Pragmatics

يقدم هذا البحث معالجة تحليلية موجزة للاتجاهات الأساسية في فلسفة اللغة المعاصرة، وهي ثلاثة: 1- الاتجاه الممتد من فريجه ورسل وفتجنشتين المبكر عبر الوضعية المنطقية وكواين وديفيدسون ودميت وبتنام وكريبكي. ويهتم بالعلاقة بين المعنى والصدق والإشارة. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: ما شروط صدق الجملة؟ 2- الاتجاه الممتد من مور وفتجنشتين المتأخر ومدرسة أكسفورد (رايل، وأوستن وستراوسون، وجرايس) وسيرل وهابرماس وبراندوم. ويهتم بالعلاقة بين اللغة والمتكلم. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: ما العلاقة بين المعنى والاستعمال. 3- الاتجاه الذي (...) يمثله تشومسكي وتلاميذه في علم اللغة مثل كاتز وفودور ومن سايرهم. ويهتم بالمعرفة اللغوية. والسؤال الأساسي في هذا الاتجاه هو: كيف نفسر الإبداع اللغوي؟ . (shrink)

Philosophy of Language, introduces students to the main issues and theories in twenty-first-century philosophy of language, focusing specifically on linguistic phenomena. Author Salah Ismail divided the book into seven chapters. Ch. I, Philosophy of language: Defining term and Indication of trends. Ch.2, Empirical theory in language learning (Quine). Ch.3, Mental theory in language learning and its knowledge (Chomsky). Ch.4, Theories of meaning, surveys the competing theories of linguistic meaning and compares their various advantages and liabilities; theory of ideas, theory of (...) verification, use theory. Ch.5, Theory of communication- intention. Ch.6, Pragmatics and rules of conversation. Ch.7, Language, truth and reality. يعالج الكتاب الموضوعات الأساسية في فلسفة اللغة وهي المعنى والإشارة والصدق، بالإضافة إلى تعلم اللغة ومعرفتها. ويعرض بأسلوب رصين وبدقة نظريات الفلاسفة المعاصرين في هذه الموضوعات بداية من فتجنشتين، ومرورا بكواين وتشومسكي وجرايس، إلى جون سيرل في وقتنا الحالي. وستجد فيه إجابات عن أسئلة من قبيل: كيف نتعلم اللغة؟ وما المعنى؟ وكيف تعني الكلمات ما تعنيه؟ وما شروط صدق الجملة؟ وما الاختلاف بين معنى الجملة والمعنى لدى المتكلم؟ وكيف يكون التواصل اللغوي ممكنا؟ وما قواعد المحادثة؟ وما الاختلاف بين علم الدلالة وعلم الاستعمال؟ ويدافع المؤلف عن نظرية الاستعمال في المعنى . (shrink)

