Ignoring Qualifications as a Pragmatic Fallacy: Enrichments and Their Use for Manipulating Commitments

The fallacy of ignoring qualifications, or secundum quid et simpliciter, is a deceptive strategy that is pervasive in argumentative dialogues, discourses, and discussions. It consists in misrepresenting an utterance so that its meaning is broadened, narrowed, or simply modified to pursue different goals, such as drawing a specific conclusion, attacking the interlocutor, or generating humorous reactions. The “secundum quid” was described by Aristotle as an interpretative manipulative strategy, based on the contrast between the “proper” sense of a statement and its meaning taken absolutely or in a certain respect. However, how can an “unqualified” statement have a proper meaning different from the qualified one, and vice versa? This “linguistic” fallacy brings to light a complex relationship between pragmatics, argumentation, and interpretation. The secundum quid is described in this paper as a manipulative argument, whose deceptive effect lies in its pragmatic dimension. This fallacy is analyzed as a strategy of decontextualization lying at the interface between pragmatics and argumentation and consisting of the unwarranted passage from an utterance to its semantic representation. By ignoring the available evidence and the presumptive interpretation of a statement, the speaker places it in a different context or suppresses textual and contextual evidence to infer a specific meaning different from the presumable one.

Identity

This chapter focuses on the divide between Christian traditions that understand “this is my body” as true in the proper sense (what George Hunsinger calls “real predication”) and those that do not. It traces the development of this divide to the Western eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century. The author argues that both Roman Catholics and Lutherans (on one side) and Swiss Reformers and the Radical Reformation (on the other) shared an assumption that language must be either literal or figurative, with only the former adequate for proper truth claims. The author also analyzes the eucharistic controversy between Luther, who understood “is” as an example of literal predication, and Zwingli, who saw it as a rhetorical trope and thus not properly true. The chapter concludes by arguing that a cognitive understanding of language can transcend this dichotomy since figurative language can indeed be capable of proper truth claims.

Ein anders unfester Text

Printed anonymously in 1587, the henceforth immensely successful Historia von D. Johann Fausten is both a textual and a narratologic provocation. This is brought about by the polyphony of sources and genres compiled by its author which do not produce a homogeneous whole. But it is also the result of a specific, hybrid conception of text and narration, which intendedly creates ambiguity and scatters irritation everywhere. A valid interpretation is thereby sheerly impossible, which presumably is the most significant reason for the long and controversial discussions among readers and re-tellers, running from Christopher Marlowe (1592) and the Wagnerbuch (1593) up to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus (1947). This article explores some essential textual aspects of this inexhaustible narrative, such as the discursive and hermeneutic predominance of intradiegetic instances (first of all Mephostophiles) and the decommissioning of the narrator by inserted documents, transtextual references, and primarily by paratexts which almost lead a life of their own on the margins of the story in a proper sense. In this way, the text gets fluid, and its reception becomes an endless search for a coherent meaning which isn’t right there.

Metaphors of Eucharistic Presence

One of the most challenging questions for Christian ecumenical theology is how the relationship between the eucharistic bread and wine and Jesus Christ’s body and blood can be appropriately described. This book takes a new approach to controverted questions of eucharistic presence by drawing on cognitive linguistics. Arguing that human cognition is grounded in sensorimotor experience and that phenomena such as metaphor and conceptual blending are basic building blocks of thought, the book proposes that inherited models of eucharistic presence are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can serve as complementary members of a shared ecumenical repertoire. The central element of this repertoire is the motif of identity, grounded in the Synoptic and Pauline institution narratives. The book argues that the statement “The eucharistic bread and wine are the body and blood of Christ” can be understood both as figurative and as true in the proper sense, thus resolving a church-dividing dichotomy. The identity motif is complemented by four major non-scriptural motifs: representation, change, containment, and conduit. Each motif with its entailments is explored in depth, and suggestions for ecumenical reconciliation in both doctrine and practices are offered. The book also provides an introduction to cognitive linguistics and offers suggestions for further reading in that field.

Kemiskinan dan Struktur Sosial di Maluku Dalam Perspektif Social Capital

This article aims to analyze the poverty problems and social structure in Maluku from a social capital perspective. Poverty is a human problem that hinders prosperity and civilization. The discourse of poverty in Indonesia to Maluku remains a crucial discourse to discuss and find a solution. Poverty has become a chronic problem because it is related to gaps and unemployment. In a proper sense, poverty is understood as a state of lack of money and goods to ensure survival. In Maluku, the latest data on poverty was recorded by BPS (center for statistic data) as of 2020 from September 2020, BPS recorded the number of poor people in Maluku amounting to 322.40 thousand people, or an increase of 4.2 thousand people when compared to March 2020, which was 318.18 thousand souls. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, this article offers a mapping of problems and approaches to social capital to address the acute problem of poverty in Maluku.

