PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to pose questions about quality indicators, describe the fields of reference of communicators and the instruments currently being used in quality assurance of journalism, especially in Germany.Design/methodology/approachDue to their relevance to the questions being posed in media ethics, the paper deals with the meaning‐conferring functions of media offerings and with reasonable expectations toward media courses that prepare young communicators for their field of occupation.FindingsThis paper reveals that a more in‐depth involvement with constructivist epistemologies (...) can impart to the media students a particular understanding of the dimensions of ethics, norms, law and the associated sets of rules.Originality/valueThis paper is focusing on the latently present, meaning‐generating aspects of the media, just not discussing them in terms of “effects” including their measurability, but in terms of reception and epistemology, underscoring the responsibility of all related communicators. (shrink)

Meaning is a key foundation of human life. We yearn to make our life meaningful and have a proper understanding of the meaning of words and worlds, which help us in blossoming of life rather than being trapped in labyrinths of confusion and annihilated in varieties of killing and destruction. But this fundamental yearning for meaning has always been under stress in different periods and epochs of human history. In our contemporary world, we are also going through (...) stress, vis-à-vis the work of meanings in our lives, which is part of a global crisis of meaning. Our global crisis of meaning has multiple genealogies. Our contemporary crisis of meaning has its roots in both the way we relate to language and our worlds, which is discussed in this article. It also discusses how we can cultivate new movements and circles of meaning generation. This is linked to vision and practices of upholding our world and regenerating our earth. I then link processes of meaning generation to processes of coming together of people as well as soul, what is called Lokasamgraha in Indic tradition. I discuss how the global crisis of meaning calls for new cosmopolitan movements as well as building a planetary Lokasamgraha. (shrink)

The concept of cooperative question-responses as an extension of cooperative behaviours used by interfaces for databases and information systems is proposed. A procedure to generate question-responses based on question dependency and erotetic search scenarios is presented. The procedure is implemented in Prolog.

Current models for individuation in academe exacerbate generational tensions between second and third wave feminists. Feminist pedagogues must be wary of getting caught in the "vicious circle of contempt," where students are expected to compensate for a teacher's past narcissistic wounds. Instead, we must be willing to mourn the wounds we have received at the hands of a contemptuous culture and to acknowledge same-gender attachments that are disavowed in dialectical models of subject production.

Recent discussions in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have defended a theory according to which we live in a virtual world akin to a computer simulation, generated by our brain. It is argued that our brain creates a model world from a variety of stimuli; this model is perceived as if it was external and perception-independent, even though it is neither of the two. The view of the mind, brain, and world, entailed by this theory has some peculiar (...) consequences which have rarely been explored in detail. This paper sets out virtual world theory and relates it to various central philosophical problems, the role of the perceiver and the problem of the existence of the external world ). The second part suggests three interpretations of virtual world theory, two familiar ones and a somewhat less familiar one. The remainder of the paper argues that the irrealist interpretation is the one we should adopt. (shrink)

Philosophers have traditionally approached questions of meaning as part of the philosophy of language. In this book David Cooper broadens the analysis beyond linguistic meaning to offer a an account of meaning in general. He shows that not only words, sentences, and utterances in the linguistic domain can be described as meaningful but also items in such domains as art, ceremony, social action, and bodily gesture. Unlike much of the recent work in the philosophy of meaning, (...) Cooper is not concerned with trying to develop a theory of meaning but with examining the meaning of meaning through an overview of the behaviour and scope of "meaning" and its cognates, addressing questions about the import, function, and status of meaning. This fuller account of meaning not only addresses questions of the meaning of meaning but also the issues or problems that answers to those questions generate, such as, Is meaning just a misleading "folk" term for something more basic, such as the causal conditions governing the production of certain noises and movements? Is meaning something that we should strive for or should we let our lives "just be," rather than mean? By taking the problem of meaning out of the technical philosophy of language and providing a more general account Cooper is able to offer new insights into the meaning of meaning that will be of interest not only to philosophers of language but to philosophers working in other areas, such as epistemology and metaphysics. (shrink)

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that internally generated images and thoughts were driven by meaning complexes, a construct which reflects a synthesis of semantic meaning and personal salience . Experiments 1 and 2 contrasted the mutual inhibition between encoding words and non-words on: the frequency that thoughts and images unrelated to the task were experienced and on the intensity of images generated from long-term memory and maintained under dual task conditions, which whilst familiar were not of particular personal (...) salience . Experiment 3 examined the physiological arousal associated with the experience of TUT in a semantic encoding task. Evidence suggested that, in general, internally generated images and thoughts, irrespective of the personal salience, were suppressed by the co-ordination of information in working memory. In addition, only the experience of spontaneous images and thoughts of personal salience interfered reliably with the encoding/retrieval of semantic information from memory. Finally, in Experiment 3, physiological arousal, as indexed by mean heart rate, was associated with a high frequency of TUT. The results of all three experiments support the notion that the maintenance of spontaneously occurring images and thoughts is simultaneously influenced by both the semantic content and the personal salience of the information held in working memory. (shrink)

