scholarly journals Normative Reason, Primitiveness, and the Argument for Semantic Normativism

Etyka ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Joanna Klimczyk
Keyword(s):  
Normative Reason ◽  
Linguistic Meaning

This paper sketches a particular line of criticism targeted at Scanlon’s account of a normative reason, which is purported to kill two birds with one stone: to raise doubts about the plausibility of Scanlon’s account of a normative reason and, next, to dismiss Scanlon’s conception of what a normative reason is in the role of an argument for semantic normativism. Following Whiting I take semantic normativism to be the view, according to which linguistic meaning is intrinsically normative. The key argument for semantic normativism is that a word or expression has conditions for its correct use which count, or speak in favour of using it in certain ways and not in others. Specifically, it has immediate implications for how a subject should or may (not) employ that expression. I shall argue that if the favouring format of analysis of a normative reason is not a particularly happy proposal in itself, then it supplies a superficial support for semantic normativism.

Showing, Expressing, and Figuratively Meaning

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Perspective Taking ◽  
Figurative Language ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Psychological State ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Speaker Meaning

We first correct some errors in Lepore and Stone’s discussion of speaker meaning and its relation to linguistic meaning. With a proper understanding of those notions and their relation, we may then motivate a liberalization of speaker meaning that includes overtly showing one’s psychological state. I then distinguish this notion from that of expression, which, although communicative, is less cognitively demanding than speaker meaning since it need not be overt. This perspective in turn enables us to address Lepore and Stone’s broadly Davidsonian view of figurative language, which rightly emphasizes the role of imagination and perspective-taking associated with such language, but mistakenly suggests it is sui generis relative to other types of pragmatic process, and beyond the realm of communication. Figurative utterances may influence conversational common ground, and may be assessed for their aptness; they also have a characteristically expressive role that a Davidsonian view lacks the resources to explain.

Shifting Concepts

2020 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Central Area ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Important Work ◽  
Linguistic Communication ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Conceptual Variation

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programs until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective: that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.

The philosophical interpretation of language game theory

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Zangwill
Keyword(s):  
Game Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Game Theory ◽  
Evolutionary Game ◽  
Language Game ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Philosophical Interpretation ◽  
Game Theoretic ◽  
Game Theoretic Approach

Abstract I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which is its psychological economy, and I point to the casual mechanisms that are the ground of the application of evolutionary game theory to linguistic phenomena. Lastly, I consider the objection that the account cannot explain predication, logic, and compositionality.

From Symbolic Forms to Lexical Semantics: Where Modern Linguistics and Cassirer's Philosophy Start to Converge

1999 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 493-511
Author(s):  
Daniel Dor
Keyword(s):  
Lexical Semantics ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Empirical Results ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Science And Art ◽  
Perceptual Attention ◽  
Theory Of Language ◽  
Representational Level

The ArgumentErnst Cassirer's theory of language as a symbolic form, one of the richest and most insightful philosophies of language of the twentieth century, went virtually unnoticed in the mainstreams of modern linguistics. This was so for what seems to be a good metatheoretical reason: Cassirer insisted on the constitutive role of meaning in the explanation of linguistic phenomena, a position which was explicitly rejected by both American Structuralists and Chomskian Generativists. In the last decade, however, a new and promising linguistic framework has emerged — the framework of lexical semantics — which seems to bear close theoretical resemblance to Cassirer's theory. In this paper, I show how the empirical results accumulated within the framework of lexical semantics serve to validate Cassirer's most fundamental philosophical insights, and suggest that Cassirer's philosophy helps position these empirical results in their appropriate epistemological context. I discuss the following fundamental points, which, for me, constitute the backbone of both Cassirer's philosophy and the theory of lexical semantics: (i) natural language grammars constitute structural reflections of a deeply-rooted, highly structured level of semantic organization; (ii) the representational level of linguistic meaning, which is prior to experience in the Kantian sense, comprises a partial set of semantic notions, which language selects as centers of perceptual attention; (iii) this partial set is potentially different from the sets selected by other symbolic forms, such as myth, science, and art; and (iv) linguistic variability is to be explained in universalistic terms, thus allowing for specific patterns of variability within universally-constrained limits.

Language and Power: The Dragoman as a Link in the Chain Between the Law of Nations and the Ottoman Empire

2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-74
Author(s):  
Zülâl Muslu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Language And Power ◽  
Law Of Nations ◽  
Professional Body ◽  
The Law

Abstract The paper attempts to take a different look into the Law of Nations through the role of dragomans (official translators) in the making of modern International law. Addressing the power of language above its mere linguistic meaning, also considering the way it is taught, socially shaped, productive and lasting, this paper intends to illustrate the general epistemic framework governing dragomans as an original social and professional body in order to better understand their unforeseen impact on the Ottoman understanding of and integration into modern international law. The paper argues that legal transformations are also the result of legal translations, which intrinsically imply the cultural and social backgrounds of the translators. It discusses how the progressive formation of the cosmopolitan professional body of dragomans led to both develop a bolted technicality and contribute to the uniformization of legal thought and language by the nineteenth century.

