Language and thought as control of perception

This chapter examines Thatcherite rhetoric about class and individualism. Thatcher needed to distance herself from her own, narrow, upper-middle-class image; she also wanted to rid politics of class language, and thought that class was—or should be—irrelevant in 1980s Britain because of ‘embourgeoisement’. For Thatcher, ‘bourgeois’ was defined by particular values (thrift, hard work, self-reliance) and she wanted to use the free market to incentivize more of the population to display these values, which she thought would lead to a moral and also a prosperous society. Thatcherite individualism rested on the assumption that people were rational, self-interested, but also embedded in families and communities. The chapter reflects on what these conclusions tell us about ‘Thatcherism’ as a political ideology, and how these beliefs influenced Thatcherite policy on the welfare state, monetarism, and trade unionism. Finally, it examines Major’s rhetoric of the ‘classless society’ in the 1990s.

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The Metaphysics of Representation

10.1093/oso/9780198850205.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

J. Robert G. Williams

Keyword(s):

Representational Content ◽

Physical World ◽

Degrees Of Belief ◽

Public Language ◽

Language And Thought ◽

Final Layer ◽

The World ◽

Interactive Relationship ◽

Compositional Interpretation ◽

The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

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Hegel's Critique of Foundationalism in the “Doctrine of Essence”

Hegel Bulletin ◽

10.1017/s0263523200001415 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 20 (1-2) ◽

pp. 18-34 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Stephen Houlgate

Keyword(s):

A Priori ◽

Logical Structure ◽

Richard Rorty ◽

Language And Thought ◽

The World

It is a commonplace among certain recent philosophers that there is no such thing as the essence of anything. Nietzsche, for example, asserts that things have no essence of their own, because they are nothing but ceaselessly changing ways of acting on, and reacting to, other things. Wittgenstein, famously, rejects the idea that there is an essence to language and thought — at least if we mean by that some a priori logical structure underlying our everyday utterances. Finally, Richard Rorty urges that we “abandon […] the notion of ‘essence’ altogether”, along with “the notion that man's essence is to be a knower of essences”.It would be wrong to maintain that these writers understand the concept of essence in precisely the same way, or that they are all working towards the same philosophical goal. Nevertheless, they do share one aim in common: to undermine the idea that there is some deeper reality or identity underlying and grounding what we encounter in the world, what we say and what we do. That is to say, they may all be described as anti-foundationalist thinkers — thinkers who want us to attend to the specific processes and practices of nature and humanity without understanding them to be the product of some fundamental essence or “absolute”.

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Grammatical and Theoretical Models - Rik Pinxten (ed.), Universalism and relativism in language and thought: Proceedings of a colloquium on the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses. (Contributions to the Sociology of Language, II.) The Hague: Mouton, 1976. Pp. xiii + 310.*

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404500010629 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 13 (3) ◽

pp. 396-404

Author(s):

Shin-Ja Joo Hwang

Keyword(s):

Theoretical Models ◽

Language And Thought ◽

The Hague ◽

Sociology Of Language

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New Essays on Plato: Language and Thought in Fourth-Century Greek Philosophy by Fritz-Gregor Herrmann

Phoenix ◽

10.1353/phx.2009.0064 ◽

2009 ◽

Vol 63 (1-2) ◽

pp. 179-180

Author(s):

Nicholas Denyer

Keyword(s):

Fourth Century ◽

Greek Philosophy ◽

Language And Thought

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The Prehistory and Analogues of Hesiod’s Poetry

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190209032.013.35 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Joshua T. Katz

Keyword(s):

Greek Poetry ◽

Near Eastern ◽

Language And Thought ◽

Holistic Understanding

Hesiod’s indebtedness to Near Eastern material is more frequently discussed than the Indo-European background of his poetry. This chapter argues for a holistic understanding of how Indo-European prehistory and Near Eastern analogues contribute together to the formation of Hesiodic language and thought. Concentrating on Theogony 35, ἀλλὰ τίη μοι ταῦτα περὶ δρῦν ἢ περὶ πέτρην;, “But what are these things about a tree or a rock to me?,” I demonstrate that this enigmatic question encapsulates Hesiod’s role as mouthpiece at the head of the simultaneously Indo-European- and Near Eastern-based tradition of Greek poetry. By means of artful phonology here and throughout the proem, Hesiod highlights, in ways not previously noticed, the quite different sounds of the melodious Muses and their loud-thundering father, Zeus, who, like the Near Eastern storm god, has a robust association with prophetic oaks and stones.

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Metaphor in applied linguistics: four cognitive approaches

DELTA Documentação de Estudos em Lingüística Teórica e Aplicada ◽

10.1590/s0102-44502006000300004 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 22 (spe) ◽

pp. 21-44

Author(s):

Gerard Steen

Keyword(s):

Empirical Research ◽

Applied Linguistics ◽

Round Table ◽

Central Issue ◽

Language And Thought ◽

The Core ◽

System 2 ◽

Cognitive Approaches ◽

The Relationship

This article presents some considerations into metaphor in language and thought- 'the topic and title of the first conference of its kind in Brazil'. The paper focuses on the discussions presented in the round table, which were mostly directed to the empirical research on metaphor in Applied Linguistics. This integrative and retrospective reflection on the papers presented will be conducted from the perspective of the debate into the relationship between metaphor in language and in thought. This central issue is at the core of my proposal for four different approaches to metaphor, based on the interdependence between language and thought as system and as use:1) metaphor in language as system; 2) metaphor in thought as system; 3) metaphor in language as use and 4) metaphor in thought as use. It is within the framework of these categories that metaphors should be studied, with a certain degree of autonomy, so that their interdependence can be better understood.

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