This book has been inspired by Walter Benjamin’s idea of an afterlife of an original in its translations and probes into a wide variety of extensions of Carroll’s story in six languages. For one thing, it deals with language that speaks and more or less automatically steers its users in a particular direction and, for another, it discusses the creativity of individual translators who not only share a definite picture of the world with their language community but, in (...) great many instances, reveal a unique resourcefulness in resisting its power. Each chapter deals first with a separate theoretical issue (e.g. literalness, style, gender, and tense) and then proceeds to examine its practical actualization in various translations of Alice. (shrink)

The article discusses the problem of coexistence of different types of rationality, different scientific and linguistic pictures of the world as well as the problem of the adoption by one culture of another culture’s scientific picture of the world with accompanying transformations of the linguistic picture of the world of the recipient culture. The article deals with the experience of mutual research and collision between Western and Chinese traditions, using the example of medical (...) science. The author examines the problem of the transfer of scientific medical knowledge from Western to Chinese culture in the context of a radical mismatch of scientific and linguistic pictures. The articles considers two different approaches to the translation of Western medical terminology into Chinese, developed at different times by English translators Benjamin Hobson and John Fryer. Hobson was focused on harmonizing new terminology with the usual concepts of the world language picture of the recipient. Fryer preferred to introduce new specific terms, artificially created directly for the needs of a new scientific picture of the world. In the field of medical terminology, the first of the two approaches turns out to be more viable, since it is more focused on its “end users” – Chinese doctors who study Western medicine in order to use its methods in their medical practice. Therefore, there is only partial applicability of the approaches, methods and terminology developed in one tradition for the evaluation and development of another tradition. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary notion picture of the world makes research works devoted to this area of studies challenging from the point of view of finding interconnections between linguistic and extra-linguistic factors in the process of structuring categories of words, including those functioning in terminological systems and subsystems. Legal pictures of the world are specific cultural phenomena that may differ in various countries due to the nationally specific features of law and legal culture development. One of the (...) most complicated problems of representing specific knowledge through linguistic, terminological, signifiers is the problem of linguistic categorization of concepts. The article considers the problem of forming legal categories based on word-building suffixes from the point of view of the development of the legal language ‘picture of the world’ [reflection of the world] closely associated with its conceptual picture. The conclusion is drawn that commonly used derivational suffixes transform their meanings in accordance with the legal taxonomies, forming the conceptual legal picture of the world. The results of theoretical studies in terminological conceptualization may be used in teaching legal English vocabulary in the form of systematic presentation of term-building patterns expressing certain conceptual categories. (shrink)

The article discusses the problems of constructing a scientific picture of the world in a technogenic civilization at the stage of its globalization. The interdependence of science, technology and society generates a number of issues of a socio-humanitarian and, in particular, ideological nature. Interdisciplinary forms of organization of sciences contribute to the development of borderline methodologies. These methodologies integrate the achievements and problems of specific disciplines into a certain overall picture. The ambitions of this worldview include space, (...) planetary nature with all geo – shells, as well as the biosphere, technosphere, sociosphere, anthroposphere. In the course of communicative interactions, scientists have developed methodological principles for constructing a picture of the world. These principles claim to be universal: integrity, consistency, coherence, structurality, evolution/involution, complexity, self-organization, human dimension. However, epistemic and communicative difficulties accompany the construction of a general scientific picture of the world. There are methodological, experimental, linguistic, cognitive barriers between disciplines. Also, the unevenness of their development is strong. Competition between disciplines and reductionist programs are often caused by social reasons – politicization, ideologization and commercialization of big science. Philosophy seeks to connect the idea of a scientific picture of the world with a change in self-consciousness and a person’s place in the world. The prospect of intellectual synthesis fluctuates between the transdisciplinary form of organization of collective scientific thinking and the ideological imperialism of individual philosophical and scientific programs. (shrink)

In this book, Andrew Inkpin considers the disclosive function of language—what language does in revealing or disclosing the world. His approach to this question is a phenomenological one, centering on the need to accord with the various experiences speakers can have of language. With this aim in mind, he develops a phenomenological conception of language with important implications for both the philosophy of language and recent work in the embodied-embedded-enactive-extended tradition of cognitive science. -/- Inkpin draws extensively on the (...) work of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, showing how their respective conceptions of language can be combined to complement each other within a unified view. From the early Heidegger, Inkpin extracts a basic framework for a phenomenological conception of language, comprising both a general picture of the role of language and a specific model of the function of words. Merleau-Ponty’s views are used to explicate the generic “pointing out”—or presentational—function of linguistic signs in more detail, while the late Wittgenstein is interpreted as providing versatile means to describe their many pragmatic uses. Having developed this unified phenomenological view, Inkpin explores its broader significance. He argues that it goes beyond the conventional realism/idealism opposition, that it challenges standard assumptions in mainstream post-Fregean philosophy of language, and that it makes a significant contribution not only to the philosophical understanding of language but also to 4e cognitive science. (shrink)

