Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

This is the first book to offer a philosophical engagement with microaggressions. It aims to provide an intersectional analysis of microaggressions that cuts across multiple dimensions of oppression and marginalization, and to engage a variety of perspectives that have been sidelined within the discipline of philosophy. The volume gathers a diverse group of contributors: philosophers of color, philosophers with disabilities, philosophers of various nationalities and ethnicities, and philosophers of several gender identities. Their unique frames of analysis articulate both how the concept of microaggressions can be used to clarify and sharpen our understanding of subtler aspects of oppression and how analysis, expansion, and reconceiving the notion of a microaggression can deepen and extend its explanatory power. The essays in the volume seek to defend microaggressions from common critiques and to explain their impact beyond the context of college students. Some of the guiding questions that this volume explores include, but are not limited to, the following: Can microaggressions be established as a viable scientific concept? What roles do microaggressions play in other oppressive phenomena like transphobia, fat phobia, and abelism? How can epistemological challenges around microaggressions be addressed via feminist theory, critical race theory, disability theory, or epistemologies of ignorance? What insights can be gleaned from intersectional analyses of microaggressions? Are there domain-specific analyses of microaggressions that would give insight to features of that domain, i.e. microaggressions related to sexuality, athletics, immigration status, national origin, body type, or ability. Microaggressions and Philosophy features cutting-edge research on an important topic that will appeal to a wide range of students and scholars across disciplines. It includes perspectives from philosophy of psychology, empirically informed philosophy, feminist philosophy, critical race theory, disability theory, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, and social and political philosophy.

The Taming of the True poses a broad challenge to the realist views of meaning and truth that have been prominent in recent philosophy. Neil Tennant starts with a careful critical survey of the realism debate, guiding the reader through its complexities; he then presents a sustained defence of the anti-realist view that every truth is knowable in principle, and that grasp of meaning must be able to be made manifest. Sceptical arguments for the indeterminacy or non-factuality of meaning are countered; and the much-maligned notion of analyticity is reinvestigated and rehabilitated. Tennant goes on to show that an effective logical system can be based on his anti-realist view; the logical system that he advocates is justified as a body of analytic truths and inferential principles. Having laid the foundations for global semantic anti-realism, Tennant moves to the world of empirical understanding, and gives an account of the cognitive credentials of natural scientific discourse. He shows that the same canon of constructive and relevant inference suffices both for intuitionistic mathematics and for empirical science. This is an ambitious and contentious book which aims to reform not only theory of meaning, but our deductive practices across a broad range of discourses.

Stephen Neale presents a powerful, original examination of a cornerstone of modern philosophy: the idea that our thoughts and utterances are representations of reality, that accurate or true representations are those that correspond to the facts. Facing Facts will be crucial to future work in metaphysics, logic, and the philosophy of mind and language, and will have profound implications far beyond.

It is commonplace to regard many great works of literature-poems, dramas, works of fiction-as in some sense philosophical, yet ever since Plato, there has been a tension between the kind of abstract theorizing that goes on in philosophy and the focus on concrete particulars that occurs in poetry and fiction. Beyond Words: Philosophy, Fiction, and the Unsayable elaborates on and addresses this Platonic tension, asking in what sense, if any, literature in the form of poetry, drama, short stories, and novels can contribute significantly to our philosophical understanding. Timothy Cleveland suggests there is something in certain poems, novels, and stories that makes them especially, perhaps even best, suited to expanding our awareness and understanding into the nature of things otherwise unsayable and unconceived. Such literary works do philosophy, showing us something that a theoretical-scientific or philosophical-discourse cannot literally say.

This collation from Samuel T. Coleridge's contributions to the theory of language presents an imposing revision of the enlightenment approach to language. Selections from his verse, notebooks, journalism and ephemera are arranged under headings including the language of politics; language and culture; the language of poetry; theory of language; words and things; organ of language; and the language of religion. The editor's introduction situates Coleridge's thinking in its period, and with modern theory in mind.

Merleau-Ponty's status as a philosopher of perception is well-established, but his distinctive contributions to the philosophy and phenomenology of language have yet to be fully appreciated. Through detailed, clear, and accessible analyses of Merleau-Ponty's views of linguistic meaning, expression, and understanding, and by tracing the evolution and development of these views throughout the course of his philosophical career, Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Language offers a global and comprehensive picture of his engagement with the philosophy of language. This book demonstrates that the phenomenology of language is essential for grasping the meaning and motivations behind some of Merleau-Ponty's most celebrated philosophical contributions. It argues that his philosophy of language should take on a central role in our appraisal of the development and basic goals of his thought. And it suggests that the success of phenomenology's return to the 'things themselves' must be judged not only by the evidence of intuition, but also by the labour of expression.

