Manipulation by deliberate failure of communication

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 502-516 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sol Azuelos-Atias
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
The Other ◽  
Vicious Circle ◽  
Context Model ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Context Models

This work studies manipulative use of language that can be called “deliberate failure of communication”; I characterize this kind of manipulation and show that it can be found in the discourse of marketing experts and legal professionals. Relying on relevance theory, I show that manipulation of this kind takes advantage of what van Dijk calls the “context model” of the addressees. I exemplify two ways in which the context models of some of the discourse’s participants might be misused in order to manipulate them. One way is exemplified by a text from an advertisement, the other by a text from a criminal court file. I propose, finally, that the analysis supports van Dijk’s view that social, discursive, and epistemic inequalities reproduce one another in a kind of vicious circle. It suggests, in van Dijk’s terms, that manipulation by deliberate failure of communication is a discriminatory use of language employed by elite groups in order to reproduce their social power.

“Is it the case that … ?”: Building toward findings of fact in Japanese criminal trials

Semiotica ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 (216) ◽  
pp. 423-450
Author(s):  
Ikuko Nakane
Keyword(s):  
Functional Approach ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
The Other ◽  
Professional Communication ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
Interpersonal Aspect ◽  
Story Construction ◽  
Court Proceedings

AbstractThis article explores the adversarial nature of Japanese criminal court proceedings by analyzing functions of the questions with X to iu koto ga arimasu ka? (‘Is it the case that X took place?’), based on courtroom discourse data and trial manuals for legal professionals. To discuss the roles of lawyers’ questions with the projection with the frame “Is it the case that … ?” in witness examination, the projection’s ideational, textual and interpersonal functions are analyzed drawing on Halliday’s systemic functional approach to discourse. By analyzing sequential roles of the projection, the article highlights the ways in which it serves as a story-construction device, as well as a signpost marker towards exposing inconsistency in witness’s testimony. The analysis also reveals that the dual ideational meanings of the projection – one everyday and the other technical – may leave lay participants unaware of its legal purposes, thus creating a potentially problematic lay-professional communication gap. The discussion of the interpersonal aspect suggests the projection’s role to neutralize coercive force of leading questions as well as to index an identity of legal authority. The paper concludes that while projection “Is it the case … ?” seems to symbolize the adversarial nature of Japanese criminal trials, its neutralizing effect and arbitrariness in use also imply the pseudo-adversarial and hybrid orientation.

The Axis Feature: Illusionary Effects on Children's Judgments of Length

1982 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 720-722
Author(s):  
Anat Scher
Keyword(s):  
Relative Length ◽  
The Other ◽  
Context Model ◽  
Structural Pattern ◽  
Perceptual Judgments ◽  
Length Estimation ◽  
Different Diameters

The effect of the position of lines on length estimation was investigated. 40 5-yr.-olds were asked to compare the two arms of an L-shaped figure presented inside circular frames of different diameters. For each figure one of the arms was on the axis, that is, the diameter, and the other arm was perpendicular to that axis. In making perceptual judgments about the relative length of two lines the children tended to describe the on-axis line as longer than the off-axis line. This illusion which, presumably, reflects a perceptual force induced by the characteristics of the structural pattern, supports the context model of visual anomalies.

Dialogue across Differences: Continuing the Conversation

1991 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 393-417 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Burbules ◽  
Suzanne Rice
Keyword(s):  
Social Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
Postmodern Thought

In this article, Nicholas Burbules and Suzanne Rice engage several of the central claims made by postmodern authors about the possibilities and limits of education. Specifically,they focus on postmodern conceptions of difference, and on the question of whether dialogue across differences, particularly differences in social power, is possible and worthwhile. In order to answer this question, Burbules and Rice distinguish two trends within postmodern thought: one extends and redefines modernist principles such as democracy, reason, and equality; the other deconstructs and rejects these principles. They argue that it is the redefinition of modernist principles, not their wholesale rejection, that offers educators the most hopeful and useful conception of dialogue across differences.

scholarly journals On the concept of habitus: Feminist critic of Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory

2013 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 174-192
Author(s):  
Dejan Petrovic
Keyword(s):  
Action Potential ◽  
Feminist Theory ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Social Activism ◽  
The Other ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Critical Examination ◽  
Asymmetric Distribution ◽  
Theoretical System

Key contemporary sociological theorists, such as Foucault or Habermas rarely explicitly discussed gender in their studies. This fact has not caused a lack of interest in the critical examination of the theoretical systems of these authors within a feminist perspective. During the 1990?s feminists? attention was drawn to Pierre Bourdieu?s social theory. French sociologist?s study Masculine Domination deals with issues of gender dynamics and its reproduction. In this study the persistence of the asymmetric distribution of social power between women and men is explained by concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. As this article will show, social change cannot be explained by Bourdieu?s concept of habitus, as a key link between social structure and action, due to its reduction of actors to socialized bodies, which are practically deprived of any true action potential. On the other hand, with regard to social activism as a permanent feature of feminist theory, this paper seeks to examine whether critical examination of Bourdieu?s conceptual apparatus achieves to provide the means to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings of the theoretical system of French sociologist. In other words, this article seeks to answer the question whether such a modification of habitus is possible, which will allow for actors whose action is truly structured and structuring, and lead to possible change of existing power relations.

scholarly journals Criminal court ordered assessments in France and Canada: a comparison

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastien S Prat ◽  
Noemie Praud ◽  
Lauren Barney
Keyword(s):  
Forensic Psychiatry ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
The Other ◽  
Scientific Concepts ◽  
Letter To The Editor ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Justice Systems

In this Letter to the Editor, we aim to compare the Canadian and the French forensic psychiatry system. Comparing both systems is interesting because France is considered as one of the oldest modern justice systems, and many of the forensic concept are inherited from it or its European neighbours. On the other hand, Canada is one of the countries where the modern forensic psychiatry is born, implementing the actual scientific concepts of criminology. Although the overall goal of the Justicer system and Forensic Psychiatry is the same in both countries, the theoritecal and practical differences help each professional to reflect on their own practice in their jurisdiction.

scholarly journals A retrieved context model of the emotional modulation of memory

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Talmi ◽  
Lynn J. Lohnas ◽  
Nathaniel D. Daw
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Memory ◽  
Temporal Context ◽  
Composition Effect ◽  
Context Model ◽  
Emotional Modulation ◽  
Emotional Information ◽  
Retrieval Processes ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Context Models ◽  
Evolutionary Fitness

AbstractEmotion enhances episodic memory, an effect thought to be an adaptation to prioritise the memories that best serve evolutionary fitness. But viewing this effect largely in terms of prioritising what to encode or consolidate neglects broader rational considerations about what sorts of associations should be formed at encoding, and which should be retrieved later. Although neurobiological investigations have provided many mechanistic clues about how emotional arousal modulates item memory, these effects have not been wholly integrated with the cognitive and computational neuroscience of memory more generally.Here we apply the Context Maintenance and Retrieval Model (CMR, Polyn, Norman & Kahana, 2009) to this problem by extending it to describe the way people may represent and process emotional information. A number of ways to operationalise the effect of emotion were tested. The winning emotional CMR (eCMR) model reconceptualises emotional memory effects as arising from the modulation of a process by which memories become bound to ever-changing temporal and emotional contexts. eCMR provides a good qualitative fit for the emotional list-composition effect and the emotional oddball effect, illuminating how these effects are jointly determined by the interplay of encoding and retrieval processes. eCMR explains the increased advantage of emotional memories in delayed memory tests through the limited ability of retrieval to reinstate the temporal context of encoding.By leveraging the rich tradition of temporal context models, eCMR helps integrate existing effects of emotion and provides a powerful tool to test mechanisms by which emotion affects memory in a broad range of paradigms.