In _The Meaning of the Body_, Mark Johnson continues his pioneering work on the exciting connections between cognitive science, language, and meaning first begun in the classic _Metaphors We Live By_. Johnson uses recent research into infant psychology to show how the body generates meaning even before self-consciousness has fully developed. From there he turns to cognitive neuroscience to further explore the bodily origins of meaning, thought, and language and examines the many dimensions of meaning—including (...) images, qualities, emotions, and metaphors—that are all rooted in the body’s physical encounters with the world. Drawing on the psychology of art and pragmatist philosophy, Johnson argues that all of these aspects of meaning-making are fundamentally aesthetic. He concludes that the arts are the culmination of human attempts to find meaning and that studying the aesthetic dimensions of our experience is crucial to unlocking meaning's bodily sources. Throughout, Johnson puts forth a bold new conception of the mind rooted in the understanding that philosophy will matter to nonphilosophers only if it is built on a visceral connection to the world. “Mark Johnson demonstrates that the aesthetic and emotional aspects of meaning are fundamental—central to conceptual meaning and reason, and that the arts show meaning-making in its fullest realization. If you were raised with the idea that art and emotion were external to ideas and reason, you must read this book. It grounds philosophy in our most visceral experience.”—George Lakoff, author of _Moral Politics_. (shrink)

Many psychometricians and behavioral geneticists believe that high heritability of IQ test scores within racial groups coupled with environmental hypotheses failing to account for the differences between the mean scores for groups lends plausibility to explanations of mean differences in terms of genetic factors. This two-component argument cannot be sustained when viewed in the light of the conceptual and methodological themes introduced in Taylor . These themes concern the difficulties of moving from the statistical analysis of variance of observed traits (...) to investigation of measurable genetic factors and measurable environmental factors. One such theme is that quantities estimated by an AOV of observed traits cannot be equated with measurable genetic or environmental factors involved in the development of those traits. Once this distinction is clear, the argument that environmental factors have failed to explain the differences lacks weight because it does not consider whether genetic factors have been more successful. This article exposes additional flaws in the lines of thinking associated with the two-component argument, with the distinction between passive, reactive, and active associations between genetic and environmental factors, and with the reciprocal causation models Dickens and Flynn propose in order to reconcile high estimates of heritability and large IQ test score gains between generations. Human heritability estimates are irrelevant in developing explanations of differences across groups or across generations. My critique is directed at opening up more conceptual space for deriving empirically validated models of developmental pathways whose components are heterogeneous and differ among individuals at any one time and over generations. (shrink)

. Humans can be described as existing somewhere on a descriptive continuum between the poles expressed by the metaphors “humans are machines” and “humans are animals.” Arguments for these metaphors are examined, and the metaphors are rejected as absolute descriptions of humans. After a brief examination of the nature of metaphor, all metaphors are discovered to mediate between biological and cultural evolution. Contrary to the reductionist program of sociobiologists, religious metaphors that generate transcendent meaning offer a legitimate description of (...) humans. (shrink)

Should we remain neutral between our interests and those of future generations? Or are we ethically permitted or even required to depart from neutrality and engage in some measure of intergenerational discounting? This Article addresses the problem of intergenerational discounting by drawing on two different intellectual traditions: the social welfare function (“SWF”) tradition in welfare economics, and scholarship on “prioritarianism” in moral philosophy. Unlike utilitarians, prioritarians are sensitive to the distribution of well-being. They give greater weight to well-being changes affecting (...) worse-off individuals. Prioritarianism can be captured, formally, through an SWF which sums a concave transformation of individual utility, rather than simply summing unweighted utilities in utilitarian fashion. The Article considers the appropriate structure of a prioritarian SWF in intergenerational cases. The simplest case involves a fixed and finite intertemporal population. In that case, I argue, policymakers can and should maintain full neutrality between present and future generations. No discount factor should be attached to the utility of future individuals. Neutrality becomes trickier when we depart from this simple case, meaning: (1) “non-identity” problems, where current choices change the identity of future individuals; (2) population-size variation, where current choices affect not merely the identity of future individuals, but the size of the world’s future population (this case raises the specter of what Derek Parfit terms “the repugnant conclusion,” i.e., that dramatic reductions in the average level of individual well-being might be compensated for by increases in population size); or (3) an infinite population. The Article grapples with the difficult question of outfitting a prioritarian SWF to handle non-identity problems, population-size variation, and infinite populations. It tentatively suggests that a measure of neutrality can be maintained even in these cases. (shrink)

