Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives written by Robert Schwartz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-23 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy.

Download or read book Variation and Change written by Mirjam Fried and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."

Download or read book Perspectives on Pragmatism written by Robert Brandom and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2011-11-07 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatism has been reinvented in every generation since its beginnings in the late nineteenth century. This book, by one of todayÕs most distinguished contemporary heirs of pragmatist philosophy, rereads cardinal figures in that tradition, distilling from their insights a way forward from where we are now. Perspectives on Pragmatism opens with a new accounting of what is living and what is dead in the first three generations of classical American pragmatists, represented by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. Post-Deweyan pragmatism at midcentury is discussed in the work of Wilfrid Sellars, one of its most brilliant and original practitioners. SellarsÕ legacy in turn is traced through the thought of his admirer, Richard Rorty, who further developed JamesÕs and DeweyÕs ideas within the professional discipline of philosophy and once more succeeded, as they had, in showing the more general importance of those ideas not only for intellectuals outside philosophy but for the wider public sphere. The book closes with a clear description of the authorÕs own analytic pragmatism, which combines all these ideas with those of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and synthesizes that broad pragmatism with its dominant philosophical rival, analytic philosophy, which focuses on language and logic. The result is a treatise that allows us to see American philosophy in its full scope, both its origins and its promise for tomorrow.

Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives in Phenomenology written by Ondrej Svec and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-06-26 with total page 271 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection offers complex analysis of the pragmatic theses that are present in the works of leading phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It will be of interest to scholars of phenomenology who are interested in moving beyond the analytic-continental divide to explore the relationship between practice and theory.

Download or read book The Pragmatic Perspective written by Jef Verschueren and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1987-01-01 with total page 852 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers, originally presented at the International Pragmatics Conference held in Viareggio, Italy, 1 5 September 1985.

Download or read book A Pragmatic Perspective of Measurement written by David Torres Irribarra and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-05-29 with total page 96 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book aims to address the challenges of defining measurement in social sciences, presenting a conceptualization of the practice of measurement from the perspective of the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. The book reviews key questions regarding the scope and limits of measurement, emphasizing that if the trust that the public places on measures in the social sciences relies on their connection to the notion of measurement in the physical sciences, then the clarification of the similarities and differences between measurement in the physical and the social realms is of central importance to adequately contextualize their relative advantages and limitations. It goes on to present some of the most influential theories of measurement such as the “classical view” of measurement, operationalism, and the representational theory of measurement, as well as more methodological perspectives arising from the practice of researchers in the social sciences, such as the latent variable perspective, and from the physical sciences and engineering, represented by metrology. This overview illustrates that the concept of measurement, and that of quantitative methods, is currently being used across the board in ways that do not necessarily conform to traditional, classical definitions of measurement, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes our technical understanding of it. Moreover, what constitutes a technical understanding of measurement, and the theoretical commitments that it entails, must vary in different areas. In this context, disagreement on what is constitutive of measurement is bound to appear. Pragmatism is presented as a theoretical perspective that offers the advantage of being flexible and fallibilist, encouraging us to abandon the pursuit of a timeless and perfect definition that attempts to establish decontextualized/definitive demarcation criteria for what is truly measurement. This book will be of particular interest for psychologists and other human and social scientists, and more concretely for scholars interested in measurement and assessment in psychological and social measurement. The pragmatic perspective of measurement presents a conceptual framework for researchers to ground their assessment practices acknowledging and dealing with the challenges of social measurement.

Download or read book Language and Violence written by Daniel Silva and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book combines scholarship in pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophy to address the problem of violence in language. How do words wound? What is the relation between physical and linguistic violence? How do racial invectives, misogynous language, homophobic slurs, among other forms of hate speech, affect the body and make us vulnerable to conditions of injurability that language brings about? While investigating the limits that violence poses for everyday speech action, understanding, representation, and our shared frameworks of intelligibility, this collective volume theoretically bridges knowledge from canons in linguistic pragmatics, continental philosophy and linguistic/semiotic anthropology and the dialogic perspective of subjects who are located in the peripheries of South America and Europe. The scholarship gathered here intends to offer a perspective on the violence of words that is attentive to practices and sensibilities that do not always fit into hegemonic ideologies of self and language.