The theory of value structure concerns the meaning of "better than" and "good," as well as the way in which values serve as a basis for rational decision making. Drawing methodologically from economics and theories of decision making, the aim of serious axiology in metaethics is to do justice to problems that have puzzled philosophers of value for centuries. Can value comparisons be cyclic? Are all values comparable with each other and can decision makers just add up different aspects of an evaluation to determine the best course of action? A Theory of Value Structure: From Values to Decisions starts with a thorough introduction to the modeling of "better than" comparisons from a normative perspective. In the philosophical part of the book, Erich H. Rast argues that aspects of "better than" comparisons can differ qualitatively so much that one aspect may outrank another. Consequently, the classical weighted sum aggregation model fails. Values cannot always be summed up and comparisons may be fundamentally noncompensatory, an indeterminacy that explains problems like the apparent nontransitivity of "better than" and hard cases in decision making. Using a lexicographic method of value comparisons, Rast develops a multidimensional theory of "better than" and shows how and to which extent it can be combined with standard methods of decision making under uncertainty by using rank-dependent utility theory.

This book offers readers a collection of 50 short chapter entries on topics in the philosophy of language. Each entry addresses a paradox, a longstanding puzzle, or a major theme that has emerged in the field from the last 150 years, tracing overlap with issues in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, ethics, political philosophy, and literature. Each of the 50 entries is written as a piece that can stand on its own, though useful connections to other entries are mentioned throughout the text. Readers can open the book and start with almost any of the entries, following themes of greatest interest to them. Each entry includes recommendations for further reading on the topic. Philosophy of Language: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is useful as a standalone textbook, or can be supplemented by additional readings that instructors choose. The accessible style makes it suitable for introductory level through intermediate undergraduate courses, as well as for independent learners, or even as a reference for more advanced students and researchers. Key Features: Uses a problem-centered approach to philosophy of language (rather than author- or theory-centered) making the text more inviting to first-time students of the subject. Offers stand-alone chapters, allowing students to quickly understand an issue and giving instructors flexibility in assigning readings to match the themes of the course. Provides up-to-date recommended readings at the end of each chapter, or about 500 sources in total, amounting to an extensive review of the literature on each topic.

This book attempts to solve the question whether semiotics is a methodology as is generally held and if the studies of meaning and the mind can shed light on a series of metaphysical issues, so that the edifice of semiotics could be erected on a philosophical ground. It proposes that a philosophical semiotics is, by necessity, a semiotic phenomenology about the construction of the "world of meaning" by signs, and any discussion about semiotics has to proceed around two core issues: meaning and the mind. This book particularly exemplifies the semiotic connections in various schools of traditional Chinese philosophies. In the "Pre-Imperial Age" (before BC 300), there emerged an abundance of semiotic thinking in China, from Yijing the first sign system that aims to explain everything in the world, to the Namists's subtle argument about the form of meaning, from the Yin-Yang/five elements of the Han, to the "Things are non-existent while mind is non-non-existent" principle of the Vijnaptimatratasiddhi School of Buddhism in the Tang, and from the Sudden Revelation of Chan Buddhism to the "Nothing outside the mind" endorsed by the Mindist Confucianism in the Ming. The mighty trend of philosophical heritage provides rich food to our understanding of the form of meaning.

This edited book offers a broad selection of interdisciplinary studies within cognitive science. The book illustrates and documents how cognitive science offers a unifying framework for the interaction of fields of study focusing on the human mind from linguistics and philosophy to psychology and the history of science. A selection of renowned contributors provides authoritative historical, theoretical and empirical perspectives on more than six decades of research with a special focus on the progress of cognitive science in Central Europe. Readers encounter a bird's eye view of geographical and linguistic diversity brought about by the cognitive revolution, as it is reflected in the writings of leading authors, many of whom are former students and collaborators of Csaba Pleh, a key figure of the cognitive turn in Central Europe, to whom this book is dedicated. The book appeals to students and researchers looking for the ways various approaches to the mind and the brain intersect.

Recent decades of studies have been human-centred while zooming in on cognition, verbal choices and performance. (...) [and] have provided interesting results, but which often veer towards quantity rather than quality findings. The new reality, however, requires new directions that move towards a humanism that is rooted in holism, stressing that a living organism needs to refocus in order to see the self as a part of a vast ecosystem. Dr Izabela Dixon, Koszalin University of Technology, Poland This volume is a collection of eight chapters by different authors focusing on ecolinguistics. It is preceded by a preface (..) underlin[ing] the presence of ecolinguistics as a newly-born linguistic theory and practice, something that explains the mosaic of content and method in the various chapters, with a more coherent approach being the aim for future research. Prof. Harald Ulland, Bergen University, Norway

This Handbook brings together philosophical work on how language shapes, and is shaped by, social and political factors. Its 24 chapters were written exclusively for this volume by an international team of leading researchers, and together they provide a broad expert introduction to the major issues currently under discussion in this area. The volume is divided into four parts: Part I: Methodological and Foundational Issues Part II: Non-ideal Semantics and Pragmatics Part III: Linguistic Harms Part IV: Applications The parts, and chapters in each part, are introduced in the volume's General Introduction. A list of Works Cited concludes each chapter, pointing readers to further areas of study. The Handbook is the first major, multi-authored reference work in this growing area and essential reading for anyone interested in the nature of language and its relationship to social and political reality.

