The Limitation of Truth-Semantics in the Understanding of Religion

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 447-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Albinus

While this article salutes attempts to use Donald Davidson’s principles of radical interpretation in the study of religion in order to avoid the pitfalls of correspondence theory of truth, on the one hand, and cultural relativism, on the other, it suggests that an adequate understanding of religion may also take other pragmatic aspects of meaning into account. Buying into Jürgen Habermas’ critique of Davidson, the more specific argument is that a differentiation of validity criteria serves to disclose the restricted role “truth” plays in speech acts. It is also argued that although Richard Rorty’s skepticism towards universal criteria of rationality borders on relativism, he is justified in focusing more radically—along with Robert Brandom—on pragmatic and situational criteria of meaning. Finally, drawing on Wittgenstein’s concept of “perspicuous representation” I suggest an alternate way of coming to grips with meaning potentials in religious ways of life.

Vivarium ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laurent Cesalli

AbstractWalter Burley (1275-c.1344) and John Wyclif (1328-1384) follow two clearly stated doctrinal options: on the one hand, they are realists and, on the other, they defend a correspondence theory of truth that involves specific correlates for true propositions, in short: truth-makers. Both characteristics are interdependent: such a conception of truth requires a certain kind of ontology. This study shows that a) in their explanation of what it means for a proposition to be true, Burley and Wyclif both develop what we could call a theory of intentionality in order to explain the relation that must obtain between the human mind and the truth-makers, and b) that their explanations reach back to Augustine, more precisely to his theory of ocular vision as exposed in the De trinitate IX as well as to his conception of ideas found in the Quaestio de ideis.


Author(s):  
Oleh Tyshchenko

The article considers performative speech acts (expressives, commissives, wishes, curses, threats, warnings, etc.) and generally exclamatory phraseology in the original and translation in terms of the function of the addressee, the specifics of the communicative situation, the symbolism and pragmatics of the cultural text. Through cultural and semiotic reconstruction of these units, their semantic and grammatical structure and features of motivation in several linguistic cultures were clarified. Collectively, these verbal acts, on the one hand, mark the semiotic structure of the narrative structure of the text, and on the other hand, indicate the idiostyle of a particular author or characterize the speech of the characters and the associated range of emotions (curses, invectives, cries of indignation, dissatisfaction, etc.). Several translated versions of M. Bulgakov’s novel «The Master and Margarita» (in Ukrainian, Polish, Slovak and English) and English translations of M. Kotsyubynsky’s novel «Fata Morgana» and Dovzhenko’s short story «Enchanted Desna» constitute the material for the study. The obtained results are essential for elucidating the specifics of the national conceptual sphere of a certain culture and revealing the types of inter lingual equivalents, idiomatic analogues in the transmission of common ethno-cultural content. This approach can be useful for a new understanding of domestication and adaptation in translation, translation of culturally marked units, onyms, mythological concepts, etc. as a specific translation practices. There was further developed the theory of phatic and performative-expressive speech acts in lingual cultural comprehension.


Author(s):  
Ahmad Alqassas

This chapter focuses on the semantic and pragmatic effects associated with the various positions of negation. Particularly, presuppositional readings for negative statements follow from different structural positions of negation (higher in the TP) as opposed to the non-presuppositional interpretations associated with the lower NegP below TP. This chapter also analyses contrasts between SA maa on the one hand and laa and its variants on the other hand. These contrasts are related to scope readings, presupposition, mood and speech acts (commissive, directive, volitive, and (ir)realis). I argue that presuppositional negation is a product of the interplay between syntax and pragmatics. Specifically, I propose that presuppositional negative markers are higher in the syntactic structure. They occupy a position above the tense phrase in the clausal structure, namely NegP above TP (cf. Zanuttini 1997 for similar effects in various Romance). Pragmatically marked negation includes presuppositional negation, categorical negation and cleft-negation. The former two are in a NegP above TP, while the latter is in CP.