Download or read book The Power of Silence written by Adam Jaworski and published by SAGE. This book was released on 1993 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a theoretical account of a variety of different communicative aspects of silence and explores new ways of studying socially-motivated language. A research overview shows the influence of related work in the fields of media studies, politics, gender studies, aesthetics and literature. The author argues that in theoretically pragmatic terms, silence can be accounted for by the same principles as those of speech. A later, more applied section of the book explores the power of silencing in politics. A concluding chapter shows the importance of silence beyond linguistics and politics in terms of artistic expression. The approach is intentionally eclectic in order to explore the concept of silence as a rich and

Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics Volume II written by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2013-01-16 with total page 405 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatics of Semantically-Restricted Domains, the second volume of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, edited by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, gathers papers which partly complement and develop the first volume, Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Most of the texts collected in this book, representative of advanced independent research and that of an informed exercise in the application of a pragmatic framework, result from the Fourth Symposium on “New Developments in Linguistic Pragmatics,” organized at the University of Łódź, Poland, in May 2008. Accepting the inevitable failure of any attempt to pose a strict and clear-cut division between the research area of semantics and that of pragmatics, the volume focuses on pragmatics-oriented analyses of data which are best described as “semantically” limited. While Volume One concentrated on speech as a type of action, the present volume, without denying the inherently actional nature of language use, concentrates on limited contexts. Pragmatic phenomena in semantically-restricted domains are addressed from a variety of both theoretical and applied perspectives. The book is divided in three parts. Part One, “Pragmatics, Politics and Ideology,” gathers seven papers centered on issues pertaining to political linguistics. In Part Two, “The Pragmatics of Humour, Power and the Media,” there are eight papers which explore issues of politeness and modesty, pragmatic aspects of mediated and gendered discourse, or dynamicity of power relation in interaction. Part Three, “Focus on Textual Properties,” concentrates on text, excluding political discourse. It integrates discussions of equivalence and specialized translation, intertextual properties and pragmatically-motivated lexical choices in business communication, in law, and in science.

Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics Volume I written by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2010-02-19 with total page 510 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, the first of the two volumes of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, brings together twenty essays which critically examine linguistic action and explore ways in which it can be accounted for. The articles presented in this collection are all focused on “doing things with words”, but in most cases do not subscribe to speech act theory in the tradition of John L. Austin and John R. Searle. The linking thread through the volume is not a theoretical commitment to one of the speech-act theoretical models, but the authors’ perspective on language as a means of action, how linguistic expressions become effective in context and how this effectiveness can be explicated. The papers represent different pragmatic approaches and varied levels of expertise in the research area; among the authors there are eminent linguists and philosophers, well established researchers, and young beginners. The texts include purely theoretical discussions, case studies, reports on research in experimental pragmatics, contrastive and corpus studies, and considerations of the pedagogical implications of pragmatic reflection on the nature of language. Without purporting to cover all relevant topics, this variety reflects the complex character of linguistic pragmatics and integrates studies which cross-cut other research fields. The book is divided in three parts. The seven papers gathered in the first part of the volume, “Speech Action in Theory”, are concentrated on theoretical issues pertaining to speech as a type of action with emphasis both on linguistic forms (e.g. fragments) and theoretical commitments and particular theories’ explanatory power. Part two, “Case Studies & Experimental Pragmatics”, includes reports on research into irony processing in Polish and in English as a second language, intercultural differences in interactions broadcast in the media, power relations in doctor/patient interaction, and metaphors in media discourse at the time of crisis. Part three, “Pragmatics, Grammar, and Language Pedagogy”, contains five essays, which explore both more “formal” pragmatics through analyses of grammatical forms and the interface which the analysis of these forms share with context-grounded research, and the practical implications of pragmatic knowledge in language didactics. This collection is supplemented by the essays gathered in volume two, entitled Pragmatics of Semantically Restricted Domains.