For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's brief Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) is one of the most important philosophical works of the twentieth century, yet it offers little orientation for the reader. The first-time reader is left wondering what it could be about, and the scholar is left with little guidance for interpretation. In Tractatus in Context, James C. Klagge presents the vital background necessary for appreciating Wittgenstein's gnomic masterpiece. Tractatus in Context contains the early reactions to the Tractatus, including the initial reviews written in 1922-1924. And while we can't talk with Wittgenstein, we can do the next best thing-hear what he had to say about the Tractatus. Klagge thus presents what Wittgenstein thought about germane issues leading up to his writing the book, in discussions and correspondence with others about his ideas, and what he had to say about the Tractatus after it was written-in letters, lectures and conversations. It offers, you might say, Wittgenstein's own commentary on the book. Key Features: Illuminates what is at stake in the Tractatus, by providing the views of others that engaged Wittgenstein as he was writing it. Includes Wittgenstein's earlier thoughts on ideas in the book as recorded in his notebooks, letters, and conversations as well as his later, retrospective comments on those ideas. Draws on new or little-known sources, such as Wittgenstein's coded notebooks, Hermine's notes, Frege's letters, Hansel's diary, Ramsey's notes, and Skinner's dictations. Draws connections between the background context and specific passages in the Tractatus, using a proposition-by-proposition commentary.

This book offers original insights around a fascinating idea: Perception and the rest of cognition, crucially including language, are closer to each other than the Cartesian tradition dared to dream. By combining recent results in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of perception, and the syntax of natural language, the book demonstrates that there is continuity between higher and lower cognition. Percepts from perceptual experience are propositional, conceptual, and they are not divorced from objective reality. Human cognition is merged with the natural world, able to reflect it in complex ways and interact with it in modalities that are since the very beginning computationally complex and rich in content.

The book pursues a usage-oriented strategy of language description by infusing it with the central concept of post-structural semiotics and literary theory - that of intertextual memory. Its principal claim is that all new facts of language are grounded in the speakers' memory of previous experiences of using language. It is a "speech to speech" model: every new fact of speech is seen as emerging out of recalled fragments that are reiterated and manipulated at the same time. By the same token, the new meaning is always superscribed on something familiar and recognizable as its (more or less radical) alteration. The model offers a way to describe the meaning of language as an open-ended process, the way the meaning of literary works is described in modern literary criticism. The basic unit of the intertextual model is the Communicative Fragment (CF). A CF is a fraction of speech of any shape, meaning, and stylistic provenance, which speakers recognize and, as a consequence, treat as a whole. Its chief attributes are a prefabricated shape, an integral meaning (i.e., perceived as a whole whose scope always goes beyond the analyzable), and a specific communicative "texture" alluding at a speech genre, a tangible speech situation, and profiles of the speaker and the implied addressee. Although a CF has a recognizable shape, it is not as definitively set as that of stationary linguistic signs (words and morphemes). A CF can be tempered with, truncated or expanded, adapted to and fused with other CFs. The book describes in detail typical devices by which speakers manipulate their resources of linguistic memory, whose ever-new constellations in speech create infinite possibilities for new variations and shades of meaning. The book is of interest to linguists in such diverse fields as Cognitive Linguistics, discourse analysis, functional linguistics, language pedagogy, translation studies, semiotics, and the philosophy of language.

This book explores heterogeneity in the Indian academic setting. Presenting a study on the performance of Bachelor of Engineering students from various parts of the county, it analyzes the subjects' language skills on the basis of selected sociolinguistic variables and examines the possible role/impact of using multiple languages in the communicative setting described. In turn, the book investigates the differences between the way language is viewed in the Orient and in the Western world, and how, despite their differences, these views lead to similar language teaching methods in both worlds. It also highlights the limitations of current theories and frameworks in terms of accommodating modern methods of assessing language skills. Addressing socio-pragmatic issues in terms of English proficiency and language assessment, it is the first book to offer such a focused and detailed discussion of these varied but related issues, making it a valuable resource for all scholars and researchers working in the areas of socio-pragmatics, language assessment, and intercultural communication.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

The study offers an analysis of three grammatical constructions specifically employed in direct performance of directive speech acts in Polish. Constructions of this type have not yet been widely analyzed, as research pertaining to the relation between the grammatical structure of an utterance and its pragmatic effects has focused mainly on indirect speech acts. The study combines a discussion of a wide range of corpus examples with a detailed analysis of hand-picked examples situated in specific contexts. The aim is to show how the grammatical make-up of a construction functions with contextual factors to bring about a range of pragmatic effects pertaining to the speakers' interaction and their interpersonal relation. The framework of the study is the theory of cognitive grammar.