VOLUME 9 • 2010
UNDERSTANDING MUSICAL ACOUSTICS
ABSTRACT. Pressnitzer et al. affirm that sounds that activate the same or largely overlapping populations of neurons are perceived as forming a single stream. Cousineau et al. hold that to understand speech or appreciate music, one has to process sequences of sounds (pitch has a peculiar importance ..
THE SYMBOLIC CONSTRUCTION OF REALITY IN ADVERTISING
ABSTRACT. Zeng et al. examine how social identity and group norms of online community members may influence perceptions of and behavioral responses to advertising, and explore how community members perceive and react to advertising in community sites. Ketelaar et al. think that the presence of a pro..
THE COGNITIVE CHANGES INDUCED BY NEW FORMS OF MEDIA AND THE RISE OF SELF-ORGANIZED GROUPS ONLINE
ABSTRACT. Shirky maintains that we are living in the middle of the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race. Johnson emphasizes that what media has lost in moral clarity it has gained in realism. Jones thinks that the nation’s traditional news organizations are bein..
NIDA’S THEORY OF DYNAMIC EQUIVALENCE
ABSTRACT. Nida argues that language must be viewed as a shared set of habits using the voice to communicate, and as potentially and actually idiosyncratic and sociosyncratic. Nida suggests that we must analyze the transmission of a message in terms of dynamic dimension. Nida and Taber state that dyn..
LANGUAGE AND MEANING
ABSTRACT. Contemporary philosophy of language and semantics rests on an unjustified and largely unacknowledged Platonism. This Platonism misdirects inquiry in unfruitful directions, seeking what meaning “really is”, and what terms “really mean”. Arguing against the sorts of hypotheses put forward by..
WITTGENSTEIN, TURING, AND THE “FINITUDE” OF LANGUAGE
ABSTRACT. I consider the sense in which language is “finite” for Wittgenstein, and also some of the implications of this question for Alan Turing’s definition of the basic architecture of a universal computing machine, as well as some of the vast technological, social, and political consequences tha..
EVOLVING THE LINGUISTIC MIND
ABSTRACT. It is sometimes suggested that we can think “in” natural language. According to this “cognitive” conception of language, we have a linguistic mind, or level of mentality, which operates by manipulating representations of natural language sentences. This paper outlines two evolutionary ques..
LANGUAGE, LOCATIONS AND PRESUPPOSITION
ABSTRACT. This paper examines the claim that English is committed to the existence of locations in the light of recent work in linguistics by Susan Rothstein. It clarifies that claim, presents Rothstein’s discovery, and then argues that her work is more significant for the present issue than related..
A MENTALIST FRAMEWORK FOR LINGUISTIC AND EXTRALINGUISTIC COMMUNICATION
ABSTRACT. We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent’s capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states s..
HOMO PICTOR AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN: REVISITING HANS JONAS’ PICTURE ANTHROPOLOGY
ABSTRACT. There has been a long tradition of characterizing man as the animal that talks. However, the remarkable ability of using pictures also only belongs to human beings, after all we know empirically so far. Are there conceptual reasons for that coincidence? The paper is dedicated to a philosop..
COMMON GROUND AND MODAL DISAGREEMENT
ABSTRACT. The common ground in an inquiry consists of what the participants agree on, at least for the sake of the inquiry. The relations between the factual and linguistic components of common ground are notoriously difficult to trace. I clarify them by exploring how modal disagreements – disagreem..
NATURAL MEANING FOR NATURAL LANGUAGE
ABSTRACT. “Fire” means fire, and so does smoke. What then is the connection between linguistic meaning and natural signs? I explore the connections in the context of revisting Paul Grice’s classic attempt to distinguish the two forms of meaning in his paper “Meaning”. I argue that the..