[rec.] Hans Blumenberg, Paradygmaty dla metaforologii
Review of: Martyna UJMA - [rec.] Hans Blumenberg, Paradygmaty dla metaforologii, przeł. Bogdan Baran, Wydawnictwo Aletheia, Warszawa 2017, ss. 245
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Review of: Martyna UJMA - [rec.] Hans Blumenberg, Paradygmaty dla metaforologii, przeł. Bogdan Baran, Wydawnictwo Aletheia, Warszawa 2017, ss. 245
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The purpose of this study is to provide a reconstruction of the philosophical discussions generated by the issue of translation from one language to another. Modern philosophers have already observed that language influences the way we think. The hermeneutic tradition was followed by the establishment of a linguistic research tradition whose first doctrinal thesis was to notice the relativistic consequence of the plurality of languages. Later, epistemological relativism also underwent a linguistic turn. Exploratory concepts such as radical translation, indeterminacy of translation, paradigm and incommensurability, conceptual scheme, translation and interpretation were discussed.
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This article shows, using the example of number agreement, that an ecological perspective with a focus on the situation of the utterance (i.e. here-now-I-real) is an effective way to understand differences in grammar among individual languages and to identify commonalities above and beyond such differences. On the surface, English and Chinese would appear to be exact opposites in terms of whether or not they conform to the rule of number agreement, while the position of Japanese would appear to be ambivalent on this question. But in fact this is not the case. Numerous languages around the world are consistent in the way number distinction is more likely to arise the higher the subject’s position on the animacy hierarchy. Chinese and Japanese are no exceptions. Leaving aside differences in individual circumstances, languages differ only in the boundary lines on the animacy hierarchy where number distinction becomes obligatory. In order to reach the above understanding, it is essential to see animacy from an ecological perspective. Furthermore, an ecological perspective is essential as a principle for explaining levels of not only animacy but also self-expressiveness, esteem, and transitivity. The prevailing view of language as separate from the situation of the utterance requires considerable revision on the subject of grammar.
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Randviir’s article chapter sets the background for the entire issue of terminology and concepts. The article outlines the principle importance of terminology in the shaping of scientific concepts and the employment of the latter in actual research. The basic issue lies in discussing items and the relations of items within the line “thing-object-sign-sign of sign (meta-sign)”. He points out the importance of continual interdisciplinary dialogue about concepts as the latter flow in the stream of both object- and metalanguage. In this light, he outlines differences between concepts for semiotics, concepts in semiotics, and semiotic concepts. Randviir’s basic academic interests involve semiotic modelling (“From systematic Semiotic modelling to pseudointentional reference”, 2019), semiotic terminology (“Sociosemiotics and metalanguage: The case of trans- languaging”, 2020), space (“Meaning and space: Semiosphere and spatialization of meaning”, 2015), and spatial modelling (“Space”, 2022).
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The purpose of Alexandri’s chapter is to provide an in-depth investigation of the concept of the spectacle, as it was established by the French philosopher Guy Debord in 1967, concentrating on the pragmatics of the phenomenon, identifying its core mechanisms, and analysing their structure and function. This in-depth analysis of meaning-making processes and perception enables a deeper understanding of how spectacles have such a major impact on both individuals and communities, a very relevant issue in modern culture. Beginning with the predominance of the visual modality, the study continues with an examination of the significance and dual function of distance in the world of the spectacle. Furthermore, the spatiotemporal dimensions of the phenomenon are explored, and the relationship between the perception and experience of time and the concept of free will reveals the absence of agency in the spectacular world. The comparison between the human mind to a black box ultimately leads to the chapter’s thesis, which suggests that the spectacle should be seen as a modelling system. Main academic interest covers the field of Eastern Asian forms of art and entertainment. Her work concentrates on Korean popular music (K-Pop), Korean music videos, global perception, marketing tactics, and their impact on popular culture, as well as representation and identity.
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The paper focuses on the truth of language work in Herta Müller’s essays. The author is interested in what way and where the experience of the primal discrepancy between a word and a thing leads the essayist, how it affects her understanding of literature, and what kind of a picture of writing stems from her considerations. Müller’s observations are analysed in the context of the philosophy of the source language. Such a comparative approach leads to an attempt of determining what formulas of language identity and reality can be found in the essays of the German Noble prize-winner
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This text deals with Wittgenstein's concept of “grammar”, which is one of the “key concepts” of his “Philosophical Investigations”. This term is interpreted here as a type of transcendental argument, i.e. as a regressive argument of the form: "In order to to explain why such and such (the observed - e.g. language as an institution) exists, one must presuppose that such and such (the unobserved – grammar) exists." The main thesis of the analysis proposed here is that Wittgenstein had to introduce in his philosophical investigations the concept of “grammar” as something predetermined in the perspective of “grammatical realism” to provide a theory of language with the aim of explaining the possibility of intersubjective language use, without having to fall back on any universal properties of language (in the sense of classical metaphysics).