The primary function that philosophy has to perform is analysis of meanings. Contemporary philosophy is a story of the idea of meaning, in the words of Gilbert Ryle. The study of meaning in our time takes several ways. Two ways come in the forefront. The first relates to the formal theories proposed by Frege, earlier Wittgenstein, Quine, Chomsky and Dummmett. The second relates to the theories of use suggested by the later Wittgenstein, Austin, Ryle, Strawson, Grice and Searle. Formal theories (...) are concerned with the formal structure of languages, and the interrelationships between sentences, while the use theories emphasize the role of speakers in determining and understanding the meaning. This book provides an analytical and critical study of the theory communication- intention in meaning according to Paul Grice (1913-1988), which gave speakers and their intentions a central place in the interpretation of meaning, and also aims to formulate the links between theory of communication- intention in semantics and the theory of conversational implicature in pragmatics. الوظيفة الأساسية التي يتعين على الفلسفة القيام بها هي تحليل المعاني. والفلسفة المعاصرة قصة لفكرة المعني على حد تعبير جيلبرت رايل. وتسلك دراسة المعنى في عصرنا عدة طرائق. تأتي في طليعتها طريقتان. ترتبط الأولي بالنظريات الصورية التي اقترحها فريجه، وفتجنشتين المبكر، وكواين، وتشومسكي، ودميت. وترتبط الثانية بنظرية الاستعمال التي اقترحها فتجنشتين المتأخر، وأوستن، ورايل، وستراوسون، وجرايس، وسيرل وتحفل النظريات الصورية بالبنية الصورية للغات، والعلاقات المتبادلة بين الجمل،على حين تؤكد نظريات الاستعمال على دور المتكلمين في تحديد المعنى وفهمه. ويقدم هذا الكتاب دراسة تحليلية نقدية لنظرية قصد الاتصال (النظرية القصدية) في المعنى عند جرايس (1988-1913) الذي أعطى المتكلمين ومقاصدهم مكانة محورية في تفسير المعنى، ويهدف أيضا إلى صياغة الروابط بين نظرية قصد الاتصال في علم الدلالة ونظرية الاقتضاء التخاطبي في علم الاستعمال المعنى، علم الدلالة، علم الاستعمال، المعنى لدى المتكلم، الاقتضاء التخاطبي، قواعد المحادثة، النظريات الصورية، نظريات الاستعمال، فريجه، جرايس، سيرل . (shrink)

This paper uses the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan as a case study in epistemic injustice by shifting the Question Under Discussion. Drawing on recent work in formal pragmatic theory, I show that the manipulation of discourse structure—in particular, by way of shifting the Question Under Discussion mid-discourse—can constitute an act of epistemic injustice. I argue that the “All Lives Matter” response to the “Black Lives Matter” slogan is one such case; this response shifts the (...) Question Under Discussion governing the overarching discourse from Do Black lives matter? to Which lives matter? This manipulation of the discourse structure systematically obscures the intended meaning of “Black lives matter” and disincentivizes future utterances of it. (shrink)

How do conventions of communication emerge? How do sounds or gestures take on a semantic meaning, and how do pragmatic conventions emerge regarding the passing of adequate, reliable, and relevant information? My colleagues and I have attempted in earlier work to extend spatialized game theory to questions of semantics. Agent-based simulations indicate that simple signaling systems emerge fairly naturally on the basis of individual information maximization in environments of wandering food sources and predators. Simple signaling emerges by means of any (...) of various forms of updating on the behavior of immediate neighbors: imitation, localized genetic algorithms, and partial training in neural nets. Here the goal is to apply similar techniques to questions of pragmatics. The motivating idea is the same: the idea that important aspects of pragmatics, like important aspects of semantics, may fall out as a natural results of information maximization in informational networks. The attempt below is to simulate fundamental elements of the Gricean picture: in particular, to show within networks of very simple agents the emergence of behavior in accord with the Gricean maxims. What these simulations suggest is that important features of pragmatics, like important aspects of semantics, don't have to be added in a theory of informational networks. They come for free. (shrink)

Vocal fry is a phonation, or voicing, in which an individual drops their voice below its natural register and consequently emits a low, growly, creaky tone of voice. Media outlets have widely acknowledged it as a generational vocal style characteristic of millennial women. Critics of vocal fry often claim that it is an exclusively female vocal pattern, and some say that the voicing is so distracting that they cannot understand what is being said under the phonation. Claiming that a phonation (...) is so distracting as to prevent uptake of the semantic content of an utterance associated with it is an extreme reaction, especially when accompanied by demands for women to change their phonation. We argue that this reaction limits women's communicative autonomy. We analyze the extreme reaction to female vocal fry, which we characterize as a non-content-based response, from the perspectives of philosophy of language, feminist epistemology, and linguistics. We argue that when fry is heard as annoying and distracting, it is because the hearer interprets the speaker as echoing an utterance from a position of authority to which she is not entitled. We show that this reaction encodes conscious or unconscious sexist attitudes toward women's voices. (shrink)