The Third Dimension. On the Dichotomy Between Speech and Writing

This paper introduces a more complex and refined articulated view than the classic and simple dichotomy of linguistic production. According to the traditional doxa, what is linguistically articulated is either spoken or written. Forms of written language have previously been considered a secondary representation of spoken forms and, at least in the alphabetic system, the only properly linguistic form. I argue that there exists a third dimension of language, which is internal. This internal form is lexically, phonetically and grammatically articulated, without being spoken in a proper sense, but which can be seen as the pre-condition for both spoken and written production. In other words, linguistic production does not necessarily imply the presence of two interacting speakers (or writers/readers). Production can be seen as the simple effect of an internal activity, and can be described without reduction to spoken or written forms. A consideration of this third dimension in a systematic way could enrich and strengthen approaches to many types of texts and help to productively integrate the traditional schemes adopted in Sociolinguistics, Historical Linguistics, Philology, Literary Criticism, and Pragmatics.

From Situated Freedom to Plausible Worlds

This volume has provided a potent reminder of the need for a cautious and intelligent embrace of contingency in explaining the past and framing hopes for the future of international law. The contingent, properly understood, is neither the utterly random nor the wholly determined. At its best, interest in contingency expresses a commitment to a theory of situated freedom: a desire to reach a proper sense of what options are available to us, neither conceding to the claims of unbending necessity nor pretending to an unbound and utopian sense of anarchic possibility that generally collapses into its opposite when it crashes into a recalcitrant world. The chapter closes with some thoughts about the scholarly uses of counterfactuality.

Conflict and Reconciliation of Ambivalence and Hybridity in A Passage to India and A Passage to England

The ambivalence for the attraction and repulsion shapes the colonizer and colonized’s duality sense for integrating each other’s way of life. It leads to create a hybridity sense, but this hybridity turns to mimicry. Forster’s A Passage to India portrays this sense through the character analysis. This novel exposes the ambivalent attitude of the Indians and the English to adopt the respective culture as the ruler and the ruled in India leading to hybridity sense. The development of events in the novel also shows some distorted sense in the character’s relationship and individual personality that creates a kind of tension. Chaudhuri, in his travelogue with his colonial experience, shapes his ambivalent attitude to integrate into the English traits. But his real experience with the West confirms his previous knowledge and he adopts his proper sense of hybridity by praising almost everything in western life and by showing the limitation of his country’s way of life. But his presentation in the travelogue makes a question of his stereotyped personality. The article initiates to explore reconciliation in this tension, applying the thesis-antithesis-synthesis technique through the comparative analysis of these two books.

Plotinus on the Conception of Time (ennoia chronou): A Re-Examination of Enn. 3.7(45).12

This paper aims to revisit a debated issue concerning the formation of the “conception of time” in Plotinus’ treatise On Eternity and Time. Over the last several years, studies have drawn attention to the fact that ennoia (“conception”) in Plotinus does not always refer to the existence of an innate notion in the soul, but that it can also refer to a conception that is formed empirically. However, it is unclear whether this holds true also for the conception of time. My claim is that, far from attributing an empirical origin to the formation of the ennoia of time, Plotinus is committed to distinguishing the ennoia of number, which measures times, from the ennoia of time in the proper sense. However, just as it is necessary to distinguish essential time from its manifestation, measured by the movements of the heavenly bodies, we must also distinguish the innate notion of essential number, which the soul naturally possesses in itself, from the notion of arithmetical number, obtained through the observation of discrete quantities. This paper thus proposes to read Enn. 3.7(45).12 in connection with the analyses developed in Enn. 6.6(34).4, which concern the ennoia of number.

Types of Hellenistic Military Settlements in Royal Letters

The article is devoted to the analysis of information on Hellenistic military settlements, which can be found in the extant letters of Seleucid and Attalid kings. We mean the letter of Antiochus III preserved by Flavius Josephus in his Judean Antiquities, and three letters extant as inscriptions on stone: ‘Ikadion’s inscription’ from the island of Failaka in the Arabian Gulf (Kuwait, middle of the 3rd – early 2nd centuries BC), Antiochus V’s letter from Jamnia-on-the-Sea (Palestine, 163 BC) and Eumenes II’s letter from Kardakon Kome (Lycia, 181 BC). The material of the letters allows to conclude, that there were at least two different types of aforementioned settlements: 1) military settlements in proper sense, inhabited by warriors, whose duty was permanent military service, and members of their families; 2) specific settlements where people generally lived peaceful lives being engaged mostly in agriculture, cults of local sanctuaries etc., but also in some military activities like defense of fortresses. Both types could be protected by the kings in the form of partial or full tax exemption, land grants etc., although the second type got less royal attention of that kind than the first one. The existence of the second type can be explained by the fact that the oldest type of army, quite actual in the ancient world, was militia of a community. Thence the second type of settlements can be nothing else than communities, whose militias were used by the Hellenistic kings in their military activities alongside the professional army.