. I close with an outline of this dependence relation that distinguishes among three importantly distinct types of conversation.