Download or read book Cognitive Pragmatism written by Nicholas Rescher and published by University of Pittsburgh Pre. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Cognitive Pragmatism, Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we've come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings.Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there's no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, "If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State." In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science.

Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives on Postcolonial Discourse written by Christoph Schubert and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-06-22 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.

Download or read book Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics Volume I written by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2009-12-14 with total page 526 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies, the first of the two volumes of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, brings together twenty essays which critically examine linguistic action and explore ways in which it can be accounted for. The articles presented in this collection are all focused on “doing things with words”, but in most cases do not subscribe to speech act theory in the tradition of John L. Austin and John R. Searle. The linking thread through the volume is not a theoretical commitment to one of the speech-act theoretical models, but the authors’ perspective on language as a means of action, how linguistic expressions become effective in context and how this effectiveness can be explicated. The papers represent different pragmatic approaches and varied levels of expertise in the research area; among the authors there are eminent linguists and philosophers, well established researchers, and young beginners. The texts include purely theoretical discussions, case studies, reports on research in experimental pragmatics, contrastive and corpus studies, and considerations of the pedagogical implications of pragmatic reflection on the nature of language. Without purporting to cover all relevant topics, this variety reflects the complex character of linguistic pragmatics and integrates studies which cross-cut other research fields. The book is divided in three parts. The seven papers gathered in the first part of the volume, “Speech Action in Theory”, are concentrated on theoretical issues pertaining to speech as a type of action with emphasis both on linguistic forms (e.g. fragments) and theoretical commitments and particular theories’ explanatory power. Part two, “Case Studies & Experimental Pragmatics”, includes reports on research into irony processing in Polish and in English as a second language, intercultural differences in interactions broadcast in the media, power relations in doctor/patient interaction, and metaphors in media discourse at the time of crisis. Part three, “Pragmatics, Grammar, and Language Pedagogy”, contains five essays, which explore both more “formal” pragmatics through analyses of grammatical forms and the interface which the analysis of these forms share with context-grounded research, and the practical implications of pragmatic knowledge in language didactics. This collection is supplemented by the essays gathered in volume two, entitled Pragmatics of Semantically Restricted Domains.

Download or read book Variation and Change written by Mirjam Fried and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ten volumes of the Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker’s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at explaining variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models.

Download or read book The Pragmatic Turn written by Andreas K. Engel and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Experts from a range of disciplines assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as “enactive.” This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show that an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. Contributors Moshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau

Download or read book A Pragmatic Approach to Libertarian Free Will written by John Lemos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-03-26 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Pragmatic Approach to Libertarian Free Will argues that the kind of free will required for moral responsibility and just desert is libertarian free will. It is a source of great controversy whether such a libertarian view is coherent and whether we should believe that we have such free will. This book explains and defends Robert Kane’s conception of libertarian free will while departing from it in certain key respects. It is argued that a suitably modified Kanean model of free will can be shown to be conceptually coherent. In addition, it is argued that while we lack sufficient epistemic grounds supporting belief in the existence of libertarian free will, we may still be justified in believing in it for moral reasons. As such, the book engages critically with the works of a growing number of philosophers who argue that we should jettison belief in the existence of desert-grounding free will and the practices of praise and blame and reward and punishment which it supports.

Download or read book Adpositions written by Dennis Kurzon and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of articles which deal with adpositions in a variety of languages and from a number of perspectives. Not only does the book cover what is traditionally treated in studies from a European and Semitic orientation – prepositions, but it presents studies on postpositions, too. The main languages dealt with in the collection are English, French and Hebrew, but there are articles devoted to other languages including Korean, Turkic languages, Armenian, Russian and Ukrainian. Adpositions are treated by some authors from a semantic perspective, by others as syntactic units, and a third group of authors distinguishes adpositions from the point of view of their pragmatic function. This work is of interest to students and researchers in theoretical and applied linguistics, as well as to those who have a special interest in any of the languages treated.