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The present study has as its object three of the most frequent and representative metaphors of the first part (paragraphs from 1 to 133) of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. In particular, the analysis focuses on the following mappings: LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE TOOLS, LANGUAGE IS A CITY and MEANING IS A PURE CRYSTAL. The methodological approach adopted in the study as well as the analytical proceedings are both borrowed from the theory of conceptual metaphor (see: Lakoff and Johnson 1980, Lakoff 1993 and Kövecses 2002, 2020). The three metaphors were identified through a careful manual search of the text. An automatic search for source domain vocabulary followed to identify any further instances of the metaphors. In a second step, the conceptual structure of the metaphors was outlined; the entailments of the mappings were listed and interpreted on the backdrop of the arguments developed in Wittgenstein’s work. Finally, a comparison of the structures of the three conceptual metaphors was made. The analysis revealed the existence of complex and coherent conceptual mappings motivating the use of the identified metaphorical expressions. The comparison among the three metaphors confirmed the hypothesis that the entailments of the first two mappings mentioned above are all consistent with each other, playing a fundamental role in the comprehension of Wittgenstein’s position on language and meaning. Conversely, the internal logic of the third metaphor reflects a conception of language rejected by the philosopher.
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It is something absolutely natural that in Whitehead’s philosophical and essayistic works one meets names like: Plato, Locke, Descartes, Hume or Kant. It is equally natural that in Principia Mathematica the onomastics are of a completely different nature. This is how it happens that here we will meet names like Nicod, Zermelo, Peano, Cantor, Dedekind or Frege. Names as appropriate as possible with the content of the works. On the other hand, one cannot help but wonder why in the philosophical and essay-like works you find the occurrence of ‘Caesar’ no less than 37 times. We intend to discuss the presence of this occurrence in some of Whitehead’s works in the following text.
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In this paper, the author explores the history and trends of discussions on scientific communication, emphasizing the need for more complex and nuanced models of communicating scientific knowledge in contrast to the traditionally applied theoretical framework known as the “deficit model.” The focus is also directed towards analyzing the advantages of a more elaborate approach, known as the “dialogue model,” while simultaneously investigating its potential limitations. The text introduces a certain degree of skepticism regarding the exclusivity of both approaches in portraying how scientific claims are incorporated into public understanding and decision- making, highlighting the equal importance of information and trust in shaping public attitudes toward science. In conclusion, recommendations for alternative approaches to scientific communication are outlined, underscoring the significance of actively and thoughtfully combining different aspects of these theoretical frameworks.
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This short paper has the character of a critical notice of Una Stojnić’s book Context and Coherence: The Logic and Grammar of Prominence (Stojnić 2021). It is mainly concerned with Stojnić’s strong claim that linguistic phenomena related to prominence and coherence, in particular the interpretation of pronouns, are governed by linguistic conventions and are not pragmatic in nature. On these matters, my views are opposite to Stojnić’s.
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Stojnić (2021) argues that the content of linguistic utterances is determined by the rules of natural language grammar more stringently than what is generally assumed. She proposes specifi cally that coherence relations are encoded by the linguistic structures and determine what individuals count as most prominent, thereby serving as the referents of free (“demonstrative”) pronouns. In this paper, I take a close look at the empirical evidence from English and Serbian that she offers in support of this position. Considering these data points in connection with additional linguistic data (also from German and Japanese), I argue that there is no compelling evidence for the assumption that coherence relations directly determine the resolution of pronouns. Instead, grammatical restrictions imposed by different types of pronouns and tenses have a larger impact on the meaning conventionally expressed by complex utterances than what is generally assumed in the literature on coherence relations.
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Intentionalism is the view that a demonstrative refers to something partly in virtue of the speaker intending it to refer to that thing. In recent work, Una Stojnić has argued that the natural interpretation of demonstratives in some discourses is that they do not refer to the objects intended by the speaker, and instead refer to other things. In this paper, I defend intentionalism against this charge. In particular, I argue that the data presented by Stojnić can be explained from an intentionalist point of view. The explanations take two forms: either the audience’s reaction to the discourse does not concern reference, or the natural interpretation is wrong. This latter claim has been defended by Stojnić in other work as applied to word identifi cation and is neutral between intentionalism and Stojnić’s objectivism. It is also very plausible. But it takes away the import of the argument from natural interpretation, at least in the form discussed here.
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The standard view on discourse pronoun resolution is that determining the antecedents of discourse pronouns is typically a function of extralinguistic reasoning. In contrast, Stojnić (2021) argues that pronoun resolution is a function of linguistic facts. In this article we offer what we take to be a friendly amendment to the technical aspects of Stojnić’s proposal. Our point of departure will be with our idea that prominence is not determined by the position of the candidate antecedent within a stack, but rather by its position within standard syntactic tree structures, extended to include discourse-level trees. Our proposal leans on the notion of p-scope, a proof-theoretic accessibility relation among tree nodes which we develop in Ludlow and Živanović (2022), and the notion of closeness built on standard accounts of syntactic locality. The key idea is that a pronoun’s antecedent resolves to its closest p-scoper; specifically, p-scope determines the potential antecedents, and the closeness relation orders these by prominence. Coherence relations, which we provisionally represent as syntactic heads, can be then seen as affecting accessibility and prominence indirectly, in virtue of their position in traditional LF tree structures.
