Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 388-399, April 2022.

Utterances of natural language sentences can be used to communicate not just contents, but also forces. This paper examines this topic from a cross-linguistic perspective on sentential mood. Recent work in this area focuses on conversational dynamics: the three sentence types can be associated with distinctive kinds of conversational effects called sentential forces, modeled as three kinds of updates to the discourse context. This paper has two main goals. First, it provides two arguments, on empirical and methodological grounds, for treating (...) sentential force as part of a compositional dynamic semantics, rather than a dynamic pragmatics. Second, it formulates a minimal dynamic semantic analysis that covers the data at the heart of these arguments, incorporating existing analyses of the three major moods, evidentials and conjunction. A further aim of the paper is to sharpen the distinction between sentential force and utterance force, and discuss its implications. (shrink)

Qualitative immediacy (also termed quality in its philosophical sense and aesthetic quality) is of fundamental importance within the pragmatic conception of meaning as interpretive act, and yet it has been virtually ignored by social scientists. The concept is traced through its foundations in Peirce's philosophy, its development in Dewey's theory of aesthetic experience, and its relation to the general pragmatic conception of the self. The importance of the "I" in Mead's view of the self is seen as similar to Firstness (...) in Peirce and aesthetic experience in Dewey. Those turning to qualitative approaches ought to consider qualitative immediacy as a genuine addition to our understanding of human communication. (shrink)

The paper extends previous accounts of informational privacy as a contextual notion. Where previous accounts have focused on interpretations of the privacy context itself as being contextual and open for negotiation and interpretation, this paper extends those analyses and shows that personal information itself is in fact best understood as contextual and situational—and as such open for interpretation. The paper reviews the notion of information as it has been applied in informational privacy and philosophy of information, and suggests that personal (...) information ought to be regarded as communicative acts. The paper suggests a reconceptualization of informational privacy from having its focus on controlling, limiting, and restricting access to material carriers of information to a focus on a regulation of the use, analysis, and interpretation of personal information. (shrink)

Using an ethnographic case study, this research examines three competing hypotheses of how a community acts. The study attempts to reconstruct the events that led various actors in the community to seek the formation of an industrial base as an alternative economic source for the community. The roles of unique events, specific persons and particular strategies in the formation of the industrial base are examined. It was found that unique events play a very important role in the community's concern (...) over economic alternatives to agriculture and their success in securing such alternatives. These events were also important to key individuals within the community, placing them in positions to act in the industrial base formation. Strategies of community action used in the industrial base formation and since that time were found to be consistent with the “centralized weak-tie network” hypothesis of action or ganization. This type of community action organization seems to be very effective at the community level but tends to be very exclusionary of the community population as a whole. (shrink)

A context-directed theory of communicative acts is one that thinks of a communicative act as a proposal to change the context in some way. I focus on three influential examples: Robert Stalnaker’s theory of assertion, Craige Roberts’ theory of questions, and Paul Portner’s theory of directives. These theories distinguish different categories of communicative acts by distinguishing the components of context that they aim to change. I argue that the components of context they posit turn out (...) not to be distinct after all, and that these theories therefore col­lapse the taxonomic distinctions that they set out to draw. Although it might be possible to avoid this problem by devising a more adequate theory of the nature of context, I argue that it should be taken as a reductio of context-directed theories. (shrink)

To justify attraction to Dominant Traditional Masculinities and lack of attraction to non-aggressive men, some women defend opinions such as “there are no frigid women, only inexperienced men”. Such statements generate a large amount of sexual-affective insecurity in oppressed men and contribute to decoupling desire and ethics in sexual-affective relationships, which, in turn, reinforces a model of attraction to traditional masculinities that use coercion, thus perpetuating gender-based violence. New Alternative Masculinities represent a type of masculinity that reacts to reverse such (...) consequences with communicative acts, in which they state that women who support such discourses have never met a NAM man or have never experienced a successful sexual-affective relationship where passion, love, desire, and equality are all included. This article presents data analyzing these communicative acts to ultimately find the key to NAM communication that would contribute to changing attraction patterns. The data was collected using communicative daily life stories of three heterosexual white men and one heterosexual white woman, between the ages of 30 and 40. Findings emphasize the importance of self-confidence manifested by NAM men when communicating about sex and facing these offensive mottos in the presence of other men and women. Findings also demonstrate that supportive egalitarian relationships encourage the emergence of self-confidence in NAM men and that NAM men's self-confident communicative acts foster healthy relationships and obliterate coercive ones. (shrink)

