Generations of fighting Harris blood exploded through Roy Harris's veins that August night in 1958 as he stood in the boxing ring in Los Angeles. He was facing the undefeated heavyweight champion of the world, Floyd Patterson, who, at the time, had earned that crown at an earlier age than any other man in history.

Roy faced a psychological handicap met by few other heavyweight challengers. How could a rustic backwoodsman turned gentleman-scholar-soldier cope with such a challenge? What strange events had conspired to create the meeting of such a contrast in pugilistic antagonists?

"Roy Harris of Cut and Shoot" is, in part, the story of how and why Roy Harris emerged from backwoods obscurity to the pinnacle of fistic heaven--a heavyweight title bout. But this is also the story of the rapidly vanishing breed that spawned and nourished him--the rugged individualistic frontiersmen from the oil-rich southeast Texas thicket country. Today, Cut and Shoot is a growing community northeast of Houston. Roy has retired from illustrious careers not only in boxing, but as an attorney, real estate mogul, and the county clerk of Montgomery County, Texas, for twenty-eight years.

Roy's personal memories are inserted throughout "Roy Harris of Cut and Shoot," adding authenticity to this dramatic saga.

Are contemporary art theorists and critics speaking a language that has lost its meaning? Is it still based on concepts and values that are long out of date? Does anyone know what the function of the arts is in modern society?Roy Harris breaks new ground with his linguistic approach to the key issues. He situates those issues within the long-running debate about the arts and their place in society which goes back to the Classical period in ancient Greece. Contributors to the debate included some of the most celebrated artists and philosophers of their day--Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo, Kant, Hegel, Wagner, Baudelaire, Zola, Delacroix--but none of these eminent figures or their supporters provided a reasoned overview examining the multilingual development of Western artspeak as a whole. Nor did they develop any explicit account of the relationship between the arts and language.The Necessity of Artspeak shows for the first time that what have usually been considered problems of aesthetics and artistic justification often have their source in the linguistic assumptions underlying the terms and arguments presented. It also shows how artspeak has been--and continues to be--manipulated to serve the interests of particular social groups and agendas. Until the semantics of artspeak is more widely understood, the public will continue to be taken in by the latest fads and fashions that propagandists of the art world promote.

A radical new theory of the language of science by eminent linguist Roy Harris. In The Semantics of Science Roy Harris challenges a number of long-accepted assumptions about science and scientific discourse. According to Harris, science - like art, religion and history - is one of the supercategories adopted by modern societies for explaining and justifying certain types of human activity. Harris argues that these supercategories are themselves verbal constructs, and thus language-dependent. Each supercategory has its own semantics. The function of the supercategory is to integrate what would otherwise be unconnected forms of inquiry, and the result of such integrations is to draw a certain map of our intellectual world. Among the questions tackled are: Is mathematics a language? Does the language of science go beyond the bounds of common sense? And, if so, on what basis? In a wide-ranging historical survey, Harris rejects the view that the Greeks and medieval thinkers had any concept of scientific inquiry that corresponds to our own. He pays close attention to the early work of the Royal Society and to the twentieth-century semantic crisis caused by attempting to integrate Einsteinian relativity and quantum mechanics. This lucidly written book will be of interest to all those engaged in linguistics, semiotics, philosophy of science and cultural studies.

In Signs, Language and Communication readers familiar with the arguments of Professor Harris' previous work, including Signs of Writing, will find those ideas developed here to cover not just writing, but aspects of art, design and manufacture.
Roy Harris proposes a new theory of communication. He begins with the premise that the mental life of an individual should be conceived as a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the past and future. He concludes by arguing that communication should be viewed as both a product and a resource of this constant act of integration.

In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech.
By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext.
This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.

The problem of definition has a long history and has engaged the minds of some of the most eminent thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato and Aristotle onwards. But it is also an everyday problem constantly confronting all who have to draft or interpret the countless texts on which modern society depends. Definition in Theory and Practice focuses on two areas where difficulties arise in a particularly acute form: lexicography and the law. Examining a wide range of approaches and definitional techniques, backed up by detailed analyses of dictionary entries and court cases, the authors provide a comprehensive survey of their subject. They argue that what underlies the problem of definition are conflicting assumptions about the way language functions. This in-depth study of definition will be of interest to academics researching lexicography, semantics and the intersection of linguistics and jurisprudence.

Saussure as a linguist and Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century linguistic thought. By pointing out what their ideas have in common, in spite of emanating from very different intellectual sources, this study breaks new ground.

The basic claim of this book is that for 2000 years and more the western tradition has relied on two very dubious assumptions about human communication: that each national language is a unique code and that linguistic communication consists in the utilization of such codes to transfer messages from mind to mind.

This book re-examines the old debate about the relationship between rationality and literacy. Does writing "restructure consciousness?" Do preliterate societies have a different "mind-set" from literate societies? Is reason "built in" to the way we think? How is literacy related to numeracy? Is the "logical form" that Western philosophers recognize anything more than an extrapolation from the structure of the written sentence? Is logic, as developed formally in Western education, intrinsically beyond the reach of the preliterate mind? What light, if any, do the findings of contemporary neuroscience throw on such issues? Roy Harris challenges the received mainstream opinion that reason is an intrinsic property of the human mind, and argues that the whole Western conception of rational thought, from Classical Greece down to modern symbolic logic, is a by-product of the way literacy developed in European cultures.