In questa nota si fornisce un esempio preliminare di analisi pragmatica delle strutture musicali. Nell’analisi, la stipulazione di una pragmatica musicale segue strettamente recenti proposte presentate in ambito semantico, in cui si illustrano le potenziali virtù rappresentazionali delle strutture musicali. In particolare, in questa nota si suggerisce la presenza di strategie di ricostruzione dei significati musicali le quali intervengono a prevenire la realizzazione di contenuti semantici contraddittori. L’evidenza utilizzata è ricavata da alcune misure del madrigale primo del II libro dei (...) madrigali di Monteverdi (1590), e dal testo (di T. Tasso) che le accompagna; sviluppi dell’analisi qui proposta dovranno fondarsi su evidenze indipendenti e auspicabilmente naturali. (shrink)

Recent pragmatic accounts of slurs argue that the offensiveness of slurs is generated by a speaker's free choice to use a slur opposed to a more appropriate and semantically equivalent neutral counterpart. I argue that the theoretical role of neutral counterparts on such views is overstated. I consider two recent pragmatic analyses, Bolinger (2017) and Nunberg (2018), which rely heavily upon the optionality of slurs, namely, that a speaker exercises a deliberate lexical choice to use a slur when they could (...) have easily used a neutral counterpart instead. Against such views, I argue that across a range of different offensive uses of slurs, a speaker's choice to use a slur opposed to a neutral counterpart plays little to no role in accounting for why the slur generates offence. Such cases cast serious doubt upon the explanatory depth of these pragmatic analyses, and raise more general concerns for views which draw upon the relationship between a slur and its neutral counterpart. The main upshot is this: theorists should exercise caution in assuming that neutral counterparts play any fundamental or systemic role in explaining why slurs are offensive. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that a serious philosophical investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary is both possible and desirable, and I show that it possesses a distinctively moral dimension that has so far been overlooked. I start, in Section II, by offering an original characterisation of the distinction between the illocutionary and the perlocutionary derived from the degree of predictability and stability that differentiates their respective effects. In Section III, I argue that, in order to grasp the specificity (...) of the perlocutionary, we must focus on the total speech situation, which I define as conversation. Then, in Section IV, I show that an investigation of the domain of the perlocutionary requires us to draw a conceptual distinction between recognition and acknowledgment. This distinction proves to be crucial, because the success of perlocutions normally depends on something more than what Austin calls the ‘securing of uptake’: the reciprocity condition for illocutions needs to be supplemented, in the case of perlocutions, with an analysis of what I call the ‘grammar of acknowledgment.’ Lastly, in Section V, I elaborate the notion of ‘perlocutionary responsibility,’ a specific form of moral responsibility for the consequences of utterances that are not (entirely) predictable. (shrink)

This paper has two interconnected goals -- one defensive and fairly conservative, the other more novel and enterprising. The first goal is to defend a broadly Gricean approach to verbal irony from the post-Gricean criticisms which have emerged in the intervening literature --i.e., all things considered, verbal irony is best viewed as one among many species of particularized conversational implicature. The subsequent goal is to work toward developing a significantly original theory of verbal irony, within this Gricean orientation, which aims (...) to take into account and rectify some omissions in and shortcomings of Grice’s very brief published remarks on the topic. (shrink)

This paper considers four lines of objection to the efficacy or worth of Grice's cancellability test for conversational implicatures – the coherence objection, the entailment objection, the sarcasm objection, and the ambiguity objection. I argue that the test survives these objections relatively unscathed; and hence conclude that the cancellability test is still a significant, useful, reliable indicator at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