Some feminist discourses blame some men for gender inequality, gender domination, and gender-based violence. Some women use such discourse as a perfect scenario to criticize some men’s behavior. Indeed, they usually do so with Oppressed Traditional Masculinities but not with Dominant Traditional Masculinities, who are the men who were violent with those women and with whom some of those women chose to have relationships. However, there have always been men who have been on the side of women and have never (...) committed violence against them. Therefore, New Alternative Masculinities reject being indicated as guilty of the violence committed against women by DTM. Through a communicative approach, applying six semi-structured interviews with a communicative orientation and a communicative data analysis of all information, this article explores both women’s communicative acts that blame OTM for what DTM have done to women and NAM’s reactions to these accusations to stop such blaming to make it possible to overcome hegemonic discourses. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the consistency and accuracy of Husserl’s sketch of a theory about non-declarative sentences in the last chapter of Logical Investigations. Whereas the consistency is acknowledged, the accuracy is denied, because Husserl’s treatment of non-declarative phrases such as questions or orders implies that those phrases contain, in some way, a declarative sentence and an objectifying act. To construct a question like »is A B?« as being equivalent to a declarative sentence such as »I ask whether A (...) is B« is, indeed, a false phenomenological analysis, because to ask or to order or to beg is not to assert. I turn, then, to John Austin’s theory of performative utterances and illocutionary acts in order to find a more accurate approach to the logical-semantic content of non-declarative sentences. Eventually, I show how this Husserlian theory of non-declarative sentences has a negative impact on the phenomenological theory of social acts and communication. (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 -/- .

The chapter contextualizes and reconstructs Walther’s theory of social acts. In her view a given act qualifies as social if it is performed in the name of or on behalf of a community. Interestingly, Walther’s understanding of that notion is patently at odds with the idea of a social act originally propounded by Reinach. According to Reinach, an act is social if it “addresses” other persons and if it, for its success, requires them to grasp it. We claim that (...) to explain Walther’s reconfiguration of this concept, one has to look into the use that Husserl makes of it. Husserl adopts this idea from Reinach to tackle a problem that is not discussed by the latter. This is the problem of how communities, by means of social acts, are “constituted” in consciousness. Walther shares with Husserl the concern about the constitution of communities and her radical revision of Reinach’s idea is presented as an attempt to offer an alternative solution to Husserl’s problem. (shrink)

Austin's distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts has offered a fruitful way of focussing the relation between language and communication. In particular, by adopting the distinction we attend to linguistic and communicative subjects as actors, not just processors or conduits of information. Yet in many attempts to explicate the constitution of illocutionary acts the subject as actor is subsumed within the role of linguistic rules or conventions. I propose an account of illocutionary acts in which rules (...) or conventions are secondary to what I call communicative skills. These skills are taken as the primary component of communicative competence. They are derived from the principle that linguistic communication is not ultimately a linguistic matter, but relates instead to the way a communicator uses language. This principle is found in the work of Donald Davidson, but Davidson has tended to concentrate on semantics, and leaves the details of linguistic communication for pragmatics. The aim of this paper is to defend the general principle and supply some pragmatic details. (shrink)

During a qualitative survey we made among AIDS prevention campaigners in France, respondents stated in particular that they believed in the effectiveness of activities that prompt subjects to accomplish « mini-acts » before and after receiving persuasive arguments. As their opinion does not derive from scientific literature, we carried out an experiment, in an everyday environment with 196 subjects chosen at random and based on theories of persuasive communication and commitment, to investigate the validity of representations concerning these « (...) mini-acts » accomplished via the Internet. The results show, in particular, that the campaigners’ intuitive beliefs are sound, since these mini-acts effectively contribute to AIDS prevention. (shrink)

These short cases are intended to stimulate thought or perhaps serve as a useful tool in a classroom or discussion group setting. The cases have been modified to protect confidentiality but do represent real life elements and situations that have been encountered by ACT team staff. Many or most case situations presented may be familiar to ACT Team staff members. Will all ACT team members view each of these as ethical problems? Were others aware that all of these things happen (...) within the clinical milieu of assertive community treatment? (shrink)

For the past two decades, speech-act theory has been one of the basic tools for studying pragmatics from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. In this paper, I want to discuss certain aspects of the theory with respect to data from early communication in children. My aim will be to show that some of the central assumptions of the speech-act model of utterance comprehension need to be rethought. In the second part of the paper, I will outline a different (...) pragmatic approach to verbal understanding and present a preliminary application of this approach to the developmental data. (shrink)

Introduction: Christian moral action -- Stanley Hauerwas -- Reinhard Hütter -- Common threads -- Thomas Aquinas -- Toward an ecumenical ethic of grace -- Conclusion: A community-centered ecumenical ethic of grace.

