scholarly journals A Truth-minimalist Reading of Foucault

Le foucaldien ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Filip Buekens

That we have culturally acquired certain concepts and beliefs, that many concepts that refer to or impose social or cultural classifications have their origin in intended or unintended declarative speech acts, that the institutional facts they intentionally and unintentionally create have a contingent existence and that it is not always fully transparent to us that the facts so created are institutional facts, were Foucault's key insights in his early work. I argue that these insights can be fully articulated, explored and discussed with a minimalist conception of truth in mind. His observations anticipate current "rediscoveries" of those insights by analytic philosophers. A minimalist about truth holds that these insights do not require a revision of our ordinary concept of truth. The flip side of my argument is that Foucault and his followers should not have grounded his views in a substantial revision of the concept of truth. Truth is and has always been "a thing of this world"; his idiosyncratic reconceptualizations of truth are not needed to explore social dimensions of belief systems, the way social facts emerge and the relevance of genealogies.

2015 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Vidya Dwi Amalia Zati ◽  
Sumarsih Sumarsih ◽  
Lince Sihombing

The objectives of the research were to describe the types of speech acts used in televised political debates of governor candidates of North Sumatera, to derive the dominant type of speech acts used in televised political debates of governor candidates of North Sumatera and to elaborate the way of five governor candidates of North Sumatera use speech acts in televised political debates. This research was conducted by applying descriptive qualitative research. The findings show that there were only four types of speech acts used in televised political debates, Debat Pemilukada Sumatera Utara and Uji Publik Cagub dan Cawagub Sumatera Utara, they were assertives, directives, commissives and expressives. The dominant type of speech acts used in both televised political debates was assertives, with 82 utterances or 51.6% in Debat Pemilukada Sumatera Utara and 36 utterances or 41.37% in Uji Publik Cagub dan Cawagub Sumatera Utara. The way of governor candidates of North Sumatera used speech acts in televised political debates is in direct speech acts, they spoke straight to the point and clearly in order to make the other candidates and audiences understand their utterances.   Keywords: Governor Candidate; Political Debate; Speech Acts


Author(s):  
Kirk Ludwig

Chapter 12 evaluates, in the light of the analysis of status functions in previous chapters, a recent claim by Searle that all institutional facts, and so all status functions, are created by declarative speech acts. An example of a declaration is an employer saying “You’re fired” to an employee and thereby making it the case that he is fired. The chapter argues that while declarations are often used, given background conventions in a community, to impose status functions on objects, they are not necessary, and that more generally the idea that status functions are imposed by representing that object as having them is mistaken, in the light of the earlier analysis of collective acceptance as a matter of members of a community having appropriate we-intentions or conditional we-intentions directed at the relevant things.


Author(s):  
Isidora Stojanovic

De se attitudes, that is, attitudes that we have about ourselves in a first-personal way, have long been recognized as interestingly different from other attitudes. However, speech acts and, in particular, assertions that we make about ourselves have barely begun to draw philosophers’ attention. This chapter discusses some recent proposals that aim to bridge the gap between the significance of the de se phenomena in thought and the way that we express those attitudes in language. Section 1 provides some background on the de se and the essential indexical. Section 2 surveys proposals that make use of centered contents in modeling assertion and communication. Section 3 discusses the main motivations for the idea that centered contents are not only the contents of de se attitudes but also of the corresponding assertions.


2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (11) ◽  
pp. 617-642
Author(s):  
John MacFarlane ◽  

One approach to the problem is to keep the orthodox notion of a proposition but innovate in the theory of speech acts. A number of philosophers and linguists have suggested that, in cases of felicitous underspecification, a speaker asserts a “cloud” of propositions rather than just one. This picture raises a number of questions: what norms constrain a “cloudy assertion,” what counts as uptake, and how is the conversational common ground revised if it is accepted? I explore three different ways of answering these questions, due to Braun and Sider, Buchanan, and von Fintel and Gillies. I argue that none of them provide a good general response to the problem posed by felicitous underspecification. However, the problems they face point the way to a more satisfactory account, which innovates in the theory of content rather than the theory of speech acts.


