Wittgenstein, Ordinary Language, and Poeticity

The later Wittgenstein famously holds that an understanding which tries to run up against the limits of language bumps itself and results in nothing but plain nonsense. Therefore, the task of philosophy cannot be to create an ‘ideal’ language so as to produce a ‘real’ understanding for the first time; its aim must be to remove particular misunderstandings by clarifying the use of our ordinary language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein opposes both the sublime terms of traditional philosophy and the formal frameworks of modern logics—and adheres to a pointedly casual, colloquial style in his own philosophizing. However, there seems to lurk a certain inconsistency in Wittgenstein’s ordinary language approach: his philosophical remarks frequently remain enigmatic, and many of the terms Wittgenstein coins seem to be highly technical. Thus, one might wonder whether his verdicts on the limits of language and on philosophical jargons might not be turned against his own practice. The present essay probes the extent to which the contravening tendencies in Wittgenstein’s mature philosophy might be reconciled. Section 2 sketches Wittgenstein’s general approach to philosophy and tracks the special rôle that the language of everyday life occupies therein. Section 3 reconstructs Wittgenstein’s preferred method for philosophy, which he calls perspicuous representation, and argues that this method implements an aesthetic conception of philosophy and a poetic approach to philosophical language, in which philosophical insights are not explicitly stated, but mediated through well-worded and creatively composed descriptions. Section 4 discusses how Wittgenstein’s philosophical poetics relates to artificial terminologies and grammars in philosophy and science.

Expression unleashed: The evolutionary & cognitive foundations of human communication

Human expression is open-ended, versatile and diverse, ranging from ordinary language use to painting, from exaggerated displays of affection to micro-movements that aid coordination. Here we present and defend the claim that this expressive diversity is united by an interrelated suite of cognitive capacities, the evolved functions of which are the expression and recognition of informative intentions. We describe how evolutionary dynamics normally leash communication to narrow domains of statistical mutual benefit, and how they are unleashed in humans. The relevant cognitive capacities are cognitive adaptations to living in a partner choice social ecology; and they are, correspondingly, part of the ordinarily developing human cognitive phenotype, emerging early and reliably in ontogeny. In other words, we identify distinctive features of our species’ social ecology to explain how and why humans, and only humans, evolved the cognitive capacities that, in turn, lead to massive diversity and open-endedness in means and modes of expression. Language use is but one of these modes of expression, albeit one of manifestly high importance. We make cross-species comparisons, describe how the relevant cognitive capacities can evolve in a gradual manner, and survey how unleashed expression facilitates not only language use but novel behaviour in many other domains too, focusing on the examples of joint action, teaching, punishment and art, all of which are ubiquitous in human societies but relatively rare in other species. Much of this diversity derives from graded aspects of human expression, which can be used to satisfy informative intentions in creative and new ways. We aim to help reorient cognitive pragmatics, as a phenomenon that is not a supplement to linguistic communication and on the periphery of language science, but rather the foundation of the many of the most distinctive features of human behaviour, society and culture.

Nouns and Verbs Identify Different Subtypes of MCI

It is well-documented that patients with semantic dementia and Alzheimer’s disease present with difficulty in lexical retrieval and reversal of the concreteness effect in nouns and verbs. Little is known about the lexical phenomena before the onset of symptoms. We anticipate that there are linguistic signs in the speech of people who suffer from mild cognitive impairment (MCI), the prodromal stage of dementia. Here, we report the results of a novel corpus-linguistic approach to the early detection of cognitive impairment. We recorded 40 hours of natural, unconstrained speech of 188 English-speaking Singaporeans; 90 are diagnosed with MCI (51 amnestic, 39 nonamnestic), and 98 are cognitively healthy. The recordings yield 327,470 words, which are tagged for parts of speech. We calculate the per-minute speech rates and concreteness scores of nouns and verbs, and of all tagged words, in our dataset. Our analysis shows that the two measures of nouns and verbs identify different subtypes of MCI. Compared with healthy controls, subjects with amnestic MCI produce fewer but more abstract nouns, whereas subjects with nonamnestic MCI produce fewer but more concrete verbs. Cognitive impairment is manifested in ordinary language before the presentation of clinical symptoms, and can be detected through non-invasive corpus-based analysis of natural speech.

Analytical Anthropology of Peter Hacker

Purpose. The article is an explication of the features of the anthropological teaching of Peter Hacker in the context of analytical philosophy with consideration to the context of European philosophy within the framework of the Oxford School of ordinary language philosophy. The theoretical basis of the research is determined by the latest research in the English-language analytical philosophical tradition, rethinking the place of anthropological problems in the system of philosophical knowledge. Originality. Referring to primary sources, we reconstructed the philosophical and anthropological teaching of Peter Hacker in the unity of its basic principles and theoretical and practical results. We determined philosophical origins of the key ideas of his philosophical anthropology and substantiated their originality, systematicity and logical argumentation. His philosophical position is defined as anthropological holism, synthesizing the reinterpreted ideas of Aristotle and Wittgenstein. Conclusions. Peter Hacker is the creator of the original version of Analytic Philosophical Anthropology. His anthropology is based on criticism of Cartesian dualism and physicalism, which underlie modern neurosciences and which he tries to overcome on the basis of Wittgenstein’s philosophical "logotherapy". The conceptual framework of his holistic anthropology is a rethought conceptual scheme of the Ordinary language philosophy. Hacker considers consciousness not as a separate mental reality, but one of the powers of human nature – an intellectual ability, which, along with emotional (passionate) and moral, belongs to a person as an integral socio-biological being. Asserting the free will of man, the Oxford thinker criticizes various forms of determinism, especially its most common form in modern science – neurobiological determinism, which is built on false philosophical foundations. This criticism allows the modern British philosopher to build an original, systematic and logically consistent anthropological concept that asserts the immutability of the highest human values – goodness, love and happiness.