In this article I develop Heidegger's phenomenology of poetry, showing that it may provide grounds for rejecting claims that he lapses into linguistic idealism. Proceeding via an analysis of the three concepts of language operative in the philosopher's work, I demonstrate how poetic language challenges language's designative and world-disclosive functions. The experience with poetic language, which disrupts Dasein's absorption by emerging out of equipmentality in the mode of the broken tool, brings Dasein to wonder at the world's (...) existence in such a way that doubt about its reality cannot enter the picture. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on the notion of worldview as a conceptual scheme and the role of language in shaping our view of reality. In particular, I engage with Wittgenstein’s notion of World-picture in order to suggest an alternative account to the deceptive dogmatic conception of worldview, which is exemplified by C.I. Lewis’s account of cognitive experience. I argue that worldviews constitute the way in which the world is given in a particular socio-linguistic context and (...) they presuppose the mastery of a World-picture, that is, the inherited background of our acting and thinking. First, I will distinguish between two different uses of the term “worldview”. Then I will show the way in which a metaphysical-dogmatic conception of worldview leads to the Myth of the Semantic Given. Finally, I will present Wittgenstein’s notion of World-picture and its connection to the notion of worldview. (shrink)

The author examines the idea of "mind" in three linguistic pictures of the world - Russian, French and Chinese. The study is contrastive, the results are compared. The description of each idea is made according to a clear algorithm: the etymology of the word, the mythological roots of the concept, its compatibility, from the compatibility is distinguished real connotation according to V. A. Uspensky, a comparison of dictionary definitions is made. The aim of the study is to identify (...) the peculiarities of the idea of "mind" in the Russian, French and Chinese languages. The purpose of the comparison is to see the similarities and differences in the worldview of different peoples. Scientific methods of research are: comparative-historical method, method of generalization, method of semantic analysis. This topic is understudied, no linguocultural studies analyzing this idea in Russian, French and Chinese culture have been observed earlier, which constitutes the scientific novelty of the work. The results will contribute to mutual understanding between peoples, forming a kind of conceptual bridge, and will also be used in courses on regional studies, comparative studies of cultures, and in the teaching of the respective languages. (shrink)

v. 1. Mathematical expression of the main categories of philosophy and logic -- Kinematics and dynamics of exchange -- v. 2. Structure of space of the universe -- electrostatic and electromagnetic fields -- Particles and exchange in the electromagnetic field -- v. 3. Atomic structure of matter-space-time and physical properties of substance -- Physics and philosophy.

According to current cognitive linguistic theory, the abstract notion of TIME in many languages of the world is expressed through a metonymic relation involving direc-tion, irreversibility, continuity, segmentation, and measurability and one of two possible versions of the TIME AS ORIENTATION IN SPACE metaphor: either the observer moves or time does. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty argues for the possibility of understanding what he calls 'our primordial experience'of time through an exploration, analysis, comparison, and evaluation of the (...) different metaphors for time, not as they exist in themselves but as they are grounded in what other cognitive linguists have explored with respect to subjectivity, concept formation, and conceptual integration. This 'primordial experience' of time is possible because of the embodiment of ourselves in the world and gives rise to Merleau-Ponty’s theory of an ontology of the flesh; the fact that we are 'of' rather than 'in' the world gives rise to his theory of time as depth. In this paper, I show how Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of time might 1) clarify the picture Lakoff and Johnson give of the existence of time and 2) provide a philosophical foundation that integrates various contemporary cognitive linguistic theories. (shrink)

Ethotic arguments, such as arguments from expert opinion and ad hominem arguments, play an important role in communication practice. In this paper, we argue that there is another type of reasoning from ethos, in which people argue about actions in the world. These subspecies of ethotic arguments are very common in public debates: societies are involved in heated disputes about what should be done with monuments of historical figures such as Stalin or Colston: Should we demolish the building they (...) funded? Should we revere their statues? Should the street named after them be renamed?; and the general public vividly argue about what should be done with the legacy of producers, directors and actors in debates of the #MeToo movement: Should their new movies be distributed? Should their scenes be deleted from motion pictures? Should their stars from the Hollywood Walk of Fame be removed? Many arguments in these debates boil down to the character of the public figures: He was a slave trader!—But he is a part of our history; He harassed a young girl!—But he is an important actor. The reasoning step here is legitimised by the association between a person and an extra-linguistic object: the association between a historical figure and their statue or between an actor and their movie. The nature of this association is explained in the paper using Peirce’s theory of signs. We propose to extend an existing approach to patterns of reasoning from ethos that will help us to shed new light on ethotic argumentation and open an avenue for a systematic account of these unexplored argument forms. (shrink)

Physical cosmology is one of the disciplines at the forefront of modern science. Using existing physical theories and creating own ones, it describes the dynamics and evolution of the Universe, transforms and modernizes the scientific picture of the world on the largest possible scale. The article analyzes the main presuppositions and outcomes of nowadays cosmology, which are based on fundamental physical principles (theories) and astronomical observations. It has been revealed that throughout its existence as a science (about 100 (...) years), cosmology stimulated the emergence of a plenty of worldview-philosophical problems. Therefore, we need a comprehensive update of the philosophy of cosmology, which can help to realize such problems. Given the need for cooperation between cosmology and the philosophy of science, we propose to use various methodological, ontological, epistemological and other philosophical techniques to solve philosophical problems arising in cosmological research, as well as to generalize the existing knowledge about the Universe. (shrink)