The search for meaningful work has been of interest to researchers from a variety of disciplines for decades and seems to have grown even more recently. Much of the literature assumes that employees share a sense of what is meaningful in work and there isn’t much attention given to how and why meanings might differ. Researchers have not only called for more research studying demographic differences in definitions of meaning :77–90, 2014), but also more research utilizing mixed methods to (...) study psychological concepts like meaningful work Handbook of multimethod measurement in psychology, American Psychological Association, Washington, 2006). This study specifically examines differences across generational cohorts on their prioritization of sources of meaningful work through qualitative, in-depth interviews followed by a more generalizable, quantitative survey. Findings from the qualitative study show that generational cohorts define the meaning in their jobs differently, and they hold negative perceptions about the lack of desire for meaning in each of the other cohorts. Study 2 maps generational cohorts on the comprehensive model of meaningful work designed by Lips-Wiersma and Morris :491–511, 2009) to reveal that although there are some differences in prioritization of sources of meaningful work, all generational cohorts share similar desire to “develop and become themselves” when asked about their definitions of meaningful work. Implications and future research are discussed. (shrink)

Grice's (1957) analysis of non-natural meaning generated a huge industry, where new analyses were put forward to respond to successively more complex counterexamples. Davis (2003) offers a novel and refreshingly simple analysis of meaning in terms of the expression of belief, where (roughly) an agent expresses the belief that p just in case she performs a publicly observable action with the intention that it be an indication that she occurrently believes that p. I argue that Davis's analysis fails (...) to capture the essentially overt nature of our meaning-intentions, and with it, a plausible sufficient condition for meaning. (shrink)

Mark Richard presents an original theory of meaning, as the collection of assumptions speakers make in using it and expect their hearers to recognize as being made. Meaning is spread across a population, inherited by each new generation of speakers from the last, and evolving through the interactions of speakers with their environment.

In this article , I first engage in some conceptual clarification of what the words "imagine," "imagining," and "imagination" can mean. Each has a constructive sense, an attitudinal sense, and an imagistic sense. Keeping the senses straight in the course of cognitive theorizing is important for both psychology and philosophy. I then discuss the roles that perceptual memories, beliefs, and genre truth attitudes play in constructive imagination, or the capacity to generate novel representations that go well beyond what's prompted by (...) one's immediate environment. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give, using the Kripke semantics for intuitionism, a representation of finitely generated free Heyting algebras. By means of the representation we determine in a constructive way some set of "special elements" of such algebras. Furthermore, we show that many algebraic properties which are satisfied by the free algebra on one generator are not satisfied by free algebras on more than one generator.

Review article on the inspiring book, Shubhrangshu.. Zara's Witness: A soul journey into the nature of being, highlights the philosophical quest for meaning and fulfilment from Indian traditions. It is a never ending novel where a teenage girl is the heroin, who searches for truth, permanence and values.

In this paper I pursue the influences of Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotics on the anthropology of Ernst Cassirer. I propose that Cassirer in his Philosophy of the Symbolic Forms has written a cultural semiotics which in certain core ideas is grounded on biosemiotic presuppositions, some explicit (as the “emotive basic ground” of experience), some more implicit. I try to trace the connecting lines to a biosemiotic approach with the goal of formulating a comprehensive semiotic anthropology which understands man as embodied (...) being and culture as a phenomenon of general semioses. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Part I. Meaning and the Lexicon: 1. The lexicon - some preliminaries; 2. What do we mean by meaning?; 3. Components and prototypes; 4. Modern componential approaches - and some alternatives; Part II. Relations Among Words and Senses: 5. Meaning variation: polysemy, homonymy and vagueness; 6. Lexical and semantic relations; Part III. Word Classes and Semantic Types: 7. Ontological categories and word classes; 8. Nouns and countability; 9. Predication: verbs, events, and states; 10. (...) Verbs and time; 11. Adjectives and properties. (shrink)

This book aids in the rehabilitation of the wrongfully deprecated work of William Parry, and is the only full-length investigation into Parry-type propositional logics. A central tenet of the monograph is that the sheer diversity of the contexts in which the mereological analogy emerges – its effervescence with respect to fields ranging from metaphysics to computer programming – provides compelling evidence that the study of logics of analytic implication can be instrumental in identifying connections between topics that would otherwise remain (...) hidden. More concretely, the book identifies and discusses a host of cases in which analytic implication can play an important role in revealing distinct problems to be facets of a larger, cross-disciplinary problem. It introduces an element of constancy and cohesion that has previously been absent in a regrettably fractured field, shoring up those who are sympathetic to the worth of mereological analogy. Moreover, it generates new interest in the field by illustrating a wide range of interesting features present in such logics – and highlighting these features to appeal to researchers in many fields. (shrink)