2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-98
Author(s):  
Stephen Adam Schwartz

In his text on the ‘Exposition Universelle 1855’, Baudelaire upholds what he calls ‘cosmopolitisme’ as the antidote to the constraining influence of universalizing principles of taste that are meant to define beauty for all times and places. Baudelaire’s view is that such aesthetic systems close off the possibility of beauty, which, he maintains must contain an element of novelty. Accordingly, the proper attitude for the viewer (or reader or spectator) to take before a work of art is one that remains always open to novelty and to the ‘universal vitality’ out of which it springs. This attitude is the cosmopolitan one. Yet Baudelaire characterizes this attitude in ways that seem fundamentally incompatible if not diametrically opposed. On the one hand, cosmopolitanism as described in this text seems to involve the slow, lived apprenticeship in the values, ways of life, and criteria of judgement of those in other places, the better to be able to appreciate the beauty of the objects produced in them. On the other, he speaks of the appropriate attitude toward an aesthetic object — indeed toward any object that presents itself to our senses — as one resulting solely from the spectator’s exertions on his or her own mind and will, exertions by which the spectator refrains from imposing criteria of judgement upon the putative aesthetic object in order, instead, to derive one’s criteria from it. While the text on the ‘Exposition’ provides the reader with no way of resolving this contradiction, Baudelaire’s remarks on fashion in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ (1863) provide a dialectical resolution.


Metalepsis ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 119-146
Author(s):  
Gail Trimble

This chapter revisits the challenges of thinking about narrative metalepsis in lyric contexts by considering the diverse corpus of Catullus. Catullus’ most obviously narrative poem—poem 64—offers rich possibilities for metaleptic readings, and the chapter particularly investigates the ways in which the boundary between the poem’s outer narrative and its inset, ostensibly ecphrastic story is navigated by two powerfully subjective presences, the narrator and Ariadne, by such means as apostrophe and mise en abyme. Yet Catullus is typically classified as a lyric poet, and the chapter also examines poems that fuse the narrative and lyric modes, looking at potentially hymnic addresses to divinities across the corpus, and the tension in poem 68 between, on the one hand, the tendency to establish a whole series of nested narrative levels through ring composition and simile, and, on the other, the pull of the lyric mode towards a unified poetic ‘present’. There is a particular emphasis on the interaction among speech acts in the first, second and third person. Catullus himself appears in all three ‘persons’ as a character in the corpus, but is also a Roman author in whose real existence we believe, and the chapter concludes by returning against this background to Genette’s concern that metalepsis prompts us to ask whether we may belong to some narrative—as Catullus indeed does.


1994 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 191-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Brassac

The question of the use of speech act theory in accounting for conversational sequencing is discussed from the point of view of the explanation of linguistic interaction. On the one hand, this question lies at the heart of the opposition between conversational analysis and discourse analysis. On the other, it dominates the discussion around a text by Searle called "Conversation". After summarizing what is at stake in the debate, I focus on the positions of two authors, Dascal and Van Rees, who favor the idea of a possible (and necessary) combination of illocutionary logic and the analysis of conversational interactions. My own position consists in taking into account the new elements that have recently enriched illocutionary logic (particularly the integration of perlocution through the notion of satisfaction conditions) within the framework of an essentially dialogical position. The proposed approach is in agreement with the theses of these two authors and complements them with elements that satisfy their demands.


2020 ◽  
Vol 88 ◽  
pp. 01011
Author(s):  
Galina Chirsheva ◽  
Marina Houston

Bilinguals of every age sometimes double units of one language with those of the other, especially in the situations where they have to interact with speakers of different languages. Bilingual communication stimulates code-switches, various in their structure and pragmatics. Among them, researchers observe the following phenomena in bilingual children’s speech: a) double morphology, b) translation/interpreting equivalents combinations, and c) self-interpreting. However, the interrelation between structural and semantic/pragmatic aspects, on the one hand, and the developmental characteristics of childhood bilingualism, on the other hand, have been underresearched. The authors of the paper argue that various cases of interlingual duplicating can indicate the balance between the competences of children in their two languages at different stages of their bilingual development. The purpose of the study is to describe structural, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of interlingual duplicating combinations in the speech of two children who acquire Russian and English simultaneously, as well as to find the correlation between their duplications and the development of their bilingualism. The results of the study can be used for the description of childhood bilingualism and the evaluation of bilingual children’s communicative competence in each of their languages and their interpreting abilities at various age stages.