Context-Based Scene Understanding

2018 ◽  
pp. 754-773
Author(s):  
Esfandiar Zolghadr ◽  
Borko Furht
Keyword(s):  
Object Detection ◽  
Latent Dirichlet Allocation ◽  
Model Performance ◽  
High Order ◽  
Multiple Sources ◽  
Context Model ◽  
Unified Framework ◽  
Context Models ◽  
Scene Content ◽  
Model Context

Context plays an important role in performance of object detection. There are two popular considerations in building context models for computer vision applications; type of context (semantic, spatial, scale) and scope of the relations (pairwise, high-order). In this paper, a new unified framework is presented that combines multiple sources of context in high-order relations to encode semantical coherence and consistency of the scenes. This framework introduces a new descriptor called context relevance score to model context-based distribution of the response variables and apply it to two distributions. First model incorporates context descriptor along with annotation response into a supervised Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) built on multi-variate Bernoulli distribution called Context-Based LDA (CBLDA). The second model is based on multi-variate Wallenius' non-central Hyper-geometric distribution and is called Wallenius LDA (WLDA). WLDA incorporates context knowledge as bias parameter. Scene context is modeled as a graph and effectively used in object detection framework to maximize semantical consistency of the scene. The graph can also be used in recognition of out-of-context objects. Annotation metadata of Sun397 dataset is used to construct the context model. Performance of the proposed approaches was evaluated on ImageNet dataset. Comparison between proposed approaches and state-of-art multi-class object annotation algorithm shows superiority of presented approach in labeling of scene content.

Challenges and Changes

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-172
Author(s):  
David J. Gerber
Keyword(s):  
Competition Law ◽  
Digital Economy ◽  
The Other ◽  
Global Competition ◽  
Key Factors ◽  
Global System ◽  
Law System ◽  
Legal Professionals ◽  
System P

The chapter focuses on two profound and lasting changes in competition. One is the deepening and widening of globalization, which alters the dimensions of markets; the other is the digital economy, which creates new forms of competition. Together, they challenge both domestic regimes and the global system. The chapter describes how these two changes combine to challenge competition authorities, courts, and legal professionals. It notes how individual regimes are responding to these changes and identifies key factors that shape their responses. It then shows how these challenges are altering many aspects of the relationships among competition law regimes—that is, the global competition law system.

Children's use of contextual cues to resolve referential ambiguity

1998 ◽  
Vol 6 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 265-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anne Bezuidenhout ◽  
Mary Sue Sroda
Keyword(s):  
Young Children ◽  
Relevance Theory ◽  
Verbal Communication ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Development ◽  
Contextual Cues ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Referential Ambiguity

Researchers interested in children's understanding of mind have claimed that the ability to ascribe beliefs and intentions is a late development, occurring well after children have learned to speak and comprehend the speech of others. On the other hand, there are convincing arguments to show that verbal communication requires the ability to attribute beliefs and intentions. Hence if one accepts the findings from research into children's understanding of mind, one should predict that young children will have severe difficulties in verbal communication. Conversely, if this prediction fails, this casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills. Using insights from Relevance Theory, an experiment was designed to test children's ability to recover a speaker's intended referent in situations in which the speaker's words underdetermine the referent. Results suggest that children's skills are comparable to those of untutored adults in similar situations. Thus this study indirectly casts doubt on the claim that young children lack meta-representational skills.

Victim and Witness Measures of the International Criminal Court: A Comparative Analysis

2007 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Colin Mclaughlin
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
International Criminal Court ◽  
International Criminal ◽  
National Court ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
International Standards ◽  
The Other ◽  
International Tribunal ◽  
Protection Measures ◽  
Rules Of Procedure

AbstractThe protections of victims and witnesses have evolved from the inception of the ICTY and continue through to the creation of the ICC. The ICTY set the benchmark on victim and witness protection through reliance on varying national court systems as well as on international standards. The ICTY's approach has been followed by the ICTR and the SCSL, though each tribunal made important advances in victim and witness protection.Today, ICC continues to follow the lead of the other tribunals. Although it is still unknown how well the ICC will protect victims and witnesses, if the Rules of Procedure and Evidence are any indication, the ICC will provide proper protection measures for victims and witnesses in the international tribunal arena.After comparing the different victim and witness measures implemented by the ICC to similar measures of the other Tribunals, as well as various national court systems, it is apparent that the ICC has developed extensive victim and witness measures that mirror those established by the other tribunals. Understanding both the benefits as well as possible shortcomings of each measure, the ICC will be better equipped to implement the measures deemed necessary for the victims and witnesses whose lives have been impacted by the crimes that come before the Court.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document