Citizens are called upon to become active participants in creating a more sustainable food system. As food citizens, people participate in defining and constructing their food systems according to their needs and values. In food policies, the concept of food citizenship is often left undefined or with reference only to individual activities. In the food citizenship literature, the role of nonhuman agency in constituting food citizenship needs more examination. Here we investigate food citizenship activities in a citizen-led community-supported agriculture group (...) and explore the role of materiality in constituting food citizenship. We ask (1) what is the role of material-discursive arrangements in community-supported agriculture activities, and (2) how does materiality constitute food citizenship? We analyze semi-structured interviews, as well as observation and visual material, using qualitative content analysis. Our findings indicate that materialities, such as the field, time, and body, play a central role in community-supported agriculture activities. With materialities, food citizenship is understood as collective and active doing, aiming to change the food system. Instead of endorsing food citizenship as a human trait or status, we claim that it is more productive to regard it as a phenomenon, produced in intra-action with(in) material-discursive arrangements. Acknowledging nonhuman agency emphasizes the political, collective, and responsible nature of citizenship as well as the power relations behind the constitution of citizenship. We conclude that in food policies more attention should be paid to collective ways of civic participation and to the materiality of becoming a food citizen. (shrink)

Surface acting is a heavy emotional and cognitive task practiced by nurses, which has negative consequences on their wellbeing. The shortage of nurses along with the occurrence of the COVID-19 pandemic has worsened the situation. Based on job demands-resources and conservation of resources theories, this study aims to investigate the adverse impact of practicing SA and buffering effect of a sense of community on job stress and cognitive weariness among Iranian nurses confronting COVID-19. As this study is written within the (...) scope of Frontiers’ call for research on “Spirituality in the workplace,” the findings suggest that the aforementioned factors are in significant positive relationships. Furthermore, the empirical evidence indicates that there is a significant indirect effect of SA on CW through JS. In addition, results reveal that there is a buffering effect of SOC on the SA and JS relationship, while there is no significant moderation effect regarding the JS and cognitive weariness association. The findings of this study provide theoretical and practical implications within the scope of spirituality in the workplace. (shrink)

Suppose a diner says, 'Can you pass the salt?' Although her utterance is literally a question (about the physical abilities of the addressee), most would take it as a request (that the addressee pass the salt). In such a case, the request is performed indirectly by way of directly asking a question. Accordingly this utterance is known as an indirect speech act. On the standard account of such speech acts, a single utterance constitutes two distinct speech acts. On (...) this account then, 'Can you pass the salt?' is both a question and a request. In a provocative essay, Rod Bertolet argues that there are no indirect speech acts. According to Bertolet, 'Can you pass the salt?' is only a question. It is a question that merely functions as a request (without also being one). In this paper we respond to Bertolet's skeptical argument. Appealing to Searle's theory of speech acts and to certain features of linguistic communication, we argue that, despite Bertolet's challenge, there is good reason to countenance indirect speech acts. (shrink)

In March 2010, President Obama signed into law The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Although there is much in the ACA that is endorsed by the Catholic health ministry, the many positive provisions of the ACA have been overshadowed for the Catholic Church and the Catholic healthcare community by the controversial provisions requiring access to all FDA-approved sterilization and contraceptive medications (75 Fed. Reg. 137 (19 July 2010)) Typically, these drugs and services have not been covered by the (...) health plans of many religious employers including Catholic hospitals, universities, and social service agencies. Acknowledging the existence of religious-based objections to the provisions of these .. (shrink)

We compare a number of influential approaches to human communication with the aim of understanding what it means for interpersonal communication to be a form of social action. In particular, we discuss the large-scale social normativity advocated by speech act theory, the view of communication as small-scale social interaction proper of Gricean approaches, and the intimate connection between communication and cooperation defended by Tomasello. We then argue in favor of a small-scale view of communication capable of accounting for the normative (...) effects of communicative acts; to this purpose, we introduce the concept of interpersonal normativity and analyze its relationship with communicative intentions. (shrink)

Community acts of material signification are an important form of sculpture that occur through an exchange of human and non-human agents. First these acts of sculpture are discussed in relation to extended mind, the morphogenic model of making, material engagement theory and entanglement to frame how humans shape the world as collaborators with non-humans by extending mind through material. I then discuss various acts of community material accumulation that I consider sculpture, skateboarding and clay forming as evidence (...) of extended mind, comparison of the morphogenic to the hylomorphic model of making, occurrences of materials affecting other materials absent of human intervention and my recent participatory installation Stone Fruit. These topics are used to present a lens for understanding the production of sculpture as a collaboration with opposed to dictation on systems of materials, places and people. This lens, in turn, presents community sites of material accumulation to be an important form of sculpture production. (shrink)