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We study three different conceptions of tense emerging from semantics, syntax and morphology, respectively. We investigate how they bear on the question of the relationship between tense and modality as they emerge in Cariani’s The Modal Future (2021)
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Is there a relationship between the goals pursued and presented in the Critiqueof Pure Reason and in Tractatus logico-philosophicus? This text argues that such a relationshipwill be ascertained if we will compare Kant’s answer to the question “How are synthetic apriori judgments possible?” with the Tractarian answer to the question “How are propositionsof natural science possible?”. Based on this comparison, the Tractatus may be deemed tobe a “new critique of theoretical reason”. As in the case of the critique of theoreticalreason undertaken by Kant, the object of Tractarian investigation is constituted byascertaining internal requirements for possessing knowledge of the world.
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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus provides a methodical approach to examine the functioning and limits of language through a series of meaningful propositions that culminate in self-proclaimed nonsense. In this paper, the book’s paradox is treated by recognizing that its propositions, while ultimately nonsensical at the conclusion of the demonstration, are essential steps in a logical journey to clarify philosophical problems. Once the problem is solved and the world is seen correctly, these propositions lose their bipolar character and are left behind, not as a chaotic heap of nonsense, but as the completed rungs of a ladder that has fulfilled its philosophical purpose.
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This paper explores and criticizes some aspects of David Lewis’ theory of knowledge ascriptions. In section one I present the sceptical paradox and the basic assumptions of epistemic contextualism. In section two I explain how Lewis combines the relevant alternatives theory with epistemic contextualism in formulating his theory of knowledge ascriptions. In section three I show that this theory allows knowledge which is based purely on ignoring and I argue that this unfavourable consequence stems from the way in which Lewis formulated the rule of belief within his theory. In the concluding section I point out the problematic aspects and ad hoc character of Lewis’ rule of attention and claim that it was thus formulated so as to be able to solve the sceptical paradox. Finally, I claim that Lewis’ theory of knowledge ascriptions is untenable in its original form.
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This paper analyzes the possibility of outlining a certain kind of philosophy of language, whose frameworks and contours can be recognized within a broader specter of Deleuze’s œuvre. Even though the French thinker is not someone whose name we often associate with any kind of notion concerning a discipline such as philosophy of language, the paper aims at presenting that the philosophy of language is implicitly present within Deleuze’s writings, nevertheless. As a backbone to this thesis, we cite the analyses that are based on a number of different texts by Deleuze, written in different periods of his life. The recurring motif of these texts is the subject of literature, and these papers were later published under the name of Essays Critical and Clinical. To make our investigations more thorough, it was rather necessary to incorporate other key publications by Deleuze (written by himself or in co-authorship with Félix Guattari), as well. On top of that, the paper specially parses the pertinence of narration for constituting a highly idiosyncratic approach in treating language, as well as the structure of reality which is primarily understood as bound to language and story-telling. The said approach is named the “narrative method”. This method is constructed as a certain kind of heuristic device with the ability to untangle various problems stemming from the usual ways we treat language (langua ge understood as an expression of thought, or as information, e.g.), as well as the poststructuralist approach (language understood as an instance that goes beyond subjectivity). The text is divided into two parts: the first part deals with the importance of characterizing language as self-expressive, coupled with insisting on its fundamentally story-telling nature. The second part of the text explores the possibility of potentially correlating the way language operates with the mathematical model known as the Markov chain. The end result of the research can be doubly summarized: on the one hand, the paper puts in the foreground a prospect of understanding Deleuze’s philosophy of language, and on the other hand, the paper insists on supplementing thus instituted philosophy of language with the insight of radical narrativity of every linguistic event.
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In the early thirties of the twentieth century Wittgenstein advanced his new conception of language based on the idea of rule following. It is less known that at the same time (and as far as I can tell, independently) Ajdukijewicz developed himself an idea of the language meaning related to the rule following activity, which he used in defence of radical conventionalism. Tadeusz Czarnecki analyses papers of two philosophers both published in 1934, and offers a critique of Ajdukijewicz’s theory of meaning. He claims that while Wittgenstein has in his philosophical arsenal the means to assure intersubjectivity of meaning, Ajdukijewicz fails in that respect. In this paper I want to show that this critique is ill- placed. I will claim that the interpretation of Ajukijewicz’s directival theory of meaning offered by Czarnecki is not accurate because it is neglecting some important aspects of Ajdukijewicz’s conventionalist position.
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