This paper examines the ways in which familiar views about the world and our place in it must change in the face of the reality of psi phenomena. It is argued that most commentators are confused on this topic. Contrary to the received opinion, the existence of psi should make almost no difference to our currently accepted body of scientific theories. Nor, as some argue, can it be of much help to a defense of dualism. But the existence of (...) psi has profound implications regarding the pervasiveness of intentions in the world, even in connection with everyday sorts of events. The view is defended that we have no grounds for imposing antecedent restrictions on the range, magnitude, or refinement of psi. Finally, the paper discusses how the evidence for precognition forces serious consideration of a world?view generally associated only with so?called ?primitive? cultures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aestheticism, Homoeroticism, and Christian Guilt in The Picture of Dorian GrayJoseph CarrollSince the advent of the poststructuralist revolution some thirty years ago, interpretive literary criticism has suppressed two concepts that had informed virtually all previous literary thinking: (1) the idea of the author as an individual person and an originating source for literary meaning, and (2) the idea of "human nature" as the represented subject and common frame (...) of reference for literary depictions. Under the tutelage of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, literary critics learned to speak of authors, characters, settings, and plots not as individuals situated in a natural world but as discursive formations constituted by the circulation of linguistic, cultural, and ideological energies. In the three decades during which poststructuralism has dominated academic literary study, a different kind of revolution—evolutionary, Darwinian, and naturalistic—has been transforming the social sciences. Sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, Darwinian anthropology, behavioral ecology, cognitive archaeology, and behavioral genetics do not all agree with one another in every respect, but they are all nonetheless aspects or phases of a common research program. The central working hypothesis in this program is that the human species, like all other species, has evolved in an adaptive relation to its environment and that as a consequence it has a distinct, genetically transmitted, species-typical set of characteristics—anatomical, physiological, hormonal, neurological, and behavioral. That set of characteristics is what in common language is meant by "human nature." Literature has always given us subjectively evocative depictions of human nature, and Darwinian social science is now giving us a more comprehensive and scientifically precise account of it. The sense of [End Page 286] individual agency is one crucial aspect of human nature, and that aspect is now being explored in complementary ways by personality psychology and by cognitive neuroscience.1Over the past decade or so, a scattered handful of literary scholars has broken away from the dominant poststructuralist paradigm and has sought to make use of the new scientific information on human nature.2 The simplest and most obvious way to use this information is to examine the behavior depicted in literary texts and to correlate that behavior with "human universals," that is, with forms of behavior that appear in every known culture and that thus appear to be embedded in the nature of the species. Seeking depictions of universals has produced valuable results for literary study, but this first move in Darwinian criticism does not exhaust the range of possibility in the analysis of literary meaning. Human nature is complex and sometimes divided against itself; individuals vary, and some variations depart from species-typical patterns, even in the most adaptively crucial aspects of survival and reproduction. Moreover, literary meaning involves more than the represented subject matter. Authors imbue texts with meanings and affects peculiar to themselves; authors engage in communicative transactions with audiences; and texts have formal and aesthetic properties that are not reducible to represented subject matter. All of these aspects of the total literary situation are part of literary meaning, and all of them can and should fall within the range of analysis available to Darwinian literary study.3Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray offers two special challenges to Darwinian criticism. First, the novel is saturated with homoerotic sexual feeling, and it thus defies any simple reading in terms of behavior oriented to reproductive success. Second, the central conflicts in the novel involve two competing visions of human nature, and in their conceptual structure neither of those visions corresponds very closely to the quasi-Darwinian conceptual structure implicit in most realist and naturalist fiction. One vision derives from the aestheticist doctrines of Walter Pater, and the other from a traditional Christian conception of the soul. Pater's ideas about human motives and the human moral character are at variance both with Christianity and with Darwinism. Christianity and Darwinism share certain concepts of the human moral and social character, but they couch those concepts in different idioms, and they would invoke wholly different causal explanations for how human nature came to be the way it is. Wilde does not develop his themes in Darwinian terms, but the novel can still be read [End Page... (shrink)

The article examines the current state of the mathematical education of the students-philosophers that depends on language of the humanitarian mathematics, evidence of its statements and methodological problem of the cognition of the mathematical facts. One of important tasks of philosophy of mathematical education consists in motivation of the need for training mathematics of students-philosophers. The main criterion of the usefulness of mathematics for philosophers is revealed in the ways of justification of its truth and completeness of reasoning of mathematical (...) statements. This reflects the attractiveness of mathematical knowledge for philosophers that is characterized by the fact that the truth is revealed along with a proof in mathematics. One of the main so-called ‘acupuncture points‘ of mathematical education of philosophers, as the author believes, is the language of modern mathematics. In General, the linguistic aspect is very important in modern science. The second ‘acupuncture point‘ of mathematical education of philosophers is the level of evidence claims. Third, according to the author, is responsible for knowledge of mathematical truths, is involved in not only our existence, but also transcendental knowledge. In the context of philosophy of the future of modern civilization, mathematics is indispensable as a necessary element of scientific and philosophical picture of the world. To support the conclusions the author draws a broad philosophical and scientific context. (shrink)