Implicitness, Logical Form and Arguments

In the paper I suggest that a loose notion of logical form can be a useful tool for the understanding or evaluation of everyday language and the explicit and implicit content of communication. Reconciling ordinary language and logic provides formal guidelines for rational communication, giving strength and order to ordinary communication and content to logical schemas. The starting point of the paper is the idea that the bearers of logical form are not natural language sentences, but what we communicate with them, that is, their content in a particular context. On the basis of that idea, I propose that we can ascribe logical proprieties to what is communicated using ordinary language and suggest a continuum between semantic phenomena such as explicatures and pragmatic communicational strategies such as (particularized) conversational implicatures, which challenges the idea that an implicatum is completely separate from what is said. I believe that this continuum can be best explained by the notion of logical form, taken as a propriety of sentences relative to particular interpretations.

The Unspoken in the Speech of Symbolism School: المسكوت عنه في خطاب المذهب الرمزي

It required the literary man to base his artistic output on a basic basis from which to achieve literary creativity, and literary trends and currents have varied, specifically in the postmodern period, which directed its attention to margins and the casual things. Accordingly, we will try to discover and search for what was rejected and excluded by the literary schools, while symbolism school was interested in and considered it as an original and a reference for them. There are some technical procedures that symbolism adopted and applied that were excluded and marginalized before, as it constitutes for them aesthetic values, literary pleasure and a special emotional pleasure. Therefore, we find that they relied on music and the mysterious feelings it evokes in the mind that are difficult to express in ordinary language. They (Symbolism school) found a new kind of authority to write the poetry, specifically after feeling freedom and openness to unlimited horizons.

“MY TONGUE SWORE BUT MY HEART DID NOT”: VINDICATING ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY AGAINST THE PROCUSTEAN BED OF SCIENTISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Often vilified, if not outright rejected, ordinary language philosophy has been sustained, from its very beginnings, due to the farne of authors such as Austin and the later Wittgenstein; but not, however, on its own merits. These, w hen recognized, are branded as either constituting a bad philosophy of language, or simply a bad philosophy altogether. Thus, same charitable interpretations have tried to domesticate its methods to make it compatible with a mare orthodox philosophy of language. Very gradually, however, this situation is changing, largely thanks to the influence that Stanley Cavell's philosophy is having on several generations of philosophers. The main thing is to convince ourselves that ordinary language philosophy is not strictly speaking a philosophy of language. It is a philosophy that proceeds from the ordinary and pays attention to the importance that the ordinary has for philosophy. We will, in the course of this article, analyze the criticisms and attempts to domesticate ordinary language philosophy and will anticipate Cavell's defense of the ordinary language philosophy as practiced by Austin and Ryle in Cavell's inheritance of the farmer.

Rifkin’s misreadings of the zero-marginal cost of production of information technology

In this paper, I address contemporary attacks on rationalism thanks to Rifkin’s concepts of “extreme productivity” and “zero marginal cost of production” as examples of an ideological twist on genuine economic expressions. The main issue dealt with epistemological issues in the context of the contemporary communication age. It consists to clarify the relation between economic ideas and their relation to reality. To proceed accordingly, I implement a hermeneutic method applied to Rifkin’s discourse. That method is grounded in the scholarly tradition of “the ordinary language philosophy”. Its results proceed to show 2 distinct language games at work: 1- the neoclassical definition of marginal cost and its own logic is distinct from Rifkin’s use of it. 2- Rifkin uses the expression “marginal cost” under the auspices of an ideological discourse on the demise of capitalism. 3- The confusion is based on a systematically deceptive use of scholarly referencing. I conclude by drawing some lessons for the role of a multidisciplinary defense of economic rationality in contemporary discourse.

Reading Through Emotions: An Affective Narratolological Approach to Alice Munro's Short Stories

The emergence of fields of study like emotionology, affective narratology, and psychonarratology in recent decades evidences a dramatic rise in research done on the meaning and interpretation of emotions. Affective Narratology as one of the recent fields in emotion studies attempts to identify and account for the figuration of emotions in works of literature. Focusing on three basic emotions (shame, jealousy and love) figuring in Alice Munro’s selected short stories this paper probes the significance of emotional registers in the writer's depiction of daily life. Examined is the way the stories' sincere tone and their comprehensible, ordinary language, contribute to the emotional identification of readers with characters. Applying affective narratological theories, the objective is to show how emotions contribute to plot development and characterization in these stories. Central to the analysis is interpreting emotional moments experienced by characters, especially female characters