Psychoanalytic Books: Reviews and Discussions. Ordinary Mind: Exploring the Common Ground of Zen and Psychotherapy, by Barry Magid. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2002, 208 pages, $22.95

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Parlow
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.


Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2056-2079 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LUNN

AbstractThis article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.


Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.


Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (8 (106)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Olga Vorobieva

The article considers the cognitive potential of the history of emotions in the study of nationalism in historiographical discussions of 1990—2000s. The authors analyze the works, which criticize constructivist approaches and problematize the relationship between nationalism, “national character”, “emotional mode” and everyday behavioral practices. Based on P. Bourdieu's concept of ‘habitus’ and its modification in N. Elias's historical sociology, the article highlights the common ground and productive interaction between histories of emotion and nationalism studies. This reciprocal movement is interpreted as a symptom of the search for a common conceptual platform and vocabulary for the mutual translation of their research practices. The authors believe that a productive trend within this dialogue could be a more active address to cognitive studies advocating a rethinking of the relationship between individual consciousness and collective regimes of knowledge-power of sentimental, modern and “post-modern” eras.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 49-65
Author(s):  
Cao Feng

Zhong, as it appears in the second story in the Baoxun Testament (保訓 BX), is both a physical object that can be lent, as well as an admirable idea to be passed down the generations. Where Zhong appears in the Changmai Chapter (嘗麥 CM) of the Yizhoushu (逸周書 YZS), it appears to be a document on punitive laws that is as an object that can be transferred from person to person; it is a receivable object but also as a representation of the idea of Great Rectitude (da zheng 大正), which is of key importance in the realm of politics. The CM Chapter, like the BX, also makes appeal to the stories of ancient sage kings to argue the rationality of the views it transmits and refers to ‘ancient lost teachings’ (gu yi xun 古遺訓) and sayings attributed to King Wen of Zhou (Wen Kao zhi yan 文考之言). Taken together, these points of similarity form the basis for comparison between the BX and the YZS: CM. Furthermore, when we compare the BX with the Duxun Chapter (度訓DX) of the YZS, we find confirmation of the legal import of the term Zhong as it appears in the first story of the BX. The common ground shared between the BX, as one of Qinghua University’s collection of Bamboo Manuscripts, and the YZS makes the latter a suitable key for interpreting terms seen in the former text.


Author(s):  
Emar Maier

Lying and fiction both involve the deliberate production of statements that fail to obey Grice’s first Maxim of Quality (“do not say what you believe to be false”). The question thus arises if we can provide a uniform analysis for fiction and lies. This chapter discusses the similarities, but also some fundamental differences between lying and fiction. It argues that there is little hope for a satisfying account within a traditional truth-conditional semantic framework. Rather than immediately moving to a fully pragmatic analysis involving distinct speech acts of fiction-making and lying, the chapter first explores how far we get with the assumption that both are simply assertions, analyzed in a Stalnakerian framework, i.e., as proposals to update the common ground.


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