Why do we use epistemic modals like 'might'? According to Factualism, the function of 'might' is to exchange information about state-of-affairs in the modal universe. As an alternative to Factualism, this paper offers a game-theoretic rationale for epistemic possibility operators in a Bayesian setting. The background picture is one whereby communication facilitates coordination, but coordination could fail if there's too much uncertainty, since the players' ability to share a belief is undermined. However, 'might' and related expressions can be used to (...) reveal one's uncertainty, and exploit this to coordinate despite the lack of a common epistemic ground. The final result is a way to articulate a non-Factualist view of epistemic possibility modals that builds on their standard semantics. (shrink)

Generics are sentences that express generalizations about a category or about its members. They display a characteristic context-sensitivity: the same generic can express a statistical regularity, a principled connection, or a norm. Sally Haslanger (2014) argues that this phenomenon depends on the implicit content that generics carry in different contexts. -/- I elaborate on Haslanger’s proposal, arguing that the implicit content of generics is complex and constituted by two different propositions. A first proposition, that I here call the robustness proposition, (...) characterizes as robust the link between the category the generic is about and the predicated property. This proposition is relatively invariant and is, as I claimed elsewhere, a generalized conversational implicature. In this paper, I will argue that a second implicature, the ‘explanatory implicature’, arises which crucially depends on what explanation is called for in a certain context. Given its context-dependence, I conclude that this proposition is a particularized conversational implicature. While generics convey by default that the category and the property are strictly related, the specification of this relation hinges on the characteristics of the context in which the generic occurs. (shrink)

The present study focuses on the received version of speech act theory as developed by Searle. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate how Searle formulates precise and general conditions for illocutionary act individuation based on the linguistic description of inherent individual intentions. I argue for the impossibility of such individuation processes.

The present paper focuses on the Austinian approach to intentionality. My aim is to demonstrate that the Austinian concept and its application in the classical version of speech act theory are fundamentally different from the treatment of intentionality in the received version of speech act theory (as developed by Searle). The received version of speech act theory treats intentional states as a bunch of internal individual beliefs, desires, and intentions, while it assumes that conventions belong to the external social domains. (...) Contrary to that, the Austinian version of speech act theory doesn’t make a sharp ideological distinction between intentional states and conventions as a result of Austin’s natural realism. (shrink)

The main hypothesis of the article is that there has been an attitude change in the field of pragmatics: the philosophical notion of intentionality has penetrated in a cognitive approach. The first aim is to argue for this attitude change via analyzing classical pragmatical writings (works of J. R. Searle and H. P. Grice) and the relevance- theoretical approach of D. Sperber and D. Wilson. The second aim is to argue for the legitimacy of the attitude change by presenting a (...) new direction of research within the field of cognitive pragmatics. The author summarizes Dan Sperber's metarepresentations-first hypo-thesis about the evolution of ostensive-inferential communication, identifies its implicit presuppositions and analyzes its implications for evolutionary psychology and other related disciplines. The conclusions are the following: (1) the philosophical notion of intentionality play an important role in cognitive pragmatics as well (i.e. it uses the Gricean concept of non-natural meaning, and the Searleian distinction of first- and second-order intentionality), (2) the attitude change has enriched the notion of intentionality, (3) this enrichment makes new research directions possible in the field of pragmatics. (shrink)

It seems that the most common strategy to solve the liar paradox is to argue that liar sentences are meaningless and, consequently, truth-valueless. The other main option that has grown in recent years is the dialetheist view that treats liar sentences as meaningful, truth-apt and true. In this paper I will offer a new approach that does not belong in either camp. I hope to show that liar sentences can be interpreted as meaningful, truth-apt and false, but without engendering any (...) contradiction. This seemingly impossible task can be accomplished once the semantic structure of the liar sentence is unpacked by a quantified analysis. The paper will be divided in two sections. In the first section, I present the independent reasons that motivate the quantificational strategy and how it works in the liar sentence. In the second section, I explain how this quantificational analysis allows us to explain the truth teller sentence and a counter-example advanced against truthmaker maximalism, and deal with some potential objections. (shrink)