Ethical Values of a Sociosemiotic Approach to Translation

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-275
Author(s):  
Jinxia Tang
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Study ◽  
Target Language ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Ethical Values ◽  
Source Text ◽  
Ethical Perspective

AbstractThis article interprets the sociosemiotic approach to translation from an ethical perspective. First, it briefly illustrates the necessity and feasibility of studying the sociosemiotic approach to translation from an ethical perspective, then shifts to the genres of ethics to be used in the interpretation. After that, it proposes an empirical study of the ethical values underlying the sociosemiotic approach to translation. The articles makes it clear that, in translating the referential meaning of a sign, translators who follow the sociosemiotic approach to translation tend to honor ethics of representation if this sign has an equivalent sign in the target language and would like to adhere to norm-based ethics if this sign has no equivalent in the target language. The article demonstrates that, in translating the linguistic meaning, translators who follow the sociosemiotic approach to translation often stick to ethics of commitment, which confers upon them the role of an expert as well as an arbitrator and makes it possible for them to mediate the conflicts between the various parties related to a translating mission. The article also exemplifies that, in translating the pragmatic meaning, translators who follow the sociosemiotic approach to translation, in most cases, prefer ethics of commitment, which allows them to represent the pragmatic meaning incubated in the source text either with the method employed in the source text or with a different method when the method applied in the source text is not appreciated in the target context.

scholarly journals On the translation-proper of toponyms in Romanian translations at the beginning of the 19th century

Diacronia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dinu Moscal
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Proper Names ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Lexical Meaning ◽  
Incipient Stage ◽  
Proper Name ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Real Challenge

The translation of certain toponyms that had not yet been assimilated to the Romanian language at the beginning of the 19th century represented a real challenge for translators at that time. A first aspect to be considered here is the linguistic status as proper names and the possible translation options that could not be correlated to any tradition. A second aspect is the precarious stage of Romanian geographical terminology, reflected by the terminological variation for the same concept and the lack of semantic affinity, either real or related to the actual terminology. This article addresses mainly the first aspect mentioned above. The issues addressed are as follows: a concise presentation of the concept of proper names translation, the distinction between untranslatable and translatable or partially translatable proper names, the factors motivating the option of translating or not the translatable terms from a toponymic collocation. Our corpus reflects the incipient stage of the translation of translatable or partially translatable toponyms in Romanian, a stage in which the translator is free to decide upon translatability. Compared to the actual norm, the different choices from one translator to another or even those opted for by the same translator—especially the option of not translating toponyms that are nowadays translated in most languages—reveal the lack of importance of linguistic meaning (that is the lexical meaning of the etymon) of the proper name as far as its functioning was concerned, as well as the role of this non-functionality in identifying the linguistic status of a proper name.

Linguistic Meaning: Cognition, Interaction and the Real World

1991 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Harder
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Language Theory ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Actual Process ◽  
Research Paradigm ◽  
Cognitive Approach ◽  
Important Respect ◽  
Actual Meaning ◽  
Truth Conditional

This article deals with the basic issues of the nature of linguistic meaning and the place of semantics in linguistic theory. First, there is a discussion of the implications for semantics of the research paradigm based on formal simulation, concluding that it involves a risk of misrepresenting the place of semantics in linguistics. Second, there is a discussion of the truth-conditional approach, which, although in one important respect it involves a more adequate conception of the role of semantics in language theory, is seen as misrepresenting linguistic meaning in a way that has been pointed out within the cognitive approach to semantics. Third, however, it is argued that the cognitive approach does not sufficiently account for the external anchoring of meaning. Fourth, it is argued that meaning ‘outside the head’ must be understood as basically interactive. A crucial element in the view argued here is the distinction between linguistic, potential meaning, which functions asinstructionsto the addressee, and actual meaning or ‘message’, which the addressee works out as part of the actual process of interpretation. Within such a picture, the importance of both cognition and truth can be accounted for, and both aspects are seen as dependent on the fundamental embeddedness of language in a shared social universe.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Teresa Marques ◽  
Åsa Wikforss
Keyword(s):  
Central Area ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Research Traditions ◽  
The World ◽  
Research Programmes ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Conceptual Variation

Concepts stand at the centre of human cognition. We use concepts in categorizing objects and events in the world, in reasoning and action, and in social interaction. It is therefore not surprising that the study of concepts constitutes a central area of research in philosophy and psychology. Since the 1970s, psychologists have carried out intriguing experiments testing the role of concepts in categorizing and reasoning, and have found a great deal of variation in categorization behaviour across individuals and cultures. During the same period, philosophers of language and mind did important work on the semantic properties of concepts, and on how concepts are related to linguistic meaning and linguistic communication. An important motivation behind this was the idea that concepts must be shared, across individuals and cultures. However, there was little interaction between these two research programmes until recently. With the dawn of experimental philosophy, the proposal that the experimental data from psychology lacks relevance to semantics is increasingly difficult to defend. Moreover, in the last decade, philosophers have approached questions about the tension between conceptual variation and shared concepts in communication from a new perspective—that of ameliorating concepts for theoretical or for social and political purposes. The volume brings together leading psychologists and philosophers working on concepts who come from these different research traditions.

Role of dactinomycin in the improved survival of children with Wilms' tumor

JAMA ◽  
1966 ◽  
Vol 195 (12) ◽  
pp. 1005-1009 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. J. Fernbach
Keyword(s):  
Wilms Tumor
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