An analysis of Mark Bevir's account of the role of language and tradition on the one hand, and the individual on the other in the generation of ideas, and proposal of an alternative account It endorses Bevir's project of finding a middle way between individualism and collectivism, but finds that Bevir exaggerates the role of the individual. It argues that human selves always remains dependent on language even to articulate their own intentions to themselves. Whilst they have a capacity (...) to create new linguistic expressions, this is always limited to the exploration of possibilities already latent in the language. However, no one is a mere recipient and conduit of a given language: everyone hands it on transformed by their unique appropriation of it. The antifoundationalist analyses of Wittgenstein, Newman Collingwood, and Neurath are invoked to argue that this state of affairs also applies to the individual's relation to the beliefs and values inherited traditionally: there is no possibility of a wholesale rejection of what is received; no individual can reject all received traditions, and erect an entire belief structure from scratch, but can only modify it on a piecemeal basis, so that received tradition always remains constitutive of the individual mind. It is also argued that human self-consciousness is always socially formed, and no person ever completely integrated, and stabilized. No one is ever therefore in a state of complete self-possession. One therefore must reject Bevir's claim that the historian of ideas must initially presume that individuals are sincere, conscious and rational in their expressed beliefs: ‘sincere’ self-consciousness is an ideal never fully achieved, and beliefs as to what constitutes ‘rationality’ are so varied that specific presumptions cannot be made. (shrink)

A generative grammar for a language L generates one or more syntactic structures for each sentence of L and interprets those structures both phonologically and semantically. A widely accepted assumption in generative linguistics dating from the mid-60s, the Generative Grammar Hypothesis , is that the ability of a speaker to understand sentences of her language requires her to have tacit knowledge of a generative grammar of it, and the task of linguistic semantics in those early days was taken to be (...) that of specifying the form that the semantic component of a generative grammar must take. Then in the 70s linguistic semantics took a curious turn. Without rejecting GGH, linguists turned away from the task of characterizing the semantic component of a generative grammar to pursue instead the Montague-inspired project of providing for natural languages the same kind of model-theoretic semantics that logicians devise for the artificial languages of formal systems of logic, and “formal semantics” continues to dominate semantics in linguistics. This essay argues that the sort of compositional meaning theory that would verify GGH would not only be quite different from the theories formal semanticists construct, but would be a more fundamental theory that supersedes those theories in that it would explain why they are true when they are true, but their truth wouldn’t explain its truth. Formal semantics has undoubtedly made important contributions to our understanding of such phenomena as anaphora and quantification, but semantics in linguistics is supposed to be the study of meaning. This means that the formal semanticist can’t be unconcerned that the kind of semantic theory for a natural language that interests her has no place in a theory of linguistic competence; for if GGH is correct, then the more fundamental semantic theory is the compositional meaning theory that is the semantic component of the internally represented generative grammar, and if that is so, then linguistic semantics has so far ignored what really ought to be its primary concern. (shrink)

In this paper we study an alternative approach to the concept of abstract logic and to connectives in abstract logics. The notion of abstract logic was introduced by Brown and Suszko —nevertheless, similar concepts have been investigated by various authors. Considering abstract logics as intersection structures we extend several notions to their κ -versions, introduce a hierarchy of κ -prime theories, which is important for our treatment of infinite connectives, and study different concepts of κ -compactness. We are particularly interested (...) in non-topped intersection structures viewed as semi-lattices with a minimal meet-dense subset, i.e., with a minimal generator set. We study a chain condition which is sufficient for a minimal generator set, implies compactness of the logic, and in regular logics is equivalent to compactness of the consequence relation together with the existence of a inconsistent set, where κ is the cofinality of the cardinality of the logic. Some of these results are known in a similar form in the context of closure spaces, we give extensions to intersection structures and to big cardinals presenting new proofs based on set-theoretical tools. The existence of a minimal generator set is crucial for our way to define connectives. Although our method can be extended to further non-classical connectives we concentrate here on intuitionistic and infinite ones. Our approach leads us to the concept of the set of complete theories which is stable under all considered connectives and gives rise to the definition of the topological space of the logic. Topological representations of abstract logics by means of this space remain to be further investigated. (shrink)

In this Part II, I investigate different approaches to the question of what makes imagining different from belief. I find that the sentiment-based approach of David Hume falls short, as does the teleological approach, once advocated by David Velleman. I then consider whether the inferential properties of beliefs and imaginings may differ. Beliefs, I claim, exhibit an anti-symmetric inferential governance over imaginings: they are the background that makes inference from one imagining to the other possible; the reverse is not true, (...) and this allows us to distinguish the two attitudes. I then go on to consider the action theory of imagining and the role that imaginings play in generating emotion. (shrink)

Donald Trump’s speeches and messages are characterized by terms that are commonly referred to as “thick” or “emotive,” meaning that they are characterized by a tendency to be used to generate emotive reactions. This paper investigates how emotive meaning is related to emotions, and how it is generated or manipulated. Emotive meaning is analyzed as an evaluative conclusion that results from inferences triggered by the use of a term, which can be represented and assessed using argumentation schemes. (...) The evaluative inferences are regarded as part of the connotation of emotive words, which can be modified and stabilized by means of recontextualizations. The manipulative risks underlying the misuse and the redefinition of emotive words are accounted for in terms of presuppositions and implicit modifications of the interlocutors’ commitments. (shrink)