Author(s):  
David Rampton

Mansfield’s “Je ne parle pas francais”, a story about unrequited desire and its effects, is narrated by its principal character. He is an unscrupulous, unsavoury type, which has helped make Mansfield’s critics quasi-unanimous in condemning him for his role in the events portrayed and questioning the way he describes them. His bitterness and scepticism have reminded some of Mansfield’s readers of Dostoevsky’s “Notes from Underground”. The proto-existentialist aspect of the stories, their preoccupation with “good faith”, their scepticism concerning belief systems and grand abstractions more generally, the difficulties of escaping various kinds of isolation, the difficulties of sustained emotional commitment, all these help make the case for reading the stories in conjunction. Mansfield use a number of strategies – literary allusions, thematic echoes, self-reflexiveness –to help readers negotiate the story’s complexities. In the end, the large questions may remain unanswered, but that is as may be. “Je ne parle pas francais” firmly establishes her as an important modernist writer and a valuable link with Dostoevsky and the great Russian forebears in whom she took such an interest.


HUMANIS ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 253
Author(s):  
Gusti Alit Mahendra ◽  
I Gusti Ayu Gede Sosiowati ◽  
Ni Ketut Alit Ida Setianingsih

The study entitled “Direct and Indirect Directive Illocutionary Acts in the Movie Penguin of Madagascar” is aimed at identifying the direct and indirect directive types of illocutionary acts and explaining and analyzing the meaning of the utterances interpreted by the listeners. The data of this study were taken from the movie entitled Penguins of Madagascar, and it was chosen because of many utterances identified as directive of illocutionary acts. The observation and documentation methods were used in collecting the data since the data were obtained from the spoken source in the movie. The data were analyzed using the descriptive qualitative method since the purpose of this study is to analyze the social phenomena like speech acts. The first theory proposef by Bach and Harnish (1979: 47) is used to analyze the type of directive of illocutionary acts. The second theory, the context of situation proposed by Dell Hymes (1972, is used to analyze the meaning of directive of illocutionary acts that can be interpreted by the listeners. There are six types of directive of illocutionary act proposed by Bach and Harnish (1979). They are requestives, questions, requirements, permissives, prohibitives and advisories. In this study, several types of directive illocutionary were found in the movie, except the indirect question, and direct prohibitive. The way the listeners interpret the meaning depends on the context of situation.


Religions ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaesang Jung

Confucian rituals have constituted the foundation of religious practice in the traditional societies of East Asia. Paying attention to the Confucian ritual, this article explores the way Confucianism constructs its symbolic system based on people’s natural feelings, particularly in the case of three-year mourning. It intends to show how the two feelings of “affection for the family” (chinchin/qinqin, 親親) and “respect for the honorable” (chonjon/zunzun, 尊尊) are ritualized in Confucian rites, and to illuminate the religious and social dimensions of Confucianism in premodern Korea by analyzing a seventeenth-century controversy over royal mourning from the perspective of these two principles.


2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 951-968
Author(s):  
Etienne Denis ◽  
Claude Pecheux ◽  
Luk Warlop

Commonly regarded as an important driver of donation behavior, public recognition also can reduce donations. With three studies, this research manipulates whether donors receive public, private, imposed, or optional forms of recognition; the results show that the influence of recognition on the decision to donate is moderated by donors’ need for social approval. Whereas public recognition improves charitable giving among people with higher need for approval, imposing recognition reduces donations among people with lower need, suggesting a potential crowding-out effect on prior motives (Study 1). This penalty for public recognition disappears when the public recognition is optional (Study 2). When public recognition is saliently imposed (not requested), donation likelihood increases, suggesting that donors’ potential concerns about observers’ suspicion of their true motives is reduced (Study 3). This research highlights conditions in which public recognition encourages charitable giving and paves the way for further research on social dimensions of generosity.


Author(s):  
Tansif Ur Rehman

The internet is conceivably today's most innovative development as it proceeds to change everyday life for almost everyone globally. Billions of individuals are using the internet, and thousands enter the online world each day. Not merely has the internet revolutionized the way people connect and learn; it has eternally changed the way people live across the globe. As the internet and computer advances, offenders have originated ways to utilize these innovations as intended for their criminal acts. In social science research, social theories are of great significance. Without a theoretical direction, social facts are like a snuffed-out candle that cannot determine its bearer's path. Social theories contribute to the development of sound scientific foundations for resolving issues in any social inquiry. Theories guide our observations of the world. Digital technology has an impact and has numerous challenges. The respective work has its significance in helping and exploring this dilemma via a multifaceted theoretical approach.


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