The epistemology of dialectical materialism emphasizes two characteristic features of the picture of the world existing in our minds. First, it presents itself as reflection, i.e., as an image of an objective reality that exists independent of our consciousness. Secondly, this picture provides a reflection of the real world and the regularities of its development that is only approximately complete. The following comment by Lenin is of fundamental significance in this connection: "Cognition is man's reflection of (...) nature, but it is not a simple, not a direct, not a complete reflection, but a process involving a series of abstractions, the shaping and formation of concepts, laws, and the like, various concepts, laws, etc. and embraces, conditionally and approximately, the universal regularity of nature which is eternally moving and developing". (shrink)

The epistemology of dialectical materialism emphasizes two characteristic features of the picture of the world existing in our minds. First, it presents itself as reflection, i.e., as an image of an objective reality that exists independent of our consciousness. Secondly, this picture provides a reflection of the real world and the regularities of its development that is only approximately complete. The following comment by Lenin is of fundamental significance in this connection: "Cognition is man's reflection of (...) nature, but it is not a simple, not a direct, not a complete reflection, but a process involving a series of abstractions, the shaping and formation of concepts, laws, and the like, various concepts, laws, etc. and embraces, conditionally and approximately, the universal regularity of nature which is eternally moving and developing". (shrink)

The review of the theory of electromagnetic field together with the special and general theories of relativity has been made. The similar theory of gravitation has been presented which has the property of Lorentz-invariancy in its own representation in which the information is transferred at the speed of propagation of the gravitational field. Generalization of the specified gravitation theory on noninertial reference systems has been made with the help of the mathematical apparatus of the general relativity. It allows to avoid (...) some drawbacks of the standard general relativity theory and to expand its applicability. The possibility of complementary descriptions of the physical phenomena with the help of simultaneous use of the theories of gravitational and electromagnetic fields has been shown. (shrink)

Analytic philosophy is based on the assumption that our world is a world grasped in terms of (this or another) language and that the question of the character of any entity is closely connected with the question of the linguistic grasp of that entity. The father of this philosophical trend was Gottlob Frege: he showed the way to capture the semantic aspect of language in a systematic way without resorting into psychologism; he also showed that logical analysis (...) can be an extremely powerful tool for capturing meaning. Frege's teaching was further developed by Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Willard Van Quine and other philosophers. This philosophy, in connection with which the term linguistic turn is also often mentioned, is characterized by viewing language as a means of picturing the world and truth as the correspondence between statement and reality. Whereas some of the analytic philosophers (Carnap, Alfred Tarski) understood the relation between language and the world as a matter of a better or worse adaptation of the structure of language to the autonomous structure of the world, others (Wittgenstein, Quine, Nelson Goodman) realized that the structure of the world is always a matter of the language we use approaching the world. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of time in modern science, where in recent years there have been major changes related to the latest discoveries in the field of the foundations of quantum theory. The author refers to works of K.-F. von Weizsacker (which works are not well-known in Russian-speaking field). Weizsacker deploys a large-scale program of building modern physics, while starting (not only as a physicist, but also a professional philosopher) with questions of philosophical interpretation of postulates of (...) modern physics, especially quantum mechanics. His key thesis is that time in physics is fundamentally distinct, which represents the whole physics as an integral scientific discipline. Weizsacker comes from physical and philosophical reflections, that give a special value to his work. Analyzing the conclusions of theoretical physics, namely the issues of substantiation of statistical mechanics, thermodynamics, and, above all, quantum mechanics, Weizsacker comes to the key idea of the structure of time in the substantiation of physical theory. The author in this conclusion disagrees with the opinion of most modern physicists that time has a subjective character, and the modus of the past, present and future reflects its essential character. The allocation of the time structure requires special logic. Such a logic is temporal and quantum. Starting from temporal logic, introducing the concept of possibility and probability, he comes to the substantiation of quantum mechanics. Being modal logic, it is based on the concept of possibility and probability. Key concept for Weizsacker is a binary alternative (Uralternative), closely related to the principle of superposition in quantum mechanics. By introducing the concept of certain alternatives, essentially actualized alternatives, Weizsacker shows how one can get the theory of relativity with its space-time structure. Further, he shows that based on its structure, you can get the theory of relativity. The space-time structure in this case is secondary, relational, as understood by Leibniz, Mach, and Einstein. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to present the results of a contrastive study of the ideas of male beauty among Russians and Chinese. These ideas are studied culturologically, through the restoration of the relevant fragments of national pictures of the world. For this purpose, both linguistic and comparative-historical methods are used. Russian concepts of beauty are analyzed in the corresponding concepts in the Russian language, etymology and modern meanings, Russian epics, the reign of Peter the Great, the (...) XVIII - XIX centuries, the period of the Great October Socialist Revolution, the Stalinist period and the period of late socialism, modern ideas. To analyze the Chinese view of the subject under study, the corresponding hieroglyphs, lexical combinations, idioms, philosophical and aesthetic sources, and modern realities are analyzed. Such a multidimensional consideration of beauty in the Russian and Chinese pictures of the world caused the novelty of the study. Comparisons of Russian and Chinese are the main conclusion of the work: ideas about beauty are not just different, they are opposite. It is important to note that the image of the hero in Russian culture is a symbol of male beauty, and in Chinese, on the contrary, it is a symbol of a rude and unaesthetic person. The main oppositions are male/female, West/The East, rational/emotional — are characteristic of the Russian picture of the world, but they are not completely manifested in the Chinese ideas about beauty. The Chinese do not oppose, but combine what looks like an opposition in our culture. (shrink)

Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic . There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committed to the array of apparently non-natural entities or (...) relations mentioned in the metalanguage. However, there is an underlying relation between language and world presupposed by all empirically meaningful language. In his early work Sellars sought to describe this relation in linguistic terms as a form of 'pure description', but inadequacies in that notion drove him towards the naturalistic relation between language and world that he came to call 'picturing'. (shrink)

In this, the first of two ground-breaking volumes on the nature of language in the light of the way it evolved, James Hurford looks at how the world first came to have a meaning in the minds of animals and how in humans this meaning eventually came to be expressed as language. He reviews a mass of evidence to show how close some animals, especially primates and more especially apes, are to the brink of human language. Apes may not (...) talk to us but they construct rich cognitive representations of the world around them, and here, he shows, are the evolutionary seeds of abstract thought - the means of referring to objects, the memory of events, even elements of the propositional thinking philosophers have hitherto reserved for humans. What then, he asks, is the evolutionary path between the non-speaking minds of apes and our own speaking minds? Why don't apes communicate the richness of their thoughts to each other? Why do humans alone have a unique disposition to reveal their thoughts in complex detail? Professor Hurford searches a wide range of evidence for the answers to these central questions, including degrees of trust, the role of hormones, the ability to read minds, and the willingness to cooperate. Expressing himself congenially in consistently colloquial language the author builds up a vivid picture of how mind, language, and meaning evolved over millions of years. His book is a landmark contribution to the understanding of linguistic and thinking processes, and the fullest account yet published of the evolution of language and communication."A wonderful read - lucid, informative, and entertaining, while at the same time never talking down to the reader by sacrificing argumentation for the sake of 'simplicity'. Likely to be heralded as the major publication dealing with language evolution to date. Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington. (shrink)

The need for worldwide communication has made people learn as many foreign languages as they can in order to be able to send and receive information from all over the world. Realizing this situation, researchers and linguists have carried out a large number of studies in order to find out the best ways for teaching and learning English as a second or foreign language. The terms language learning and language acquisition are not new since in many earlier researches language (...) acquisition is compared to the process of learning the mother tongue whereas language learning is compared to the process when a child learns a second or foreign language. This paper aims to showcase that teaching/learning new vocabulary using pictures is much more effective than the other methods of vocabulary learning. The research also puts emphasis on the language level of learners. It demonstrates that the method of using pictures and illustrations works well with all levels of proficiency and as such, it has brought very useful results. It was carried out at the South East European University (SEEU) in North Macedonia and participants were thirty (30) students from all five Faculties, divided in three different groups based on their language proficiency. Each group consisted of ten (10) students, aged 18 to 22 years. They were of elementary, pre-intermediate and intermediate level of English. The research lasted for six weeks, because the students had to be introduced to six different vocabulary topics. Since the experiment was carried out in a real classroom environment, the target vocabulary topics used for this purpose were chosen from their students’ book. Data were collected in three phases. During the first phase, students were asked to complete a questionnaire, consisting of questions regarding the vocabulary learning methods, mainly vocabulary associated with pictures. In the second phase, they were engaged in real activities in a traditional classroom setting, while in the last phase, at the end of the last session, participants took a quiz that was supposed to provide evidence and additional data about participants’ achievements. It is expected that the findings from this experiment will be useful to current and prospective teachers as they show that the method of pictures and illustrations associating the target vocabulary functions well with different levels. (shrink)

A picture of the world as chiefly one of discrete objects, distributed in space and time, has sometimes seemed compelling. It is however one of the main targets of Henry Laycock's book; for it is seriously incomplete. The picture, he argues, leaves no space for "stuff" like air and water. With discrete objects, we may always ask "how many?," but with stuff the question has to be "how much?" Laycock's fascinating exploration also addresses key logical and (...) class='Hi'>linguistic questions about the way we categorize the many and the much. (shrink)

An attempt to reveal the linguistic and cultural potential of education in the process of learning Russian as a means of communication, of cognition of the linguistic picture of the world and the phenomenon of culture is made in the article. The stages of development of linguocultural concept of teaching Russian language in the Republic of Bashkortostan are presented. New approaches to teaching Russian language are considered. The author shows that in the process of education, elementary (...) literacy of students should be achieved while they are dealing with communicative and socially important tasks contributing to the development and formation of students as linguistic personalities. The author concludes that the actual task of the modern school, which is a successful preparation for the unified state examination, should also be achieved not by increased training before the exam, but provided by the total system of education aimed at the formation of personality with a wide range of language capabilities: a cultural person, well-speaking, correct writing, able to understand and interpret the text, to express their thoughts and feelings in their own texts. Such training involves the ascent of a language personality from basic literacy to formed linguistic, communicative and cultural competences. Theoretical basis and methodological support of the concept are presented in the list of publications. (shrink)