In Dirac-Bergmann constrained dynamics, a first-class constraint typically does not _alone_ generate a gauge transformation. By direct calculation it is found that each first-class constraint in Maxwell's theory generates a change in the electric field E by an arbitrary gradient, spoiling Gauss's law. The secondary first-class constraint p^i,_i=0 still holds, but being a function of derivatives of momenta, it is not directly about E. Only a special combination of the two first-class constraints, the Anderson-Bergmann -Castellani gauge generator G, leaves E (...) unchanged. This problem is avoided if one uses a first-class constraint as the generator of a _canonical transformation_; but that partly strips the canonical coordinates of physical meaning as electromagnetic potentials and makes the electric field depend on the smearing function, bad behavior illustrating the wisdom of the Anderson-Bergmann Lagrangian orientation of interesting canonical transformations. The need to keep gauge-invariant the relation dot{q}- dH/dp= -E_i -p^i=0 supports using the primary Hamiltonian rather than the extended Hamiltonian. The results extend the Lagrangian-oriented reforms of Castellani, Sugano, Pons, Salisbury, Shepley, _etc._ by showing the inequivalence of the extended Hamiltonian to the primary Hamiltonian even for _observables_, properly construed in the sense implying empirical equivalence. Dirac and others have noticed the arbitrary velocities multiplying the primary constraints outside the canonical Hamiltonian while apparently overlooking the corresponding arbitrary coordinates multiplying the secondary constraints _inside_ the canonical Hamiltonian, and so wrongly ascribed the gauge quality to the primaries alone, not the primary-secondary team G. Hence the Dirac conjecture about secondary first-class constraints rests upon a false presupposition. The usual concept of Dirac observables should also be modified to employ the gauge generator G, not the first-class constraints separately, so that the Hamiltonian observables become equivalent to the Lagrangian ones such as the electromagnetic field F. (shrink)

The absence of meaningfulness in life is meaninglessness. But what is the polar opposite of meaningfulness? In recent and ongoing work together with Stephen Campbell and Marcello di Paola respectively, I have explored what we dub ‘anti-meaning’: the negative counterpart of positive meaning in life. Here, I relate this idea of ‘anti-meaningful’ actions, activities, and projects to the topic of death, and in particular the deaths or suffering of those who will live after our own deaths. Connecting this (...) idea of anti-meaning and what happens after our own deaths to recent work by Samuel Scheffler on what he calls ‘the collective afterlife’ and his four reasons to care about future generations, I argue that if we today make choices or have lifestyles that later lead to unnecessarily early deaths and otherwise avoidable suffering of people who will live after we have died, this robs our current choices and lifestyles of some of their meaning, perhaps even making them the opposite of meaningful in the long run. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: Acknowledgements -- Notes on Contributors -- Introduction--K.Petrus -- H. Paul Grice's Defense of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction and Its Unintended Historical Consequences in Twentieth Century Analytical Philosophy--J.Atlas -- Paul Grice and the Philosopher of Ordinary Language--S.Chapman -- Some Aspects on Reasons and Retionality--J.Baker -- The Total Content of What a Speaker Means--A.Martinich -- Showing and Meaning--M.Green -- Communicative Acts - With and Without Understanding--C.Plunze -- Perillocutionary Acts. A Gricean Approach--K.Petrus -- William James + 40: Issues in (...) the Investigation of Implicature--L.Horn -- Grice on Presupposition--A.Bezuidenhout -- Irregular Negations: Implicature and Idiom Theories--W.Davis -- Grice's Calculability Criterion and Speaker Meaning--J.Saul -- A Gricean View on Intrusive Implicatures--M.Simons -- Three Theories of Implicature: Default Theory, Relevance and Minimalism--E.Borg -- Contextualism--N.Kompa -- Index. (shrink)

The structural theory of metaphor (STM) uses techniques from possible worlds semantics to generate and interpret metaphors. STM is presented in detail in The Logic of Metaphor: Analogous Parts of Possible Worlds (Steinhart, 2001). STM is based on Kittay’s semantic field theory of metaphor (1987) and ultimately on Black’s interactionist theory (1962, 1979). STM uses an intensional calculus to specify truth-conditions for many grammatical forms of metaphor. The truth-conditional analysis in STM is inspired in part by Miller (1979) and Hintikka (...) & Sandu (1994). STM is by no means a toy theory. It has been successfully tested on dozens of large texts taken from real authors. Its methods can be applied in very large linguistic databases like WordNet or MindNet. (shrink)