2021 ◽  
pp. 439-461
Author(s):  
Antonia Sánchez Villanueva

De entre los géneros en los que se expresa el discurso político en Francia, las entrevistas presidenciales televisadas del 14deJulio constituyen manifestaciones singulares. Con una tradición de cuatro décadas, se desarrollan en un contexto de gran formalidad que confiere a la palabra presidencial rango institucional sin que deje de estar sometida a los riesgos propios de la interacción. Por un lado, las reglas del género sitúan al presidente en posición funcional de dependencia. Por otro, la entrevista política ha evolucionado hacia un adversarial style (Clayman&Heritage,2002) al que las del 14deJulio no son ajenas. Este artículo se detiene en la concedida por Emmanuel Macron en 2020 y difundida en Youtube, para analizar con las herramientas del Análisis del Discurso cómo combate los actos de habla que amenazan la dimensión presidencial, expuesta ahora también a los inter e intradiscursos que se generan en el entorno digital. Among the orders in which political discourse is expressed in France, the televised presidential interview of the 14th of July is unique. With a tradition stretching back four decades, these interviews take place in a context of great formality that is intended to give the presidential word institutional rank, albeit subject to the risks associated with an interview. On the one hand, the paradigm of the interview places the president in a functional position of dependence. On the other hand, the political interview has evolved in recent times towards an adversarial style (Clayman&Heritage, 2002) to which those of the 14th of July are not immune. This article focuses upon the presidential interview granted by Emmanuel Macron in 2020, broadcast for the first time on YouTube, to analyze with the tools of Discourse Analysis how it fights the speech acts that threaten the presidential status, now also exposed in the digital environment. Parmi les différents genres où le discours politique trouve ses voies d’expression en France, les interviews présidentielles du 14 Juillet représentent des manifestations tout à fait particulières. C’est Valéry Giscard d’Estaing qui a inauguré la longue série en accordant en 1978 le premier entretien télévisé lors des cérémonies de la Fête Nationale, un exercice que la plupart de ses successeurs ont poursuivi. Seul Nicolas Sarkozy a refusé de continuer la tradition. Emmanuel Macron, de sa part, a fait de même mais, en revanche, en a accordé une le 14 Juillet 2020 dans le contexte de la crise sanitaire du Covid-19, avec une nouveauté : elle a été diffusée aussi sur Youtube. Dans cet article nous visons à décrypter à l’aide des outils de l’Analyse du Discours et de l’Analyse de la Conversation les stratégies discursives menées par Emmanuel Macron dans la seule interview du 14Juillet accordée jusqu’à présent.


2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-251
Author(s):  
Dezheng (William) Feng ◽  
Shuo Zhang

Abstract This study investigates Barack Obama’s attitudes towards Republicans and Democrats by analyzing a corpus of 249 Presidential weekly addresses. Analysis shows that Obama’s attitudes towards the Republicans are characterized by a negative judgment of propriety, creating a negative image of the Republican Party, whereas when Republicans and Democrats are mentioned together, his attitudes are characterized by his hopes for and commendations on bipartisan collaboration. An analytical model based on the attitude schema is proposed to explicate the strategies for encoding attitudes. It is found that negative attitudes are always expressed implicitly by recounting events that elicit the attitudes (i.e. behaviors of the Republicans) and performing speech acts that are motivated by the attitudes (i.e. urging the Republicans to stop the wrong behaviors). The patterns of attitudes reflect bipartisan conflict and cooperation on the one hand, and constitute an important strategy to battle against the opposition party and build coalitions on the other.


2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-59
Author(s):  
Sherif Salem ◽  

We show in this paper how three continental philosophers (Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida respectively) respond negatively to the analytic correspondence theory of truth using different notions developed by them (i.e. the notion of Intentionality by Husserl, the notion of Dasein by Heidegger, and the notion of Trace by Derrida). We show that despite the fact that the three philosophers are united against the analytic correspondence theory of truth, there are still deep differences between them which stem from the different tools they use to articulate the concept of truth. Also, we argue that Husserlian truth has an advantageous position over the other concepts of truth presented.


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