It is usually accepted that conditional sentences are sui generis and enigmatic. In this paper I try to make them more accessible by interpreting them as claims to relations of implication restricted to a parameter world. This interpretation revives an old idea that fell into disuse, but in its improved version leads to refreshing solutions to known problems in conditional theory. The many benefits of this approach are evidenced by its insightful explanation of some apparent counter-examples to classical argumentative forms (...) (the paradoxes of material implication, antecedent strengthening, contraposition, hypothetical syllogism, conditional negation), conditional standoffs, the problem of counterfactuals, the referential/inferential nature of conditionals, the Apartheid thesis, the triviality results and conditionals embedding. (shrink)

Moti Mizrahi (2013) presented a putative counterexample to Hypothetical Syllogism (HS) for indicative conditionals aiming to succeed where previous attempts to refute HS have failed. Lee Walters (2014a) objected that Mizrahi’s putative counterexample results from an inadequate analysis of conditionals with embedded modals, but advanced new putative counterexamples to HS for subjunctive conditionals that are supposed to bypass this issue (Walters, 2014a; 2014b). It is argued that Walter’s analysis of embedded modals is unnecessary to prevent Mizrahi’s putative counterexample, since the (...) example can be disarmed either as a fallacy of equivocation or as a contextual fallacy. Walters’s putative counterexamples to HS are also criticized as contextual fallacies. The conclusion is that neither Mizrahi nor Walters provided compelling reasons to reject HS. (shrink)

Intensional evidence is any reason to accept a proposition that is not the truth values of the proposition accepted or, if it is a complex proposition, is not the truth values of its propositional contents. Extensional evidence is non-intensional evidence. Someone can accept a complex proposition, but deny its logical consequences in two circumstances: (1) when her acceptance is based on intensional evidence, while the logical consequences of the proposition presuppose the acceptance of extensional evidence, e.g., she can refuse the (...) logical consequence of a proposition she accepts because she doesn’t know what are the truth-values of its propositional contents; (2) when she accepts a proposition based on extensional evidence, but thinks that this evidence is insufficient to establish its logical consequences, which would require intensional evidence. It is argued that this tension is responsible for the counter-intuitive aspects of the material account of conditionals involving the negation of conditionals, hypothetical syllogism, contraposition and the inferential passage from disjunctions to conditionals (or-to-if). This tension is also behind some known puzzles involving conditionals, namely, conditional stand-offs, Adam pairs, the cheating partner example, the problem of counterfactuals, the burglar’s puzzle and the jump-out conditionals. It is shown that this tension is always dissolved in favour of extensional evidence, since intensional evidence is defeasible, while extensional evidence is not. Thus, it is irrational to deny the logical consequences of an accepted proposition due to its reliance on intensional evidence and ignorance of its extensional evidence. (shrink)

The material account claims that indicative conditionals are material. However, the conventional wisdom even among material account enthusiasts is that the material account cannot be extended to subjunctive conditionals. There are mainly three reasons that motivate this consensus: (1) the belief that if subjunctives were material, most subjunctive conditionals would be vacuously true, which is implausible; (2) its inconsistency with Adam pairs, which suggest that indicative and subjunctive conditionals have different truth conditions; and (3) the belief that it is an (...) inferior hypothesis compared to the possible world theories. I will argue against (1) that the counterintuitive aspects of vacuously true conditionals can be explained away in a uniform fashion, regardless of whether they are indicatives or subjunctives. I reinforce this assumption by showing that the positive arguments for the material account of indicatives are also intuitively valid for subjunctives. The point mentioned in (2) is resisted by explaining Adam pairs as logically equivalent conditionals that can be appropriate at different times, depending of the speaker’s epistemic situation. Finally, (3) is criticised by making the case that the possible world account faces insurmountable problems and that a full-blown material account of indicatives and subjunctives is overall a more elegant solution. (shrink)