The question of constructing an evolutionary picture of the world based on the results obtained by extending classical mechanics is considered. The expansion of mechanics arose as a result of taking into account the role of the structure of bodies in their dynamics. It is shown that such an extension leads to the possibility of combining branches of physics, in particular, to the substantiation of the laws of thermodynamics, statistical physics, kinetics within the framework of the laws of (...) classical mechanics. It turned out that, according to the laws of classical mechanics, matter is infinitely divisible and can be represented by an infinite hierarchical structure from simple to complex. The expansion showed the existence of universal principles connecting the laws of the upper rung of the hierarchical ladder of matter with the laws of the lower rung. It is considered how they lead to the possibility of constructing a picture of the world based on the fundamental laws of nature. (shrink)

I argue that the absence of some of the ‘greatest hits’ of Western philosophy in Classical China can be explained by a Wittgensteinian take on the role of language in philosophy. One is the ‘Idea Theory’ of meaning which anchors Western Mind-Body dualism. Its attraction is removed when the writing reminds us that a picture does not by itself ‘give life to’ our language even while it plays a role of cross-linguistic communication. Another is the centrality of a (...) law-command theory of normativity which combines with mind-body dualism to give a natural push toward monotheistic supernaturalism. Western attempts to make the ‘God’ impulse logical (e.g., the Ontological Argument) fail because of differences in Chinese syntax. The upshot is we need not deny Chinese thinkers the status of philosophers for their failure to share our philosophical presuppositions and resultant agenda. (shrink)

One of the theories that have been produced in linguistics in the light of J. E. McTaggart’s influential essay “The Unreality of Time” (1908) is a critique of reality that may be attributed to the semantics of tenses in natural languages. This chapter from my book The Linguistic Picture of the World: Alice’s Adventures in Many Languages proposes an alternative approach to the semantics of time, not as a dubious product of linguists’ imagination, i.e. not as something (...) that can easily be discarded from the philosophy of language but rather as a firm category of human thinking. Particular emphasis is placed on the idea of time as it is expressed by the seemingly rather contradictory morphology of the past, present, and future. (shrink)

The present article argues that Zha Changping’s History of Ideas in Pioneering Contemporary Chinese Art fills an important gap in humanities-oriented studies on contemporary Chinese art, contributing the innovative theories of “world relational aesthetics” and “world-picture logic,” which allow for unique insights into contemporary pioneering Chinese artworks.

This paper focuses on Pseudo Justin's objections to Aristotle's cosmological doctrines, and aims to show that, as a result of his criticisms to Aristotle's viewpoints, an entirely new view of the natural world bursts in. A few arguments by Pseudo Justin against the Aristotelian cosmology are analysed, and the author shows that Pseudo Justin makes use of conceptual tools and of some assumptions Aristotelian in character without resorting to the creationist argument. If what is suggested in this paper is (...) sound, Pseudo-Justin would have put forward and advanced for the first time some aspects of the physical model which turned out to be dominant from Modernity onwards several centuries before the new approach to nature starting in the XVII century. (shrink)