We find meaning and value in our lives by engaging in everyday projects. But, according to a recent argument by Samuel Scheffler, this value doesn’t depend merely on what the projects are about. In many cases, it depends also on the future generations that will replace us. By imagining the imminent extinction of humanity soon after our own deaths, we can recognize both that much of our current valuing depends on a background confidence in the ongoing survival of humanity (...) and that the survival and flourishing of those future generations matters to us. After presenting Scheffler’s argument, I will explore two twentieth century precursors—Hans Morgenthau and Simone de Beauvoir—before returning to Scheffler to see that his argument can not only show us why future generations matter, but it can also give us hope for immortality and a blueprint for embracing a changing future. (shrink)

After establishing its roots in basic forms of sensorimotor coupling between an organism and its environment, the new wave in cognitive science known as “enactivism” has turned to higher-level cognition, in an attempt to prove that even socioculturally mediated meaning-making processes can be accounted for in enactivist terms. My article tries to bolster this case by focusing on how the production and interpretation of stories can shape the value landscape of those who engage with them. First, it builds on (...) the idea that narrative plays a key role in expressing the values held by a society, in order to argue that the interpretation of stories cannot be understood in abstraction from the background of storytelling in which we are always already involved. Second, it presents interpretation as an example of what Di Paolo et al. ( 2010 ) have called in their recent enactivist manifesto a “joint process of sensemaking”: just like in face-to-face interaction, the recipient of the story collaborates with the authorial point of view, generating meaning. Third, it traces the meaning brought into the world by interpretation to the activation and, potentially, the restructuring of the background of the recipients of the story. (shrink)

The Meaning of Things explores the meanings of household possessions for three generation families in the Chicago area, and the place of materialism in American culture. Now regarded as a keystone in material culture studies, Halton's first book is based on his dissertation and coauthored with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. First published by Cambridge University Press in 1981, it has been translated into German, Italian, Japanese, and Hungarian. The Meaning of Things is a study of the significance of material (...) possessions in contemporary urban life, and of the ways people carve meaning out of their domestic environment. Drawing on a survey of eighty families in Chicago who were interviewed on the subject of their feelings about common household objects, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton provide a unique perspective on materialism, American culture, and the self. They begin by reviewing what social scientists and philosophers have said about the transactions between people and things. In the model of 'personhood' that the authors develop, goal-directed action and the cultivation of meaning through signs assume central importance. They then relate theoretical issues to the results of their survey. An important finding is the distinction between objects valued for action and those valued for contemplation. The authors compare families who have warm emotional attachments to their homes with those in which a common set of positive meanings is lacking, and interpret the different patterns of involvement. They then trace the cultivation of meaning in case studies of four families. Finally, the authors address what they describe as the current crisis of environmental and material exploitation, and suggest that human capacities for the creation and redirection of meaning offer the only hope for survival. A wide range of scholars - urban and family sociologists, clinical, developmental and environmental psychologists, cultural anthropologists and philosophers, and many general readers - will find this book stimulating and compelling. Translations: Il significato degli oggetti. Italian translation. Rome: Edizione Kappa, 1986. Der Sinn der Dinge. German translation. Munich: Psychologie Verlags Union, 1989. Japanese translation 2007. Targyaink tukreben. Hungarian translation, 2011. (shrink)

The purpose of the study is to identify the heuristic potential of phenomenological research for philosophical understanding of generational issues. Scientific novelty. The possibilities of the phenomenological analysis of a generation as a life world with its own sense-making, value orientations, and, therefore, peculiar rules of socio-cultural activity are characterized. A comparative analysis of generational problems in the phenomenological research of E. Husserl, M. Heidegger and A. Schutz is made. The author substantiates the conditionality of phenomenological presentations of generational (...) communities with the solution of problems of temporality, historicity, existential individuation and the foundations of socio-cultural consolidation. As a result, it is concluded that the representation of a generation as a life world allows us to characterize it as a social community, based on common semantic expectations based on the universe of values and meanings being formed, which allow us to form an actual response to the challenges of the actual present. (shrink)

Let κ and λ be infinite cardinals, F a filter on κ, and G a set of functions from κ to κ. The filter F is generated by G if F consists of those subsets of κ which contain the range of some element of G. The set G is $ -closed if it is closed in the $ -topology on κ κ. (In general, the $ -topology on IA has basic open sets all Π i∈ I U i such (...) that, for all $i \in I, U_i \subseteq A$ and $|\{i \in I: U_i \neq A\}| .) The primary question considered in this paper asks "Is there a uniform ultrafilter on κ which is generated by a closed set of functions?" (Closed means $ -closed.) We also establish the independence of two related questions. One is due to Carlson: "Does there exist a regular cardinal κ and a subtree T of $^{ such that the set of branches of T generates a uniform ultrafilter on κ?"; and the other is due to Pouzet: "For all regular cardinals κ, is it true that no uniform ultrafilter on κ is analytic?" We show that if κ is a singular, strong limit cardinal, then there is a uniform ultrafilter on κ which is generated by a closed set of increasing functions. Also, from the consistency of an almost huge cardinal, we get the consistency of CH + "There is a uniform ultrafilter on ℵ 1 which is generated by a closed set of increasing functions". In contrast with the above results, we show that if κ is any cardinal, λ is a regular cardinal less than or equal to κ and P is the forcing notion for adding at least $(\kappa^{ generic subsets of λ, then in V P , no uniform ultrafilter on κ is generated by a closed set of functions. (shrink)