The material account of indicative conditionals states that indicative conditional sentences and the material implication have the same truth conditions. Recently, Adam Rieger has carried out a survey of arguments in favour of the material account. In this paper, I extend this survey by presenting yet more arguments for the material account. On top of presenting more arguments, I also want to argue that it is plausible to extend the material account to subjunctive conditionals. For that reason, the arguments here (...) presented contain principles that hold for both indicative and subjunctive conditionals. Towards the end, I defend why there are good reasons to accept these new arguments and try to explain why similar arguments have been somewhat unpopular. (shrink)

Until recently, the accepted wisdom in the US was that overt racism would doom a national political campaign. This led to the use of covert messaging strategies like dogwhistles. Recent political events have called this wisdom into question. In this paper, I explore what has happened in recent years to our norms against racist speech, and to the ways that they are applied. I describe several mechanisms that seem to have contributed to the changes that I outline.

El presente artículo busca hacer una revisión del concepto de verdad como fundamento del conocimiento científico: desde el pragmatismo de William James y Jürgen Habermas hasta las nociones pragmáticas de Charles -/- Sanders Peirce, con la intención de mostrar los rasgos pertinentes -/- e insuficiencias de cada postura. De manera complementaria, se -/- buscará dar cuenta de los niveles: pragmático (semiótico-filosófico) -/- y pragmatista (psicológico), en los que funciona dicho concepto -/- dentro de la filosofía peirciana. Finalmente, tal esbozo teórico (...) nos permitirá establecer una -/- definición operativa de verdad como condición trascendental, y -/- que resulte menos problemática para representar el conocimiento -/- científico. (shrink)

Este artículo tiene el objetivo de explorar algunas funciones semióticas que constituyen el espacio urbano. Se revisarán algunas categorías y operaciones semióticas relevantes en la comprensión del espacio para que, desde ahí, se pueda explorar el sentido de la noción Centro Histórico como un concepto fundamental en la construcción del imaginario social en las ciudades de occidente.

El presente trabajo parte de un supuesto: la historia como un espacio semiotico que se edifica sobre la base de un sistema de categorias. En este sentido, los signos con los cuales se construye la realidad "ideal" de la historia se articulan en razon de correspondencias especificas determinadas por un esquema particular de relacion. Asi pues, el proposito de la este estudio es mostrar un espacio especulativo que de cuenta de las categorias de la filosofia de la historia, con las (...) cuales se construye un esquema semiotico para el analisis de la historia y la cultura. En razon de esto, se intenta describir, por una parte, algunas corrientes de la filosofia de la historia; por otra, la vertiente constructivista que establece un esquema para la articulacion en sentido ideal del hecho historico. De la relacion entre ambas vertientes se busca exponer la utilidad del lenguaje, categorias y relaciones, como instrumento teorico en la actividad analitica e interpretativa en aras de poder determinar el proceso historico como manifestacion semiotica de una cultura, pueblo, nacion.. (shrink)

Alessandro Capone Franco Lo Piparo Marco Carapezza Editors Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology Volume 1 Editor-in-Cheif Alessandro. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy ...

The rise to power of Donald Trump has been shocking in many ways. One of these was that it disrupted the preexisting consensus that overt racism would be death to a national political campaign. In this paper, I argue that Trump made use of what I call “racial figleaves”—additional utterances that provide just enough cover to give reassurance to voters who are racially resentful but don’t wish to see themselves as racist. These figleaves also, I argue, play a key role (...) in shifting our norms about what counts as racist: they bring it about that something which would previously have been seen as revealing obvious racism is now seen as the sort of thing that a nonracist might say. This gives them tremendous power to corrupt not just our political discourse but our culture more broadly. (shrink)