It is an assumed view in Chinese philosophy that the grammatical differences between English or Indo-European languages and classical Chinese explain some of the differences between the Western and Chinese philosophical discourses. Although some philosophers have expressed doubts about the general link between classical Chinese philosophy and syntactic form of classical Chinese, I discuss a specific hypothesis, i.e., the mass-noun hypothesis, in this essay. The mass-noun hypothesis assumes that a linguistic distinction such as between the singular terms and the (...) predicates is sufficient to justify or necessarily leads to a specific ontological distinction such as the distinction between the particular and the universal. I argue that one cannot read off semantic properties simply from syntactic ones and hence the syntactic differences do not automatically translate into the semantic differences between languages, that the syntactic features of Chinese nouns do not have explanatory significance in explaining why the particular-universal problem does not arise in the classical period of Chinese philosophy, and that the part-whole ontology allegedly informed by the mass-noun-like semantics does not provide a natural or intuitive picture of the language-world relation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Response to Arthur Efland's and Richard Siegesmund's Reviews of The Arts and the Creation of MindElliot W. Eisner, Lee Jacks Professor of Education and Professor of ArtWhen I was invited by the Editor of The Journal of Aesthetic Education to respond to two unidentified reviews of my latest book, The Arts and the Creation of Mind, I thought that I would encounter a bevy of negatively critical comments, which (...) would give me the opportunity to respond equally as critically to theirs. Fortunately — perhaps unfortunately — the reviews prepared by Arthur Efland and Richard Siegesmund are not in the least bit negative. This, of course, is a boon to the book's author, but a bane to the creation of lively debate. I am happy to say that though their purposes differ, both Efland and Siegesmund got it essentially right. Efland's comments put my work in a historical context, particularly the emergence of interest in cognition and, in general, in the higher mental processes as they were called during the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. It is true that interest in cognition was in the air at that time, in the field of philosophy, and in the fields of linguistics and psychology as well. My own work is a part of that particular zeitgeist in the twentieth century.I was not aware at the time that I was being influenced by such a broad movement, but, alas or alack, I was. In some ways, the writing that John Dewey did during the early and mid 1930s, particularly his work on art as rendered in Art as Experience, presaged the interest linguists, psychologists, and philosophers developed in the conditions of communication and its relationship to symbolic systems and thought.1 Dewey has been a major influence on my thinking as have Susanne Langer and later Nelson Goodman.2 [End Page 96] The historical perspective that Efland provides is a useful accounting of where ideas about cognition were and where they are now. I do not know whether I have extended the thinking that is being done on cognition, but I certainly have tried to provide a fulsome account of the connections between cognition and the educational mission of the arts, especially the visual arts. Efland's historical portrayal is a useful picture of the period and, I would say, the significance of this way of thinking for education.Siegesmund pushes farther than Efland, in my view, into the sources of human understanding, particularly the function of somatic knowledge in grasping, or better yet, framing meaning. His notion of what might perhaps best be called visual reasoning marries two concepts that are seldom related; the visual and the reasonable. Reason is often associated with matters of logic, and matters of logic pertain to connections between language in its formal sense and with the relationships among numbers within numerical systems. Qualitative relationships are not typically regarded as manifestations, even at their best, of rational forms of thinking. Emotional, yes. Rational, no. As readers of my works know, I reject that conception of the limits of human rationality and Siegesmund does as well. His focus on embodied knowledge, or what is sometimes called somatic knowledge, is a promising conception of the sources of choice and judgment. There is, after all, more known than what can be told, to paraphrase Michael Polayni.3What pleases me most about Siegesmund's account of my work is its receptivity to the students he teaches. The ultimate educational test of any piece of writing is the extent to which people see meaning in it and apparently, at least for the students that Siegesmund teaches, meaning for most is there. I am pleased. What I have always tried to do in my work is to avoid prescribing recipes or formulaic procedures because I do not believe either works very well when one is working with human beings, but rather to provide concepts through which the educational world can be viewed, practice reflected upon, options identified, and action taken. Apparently these aims are being met in some university classrooms in which The Arts and the Creation of Mind is being used. One caveat.Although it is true, as... (shrink)

This volume addresses the intriguing issue of indirect reports from an interdisciplinary perspective. The contributors include philosophers, theoretical linguists, socio-pragmaticians, and cognitive scientists. The book is divided into four sections following the provenance of the authors. Combining the voices from leading and emerging authors in the field, it offers a detailed picture of indirect reports in the world’s languages and their significance for theoretical linguistics. Building on the previous book on indirect reports in this series, this volume adds (...) an empirical and cross-linguistic approach that covers an impressive range of languages, such as Cantonese, Japanese, Hebrew, Persian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Armenian, Italian, English, Hungarian, German, Rumanian, and Basque. (shrink)