RFID tags, small microchips no bigger than grains of rice, are currently being embedded in product labels, clothing, credit cards, and the environment, among other sites. Activated by the appropriate receiver, they transmit information ranging from product information such as manufacturing date, delivery route, and location where the item was purchased to the name, address, and credit history of the person holding the card. Active RFIDs have the capacity to transmit data without having to be activated by a receiver; they (...) can be linked with embedded sensors to allow continuous monitoring of environmental conditions, applications that interest both environmental groups and the US military. The amount of information accessible through and generated by RFIDs is so huge that it may well overwhelm all existing data sources and become, from the viewpoint of human time limitations, essentially infinite. What to make of these technologies will be interrogated through two contemporary fictions, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Philip K. Dick's Ubik. Cloud Atlas focuses on epistemological questions — who knows what about whom, in a futuristic society where all citizens wear embedded RFID tags and are subject to constant surveillance. Resistance takes the form not so much of evasion but rather as a struggle to transmit information to present and future stakeholders in a world on the brink of catastrophe. Ubik, by contrast, focuses on deeper ontological questions about the nature of reality itself. Both texts point to the necessity to reconceptualize information as ethical action embedded in contexts and not merely as a quantitative measure of probabilities. (shrink)

What do the rules of logic say about the meanings of the symbols they govern? In this book, James W. Garson examines the inferential behaviour of logical connectives, whose behaviour is defined by strict rules, and proves definitive results concerning exactly what those rules express about connective truth conditions. He explores the ways in which, depending on circumstances, a system of rules may provide no interpretation of a connective at all, or the interpretation we ordinarily expect for it, or an (...) unfamiliar or novel interpretation. He also shows how the novel interpretations thus generated may be used to help analyse philosophical problems such as vagueness and the open future. His book will be valuable for graduates and specialists in logic, philosophy of logic, and philosophy of language. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the actively discussed question of the uniqueness of Net generation. The digital natives have been credited with the ability to multitask and high-speed information processing, greater efficiency in online work. According to many researchers, the high technological skills of digital generation require an educational approach radically different from that of previous generations. According to S. Benett and K. Maton, these appeals for revolutionary changes in educational policy and practice turn into “moral panic.” The (...) analysis of contemporary empirical researches show that the digital skills and competencies attributed to the new generation are significantly overvalued, they need to be shaped and developed. The question regarding the ability of digital generation to adopt and adapt digital technologies remains controversial. The main characteristics of digital generation are distractibility, low attentional control and memorization ability, the problem with cognitive control, and, as a result, reduced educational achievements. The modified reward system and reduced self-control may lead to the Internet addiction formation. This article presents scientific evidence showing that designing education that assumes the presence of these abilities hinders rather than helps learning. However, this does not mean that we have to abandon the idea of technological modernization in education, this only means that new technologies should be used at the right time in the right place. (shrink)

What is it for a sentence to have a certain meaning? This is the question that the distinguished analytic philosopher William P. Alston addresses in this major contribution to the philosophy of language. His answer focuses on the given sentence's potential to play the role that its speaker had in mind, what he terms the usability of the sentence to perform the illocutionary act intended by its speaker. Alston defines an illocutionary act as an act of saying something with (...) a certain "content." He develops his account of what it is to perform such acts in terms of taking responsibility, in uttering a sentence, for the existence of certain conditions. In requesting someone to open a window, for example, the speaker takes responsibility for its being the case that the window is closed and that the speaker has an interest in its being opened. In Illocutionary Acts and Sentence Meaning, Alston expands upon this concept, creating a framework of five categories of illocutionary act and going on to argue that sentence meaning is fundamentally a matter of illocutionary act potential; that is, for a sentence to have a particular meaning is for it to be usable to perform illocutionary acts of a certain type. In providing detailed and explicit patterns of analysis for the whole range of illocutionary acts, Alston makes a unique contribution to the field of philosophy of language—one that is likely to generate debate for years to come. (shrink)