En una primera parte expondré la crítica pragmatista a la visión tradicional del lenguaje; luego, contrastaré las visiones dentro de las que critican a la tradición: contextualismo y contextualismo radical. En una segunda expondré el tipo de semántica que se podría sostener bajo esta concepción del lenguaje: una semántica no proposicionalista. Finalmente, quisiera proponer que, así como en las ciencias sociales el localismo metodológico plantea la emergencia de entidades colectivas (ya sean las clases o instituciones) —sin ser meramente epifenomenales, que (...) no obstante son realizadas y en principio deben poder ser reducidas a la agencia de actores racionales—, para el caso del lenguaje sería similar. Esto llama a recoger cierto espíritu en Saussure, que buscó otorgar a la ciencia lingüística un objeto de estudio con autonomía. (shrink)

The goal of the present research was to determine whether certain speaker intentions conveyed through prosody in an unfamiliar language can be accurately recognized. English and Cantonese utterances expressing sarcasm, sincerity, humorous irony, or neutrality through prosody were presented to English and Cantonese listeners unfamiliar with the other language. Listeners identified the communicative intent of utterances in both languages in a crossed design. Participants successfully identified sarcasm spoken in their native language but identified sarcasm at near-chance levels in the unfamiliar (...) language. Both groups were relatively more successful at recognizing the other attitudes when listening to the unfamiliar language. Our data suggest that while sarcastic utterances in Cantonese and English share certain acoustic features, these cues are insufficient to recognize sarcasm between languages; rather, this ability depends on language experience. (shrink)

In this paper we seek an inferential and cognitive model explaining some characteristics of abduction to composite hypotheses. In the first section, we introduce the matter of composite hypotheses, stressing how it is coherent with the intuitive and philosophical contention that a single event can be caused not only by several causes acting together, but also by several kinds of causation. In the second section, we argue that gossip could serve as an interesting model to study the generation of composite (...) hypotheses at a larger scale: several characteristics of gossip make it extremely prone to produce composite hypotheses considering different levels of causation. In the third and final section, we try to illustrate some specificities of abduction to composite hypotheses for individual agents basing on the analysis of collective agents. (shrink)

[First published 09/2016; substantive revision 02/2021.] Evaluative terms and concepts are often divided into “thin” and “thick”. We don’t evaluate actions and persons merely as good or bad, or right or wrong, but also as kind, courageous, tactful, selfish, boorish, and cruel. The latter evaluative concepts are "descriptively thick": their application somehow involves both evaluation and a substantial amount of non-evaluative description. This article surveys various attempts to answer four fundamental questions about thick terms and concepts. (1) A “combination question”: (...) how exactly do thick terms and concepts relate evaluation and non-evaluative description? (2) A “location question”: is evaluation somehow inherent to thick terms and concepts, such as perhaps an aspect of their meaning, or merely a feature of their use? (3) A “delineation question”: how do thick terms differ from the thin and from other kinds of evaluative terms? (4) Given answers to these questions, what broader philosophical significance and applications might thick concepts have? (shrink)

Source: Author: Roksana Dayani, Fazel Asadi Amjad This article is devoted to analyze verbal interactions in Oleanna [1993] within Grice’s Cooperative Principles [1975] in order to illustrate how the shift of power gradually takes place in the academic discourse of the play. Maxims of this principle are applied on John’s utterances in the first act on which the foundation of asymmetric relationship is laid. As expected within Grice’s framework, the breaching of maxims, besides their observation, is performed by John through (...) four ways of violating, opting out, clashing and flouting. The conversational implicaturs consequently generating from the flouting of some maxims, most frequently of quality, and quantity, conflict with Carol’s assumptions about the state of professorship in academic context which motivate her for gaining power. The study, thereby, aims to demonstrate how clashing and flouting of maxims by John make him weak to Carol’s new voice and culminate in reversal in teacher-student relationship in the play. ]]>. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Designing Academic Conferences in the Light of Second-Order Cybernetics” by Laurence D. Richards. Upshot: Fostering conversation is shown to be a central element in a cybernetic approach to meeting design. A history of successful meetings on cybernetic themes suggests how designing for conversation may also be applied to academic conferences generally.