concepts typically are defined in terms of lacking physical or perceptual referents. We argue instead that they are not devoid of perceptual information because knowledge of real-world situations is an important component of learning and using many abstract concepts. Although the relationship between perceptual information and abstract concepts is less straightforward than for concrete concepts, situation-based perceptual knowledge is part of many abstract concepts. In Experiment 1, participants made lexical decisions to abstract words that were preceded by related and (...) unrelated pictures of situations. For example, share was preceded by a picture of two girls sharing a cob of corn. When pictures were presented for 500 ms, latencies did not differ. However, when pictures were presented for 1,000 ms, decision latencies were significantly shorter for abstract words preceded by related versus unrelated pictures. Because the abstract concepts corresponded to the pictured situation as a whole, rather than a single concrete object or entity, the necessary relational processing takes time. In Experiment 2, on each trial, an abstract word was presented for 250 ms, immediately followed by a picture. Participants indicated whether or not the picture showed a normal situation. Decision latencies were significantly shorter for pictures preceded by related versus unrelated abstract words. Our experiments provide evidence that knowledge of events and situations is important for learning and using at least some types of abstract concepts. That is, abstract concepts are grounded in situations, but in a more complex manner than for concrete concepts. Although people's understanding of abstract concepts certainly includes knowledge gained from language describing situations and events for which those concepts are relevant, sensory and motor information experienced during real-life events is important as well. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Aristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical RefutationsMarina Berzins McCoyAristotle on False Reasoning: Language and the World in the Sophistical Refutations. Scott Schreiber. Albany: SUNY Press, 2003. pp. 240. $68.50, hardcover; $22.95, paperback.Scott Schreiber's Aristotle on False Reasoning is the first full-length English commentary on Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations in the last century. Aristotle's Sophistical Refutations is a text that has received relatively (...) little attention in the last century of scholarship, despite a revival of interest in other aspects of Aristotle's work concerned with the nature of good argument and rhetoric. (The 1995 French translation and commentary by Loius-Andre Dorion is a notable exception.) Schreiber finds the primary reason [End Page 92] for inattention to this text to lie in the tendency of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy to resolve problems in reasoning through linguistic clarification (xiv). Aristotle's claim that some errors are due to language while others lie outside the realm of linguistic error is not one to which contemporary analytic philosophy has been particularly sympathetic. The Sophistical Refutations has been neglected in light of contemporary logic. Schreiber's book attempts to return to Aristotle's project on his own philosophical terms, in order to better understand why Aristotle classified errors in reasoning as he did. Schreiber's approach is to examine each of the twelve types of false reasoning that Aristotle lays out in the Sophistical Refutations, with particular attention to Aristotle's examples, in order to understand the principles behind the overall system.Schreiber argues that Aristotle had good reason for separating errors due to language from those outside of language: Aristotle's classification of error is tied to his notion of the resolution of false arguments. To understand how to resolve a sophistical argument, we must first understand how it could have been believed to be true. Since Aristotle's aim in the Sophistical Refutations is to show why certain sorts of arguments are deceptive to some who hear them, his method of explaining errors is less a pure examination of their logical errors than of how such erroneous arguments can deceive. Aristotle is concerned with two types of problems with sophistical argument: first, why such an argument is false; and second, why it might appear to be true. Schreiber shows that most commentators have not given sufficient attention to the second of these concerns in their attempts to understand Aristotle's taxonomy. As Schreiber puts it, "Examples of false reasoning are unified into groups and differentiated into subgroups not by the nature of the confusions that they engender but by the different ways that confusion is cleared up" (54). False reasoning is due not only to mistakes in logic, but also to mistaken beliefs about language and reality. Careful examination of Aristotle's thinking allows us to see the importance of beliefs about the world in good and bad argument.For the most part, Schreiber's examinations of Aristotle's examples are lucid and helpful in understanding both the particular example at hand as well as the general picture of Aristotle's classifications. Schreiber continually returns to the importance of Aristotle's own view of language and argument in contrast to the approaches of contemporary linguistics and logic. For example, while some twentieth-century scholars have attempted to explain Aristotle's distinction between homonymy and amphiboly in terms of the contemporary distinction between semantics and syntax, [End Page 93] Aristotle seems to distinguish the two according to whether a general predicate signifies many particulars regardless of context, or in a propositional context (31). In the end, Schreiber does not think that the categories of homonymy and amphiboly can be completely distinct, even on Aristotle's own grounds, but still finds the categories useful. Schreiber is also careful to provide criticism of Aristotle's categories when warranted, both defending Aristotle against his contemporary critics when he thinks they have misunderstood him, and pointing out genuine weaknesses in Aristotle's arguments.Schreiber's book is clearly intended as a response to the contemporary Anglo-American reading of Aristotle. Much of the book assumes at least some familiarity with the ways in... (shrink)

Science has made a mighty advance since it originated in ancient Greece more than 2500 years ago. Yet we still live in Plato's cave today; we think everything around us moves continuously, but continuous motion is merely a shadow of real motion. This book will lead you to walk out the cave along a logical and comprehensible road. After passing Zeno's arrow, Newton's inertia, Einstein's light, and Schrodinger's cat, you will reach the real world, where every thing in the (...) universe, whether it is an atom or a ball or even a star, ceaselessly jumps in a random and discontinuous way. In a famous metaphor, God does play dice with the universe. Discovering motion is not continuous but discontinuous and random is like finding the Earth is not at rest but moving. The new discovery may finally solve Zeno's paradoxes and the quantum puzzle, and it will lead to a profound shift in our world view. (shrink)

In this paper I shall argue that useful correspondences can be drawn between the role of depiction in showing a view of the world and the realisation that would view God as a picture of experience in the world, since both can be seen to illustrate an art of interpretation. The perceptual insight that is gleaned in mystical-philosophical consciousness converges on the idea of a realm that is marked as divine, and by exploiting mental and linguistic (...) imagery this mindful awareness can be made concrete in the form of a written text, which can be seen to be analogous to a pictorial representation. The writer of a text purportedly sees and knows the domain of divine reality through sensible and conceptual means and then reduces this consciousness to a planar form, which is observable as an artistic rendering. The reader, who is at the same time a viewer, is invited to perceptually and imaginatively attend to the artifact as a manifestation of the experient's understanding of the functional nature of God, and in this apprehension of the divine scenario in the textual picture the interpretative motif of God-in-the-painting is revealed. (shrink)

This is the story of the transformation of the ways in which the increasingly Christianized elites of the late antique Mediterranean experienced and conceptualized linguistic differences. The metaphor of Babel stands for the magnificent edifice of classical culture that was about to reach the sky, but remained self-sufficient and selfcontained in its virtual monolingualism - the paradigm within which even Latin was occasionally considered just a dialect of Greek. The gradual erosion of this vision is the slow fall of (...) Babel that took place in the hearts and minds of a good number of early Christian writers and intellectuals who represented various languages and literary traditions. This step-by-step process included the discovery and internalization of the existence of multiple other languages in the world, as well as subsequent attempts to incorporate their speakers meaningfully into the holistic and distinctly Christian picture of the universe. (shrink)