This book re-examines the old debate about the relationship between rationality and literacy. Does writing "restructure consciousness?" Do preliterate societies have a different "mind-set" from literate societies? Is reason "built in" to the way we think? How is literacy related to numeracy? Is the "logical form" that Western philosophers recognize anything more than an extrapolation from the structure of the written sentence? Is logic, as developed formally in Western education, intrinsically beyond the reach of the preliterate mind? What light, if any, do the findings of contemporary neuroscience throw on such issues? Roy Harris challenges the received mainstream opinion that reason is an intrinsic property of the human mind, and argues that the whole Western conception of rational thought, from Classical Greece down to modern symbolic logic, is a by-product of the way literacy developed in European cultures.

The basic claim of this book is that for 2000 years and more the western tradition has relied on two very dubious assumptions about human communication: that each national language is a unique code and that linguistic communication consists in the utilization of such codes to transfer messages from mind to mind.

Saussure and his Interpreters is the first major reassessment of the reception of Saussure's ideas throughout the twentieth century. That Saussure's work profoundly influenced developments in such diverse fields as linguistics, anthropology, psychology and literary studies is denied by no one. But what exactly Saussure's views were taken to be by his interpreters has not hitherto been subject to any comprehensive critical survey. How well were Saussure's ideas understood by those who took them up? Or how badly misunderstood? And why? The answers to these questions address central issues in the history of Western culture.

Each chapter focuses on one particular interpreter of Saussure's work, but many others are mentioned in context for purposes of comparison, and attention is drawn to connections and disparities between their interpretations. Those whose interpretations are examined in detail include Bloomfield, Hjelmslev, Jakobson, L vi-Strauss, Chomsky, Barthes and Derrida.

eBook available with sample pages: HB:0415153611

Series Information:
History of Linguistic Thought

Saussure as a linguist and Wittgenstein as a philosopher of language are arguably the two most important figures in the development of twentieth-century linguistic thought. By pointing out what their ideas have in common, in spite of emanating from very different intellectual sources, this study breaks new ground.

In Signs of Writing Roy Harris re-examines basic questions about writing that have long been obscured by the traditional assumption that writing is merely a visual substitute for speech. By treating writing as an independent mode of communication, based on the use of spatial relations to connect events separated in time, the author shows how musical, mathematical and other forms of writing obey the same principles as verbal writing. These principles, he argues, apply to texts of all kinds: a sonnet, a symphonic score, a signature on a cheque and a supermarket label. Moreover, they apply throughout the history of writing, from hieroglyphics to hypertext. This is the first book to provide a new general theory of writing in over forty years. Signs of Writing will be essential reading for anyone interested in language and communication.

In Signs, Language and Communication readers familiar with the arguments of Professor Harris' previous work, including Signs of Writing, will find those ideas developed here to cover not just writing, but aspects of art, design and manufacture. Roy Harris proposes a new theory of communication. He begins with the premise that the mental life of an individual should be conceived as a continuous attempt to integrate the present with the past and future. He concludes by arguing that communication should be viewed as both a product and a resource of this constant act of integration.

The Joseph Pulitzer Gold Medal for meritorious public service is an unparalleled American media honor, awarded to news organizations for collaborative reporting that moves readers, provokes change, and advances the journalistic profession. Updated to reflect new winners of the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and the many changes in the practice and business of journalism, Pulitzer's Gold goes behind the scenes to explain the mechanics and effects of these groundbreaking works. The veteran journalist Roy J. Harris Jr. adds fascinating new detail to well-known accounts of the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate affair, the New York Times coverage of the Pentagon Papers, and the Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse cover-up. He examines recent Pulitzer-winning coverage of government surveillance of U.S. citizens and expands on underexplored stories, from the scandals that took down Boston financial fraud artist Charles Ponzi in 1920 to recent exposes that revealed neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and municipal thievery in Bell, California. This one-hundred-year history of bold journalism follows developments in all types of reporting-environmental, business, disaster coverage, war, and more.

The Joseph Pulitzer Gold Medal for meritorious public service is an unparalleled American media honor, awarded to news organizations for collaborative reporting that moves readers, provokes change, and advances the journalistic profession. Updated to reflect new winners of the Pulitzer Prize for public service journalism and the many changes in the practice and business of journalism, Pulitzer's Gold goes behind the scenes to explain the mechanics and effects of these groundbreaking works. The veteran journalist Roy J. Harris Jr. adds fascinating new detail to well-known accounts of the Washington Post investigation into the Watergate affair, the New York Times coverage of the Pentagon Papers, and the Boston Globe revelations of the Catholic Church's sexual-abuse cover-up. He examines recent Pulitzer-winning coverage of government surveillance of U.S. citizens and expands on underexplored stories, from the scandals that took down Boston financial fraud artist Charles Ponzi in 1920 to recent exposes that revealed neglect at Walter Reed Army Medical Center and municipal thievery in Bell, California. This one-hundred-year history of bold journalism follows developments in all types of reporting-environmental, business, disaster coverage, war, and more.