A generative grammar for a language L generates one or more syntactic structures for each sentence of L and interprets those structures both phonologically and semantically. A widely accepted assumption in generative linguistics dating from the mid-60s, the Generative Grammar Hypothesis, is that the ability of a speaker to understand sentences of her language requires her to have tacit knowledge of a generative grammar of it, and the task of linguistic semantics in those early days was taken to be that (...) of specifying the form that the semantic component of a generative grammar must take. Then in the 70s linguistic semantics took a curious turn. Without rejecting GGH, linguists turned away from the task of characterizing the semantic component of a generative grammar to pursue instead the Montague-inspired project of providing for natural languages the same kind of model-theoretic semantics that logicians devise for the artificial languages of formal systems of logic, and “formal semantics” continues to dominate semantics in linguistics. This essay argues that the sort of compositional meaning theory that would verify GGH would not only be quite different from the theories formal semanticists construct, but would be a more fundamental theory that supersedes those theories in that it would explain why they are true when they are true, but their truth wouldn’t explain its truth. Formal semantics has undoubtedly made important contributions to our understanding of such phenomena as anaphora and quantification, but semantics in linguistics is supposed to be the study of meaning. This means that the formal semanticist can’t be unconcerned that the kind of semantic theory for a natural language that interests her has no place in a theory of linguistic competence; for if GGH is correct, then the more fundamental semantic theory is the compositional meaning theory that is the semantic component of the internally represented generative grammar, and if that is so, then linguistic semantics has so far ignored what really ought to be its primary concern. (shrink)

The globally generated concepts of environment and sustainability are fast gaining currency in international business discourse. Sustainability concerns are concurrently becoming significant to business planning around corporate social responsibility and integral to organizational strategies toward enhancing shareholder value. The mindset of corporate managers is a key factor in determining company approaches to sustainability. But what do corporate managers understand by sustainability? Our study explores discursive meaning negotiation surrounding the concepts of environment and sustainability within business discourse. The study is (...) based on qualitative interpretive research drawing from symbolic interactionism which postulates that meaning in discourse is an essentially contested domain dependent upon negotiation in the Habermasian tradition of mutually respectful dialogue. Data from semi-structured intensive interviews of a small sample of senior corporate managers was analyzed to examine how corporate elites in India frame their approach to sustainability issues and respond to external pressures for deeper corporate responsibility. The findings point to the existence of a distinctively local narrative with strong potential for the discursive negotiation of personal and collective understanding of ethical and socio-cultural values that may help internalize broader sustainability considerations into corporate decision-making processes. (shrink)

This paper asks why information should ever be expressed vaguely, re-assessing some previously proposed answers to this question and suggesting some new ones. Particular attention is paid to the benefits that vague expressions can have in situations where agreement over the meaning of an expression cannot be taken for granted. A distinction between two different versions of the above-mentioned question is advocated. The first asks why human languages contain vague expressions, the second question asks when and why a speaker (...) should choose a vague expression when communicating with a hearer. While the former question is purely theoretical, the latter has practical implications for the computational generation of utterances in Natural Language Generation (NLG). (shrink)

Globalization impacts on education everywhere; it is impossible to consider issues of curriculum or pedagogy without bearing in mind the effects of globalization. Here I consider to what extent it is possible to imagine curricula and pedagogies which could function at a global level? I do so from an anglo-phone perspective, from within the UK in the early part of the 21st century. The challenge is to develop means of analysis which allow distanced reflection on local issues and at the (...) same time facilitate descriptions at a global level, relatively free of the ‘skew’ of the local. The article deals with four issues: dominantmyths which still govern contemporary thinking about education; addressing the transitional generation, a generation which straddles the shifts produced by the fault-lines in present social and political transitions of arrangements of power and authority; the characteristics and effects of present and likely future environments of learning, distinct historically and geographically; and the urgent need to develop apt theories of learning, that is, theories of learning which are apt for these new givens. What unites all these is the commonality of the experience of learning in a world of instability and multiplicity of meaning. (shrink)

The aim of phenomenology is to provide a critical account of the origins and genesis of the world. This implies that the standpoint of the phenomenologicalreduction is properly extramundane. But it remains an outstanding task to formulate a credible account of the reduction that would be adequate to this seemingly impossible methodological condition. This paper contributes to rethinking the reduction accordingly. Building on efforts to thematize its intersubjective and corporeal aspects, the reduction is approached as a kind of transcendental practice (...) in the context of generativity. Foregrounding the psychotherapeutic encounter with persons suffering schizophrenic delusion as paradigmatic of the emergence of shared meaning, it is argued that this is where we may best come to terms with the methodological exigencies of phenomenology’s transcendental aim. It follows that phenomenologists across all disciplines may have something important to learn from how phenomenology has been put into practice in the psychotherapeutic domain. (shrink)

This article presents an architecture for natural language generation of biomedical argumentation. The goal is to reconstruct the normative arguments that a domain expert would provide, in a manner that is transparent to a lay audience. Transparency means that an argument's structure and functional components are accessible to its audience. Transparency is necessary before an audience can fully comprehend, evaluate or challenge an argument, or re-evaluate it in light of new findings about the case or changes in scientific knowledge. (...) The architecture has been implemented and evaluated in the Genetics Information Expression Assistant, a prototype system for drafting genetic counselling patient letters. Argument generation makes use of abstract argumentation schemes. Derived from the analysis of arguments used in genetic counselling, these mainly causal argument patterns refer to abstract properties of qualitative causal domain models. (shrink)