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.

Dialectical Approach to Legal Arguing and Legal Argumentation

The article is devoted to legal argumentation, namely to its research by dialectical approach. The aim of the article is to determine characteristic features of dialectical approach to legal argumentation. Dialectical approach to the research of legal argumentation should include philosophical, theoretical, empirical components. Philosophical component of legal argumentation research consists in the critical conception of rationality i.e. the philosophical axiomatic idea about rationality of legal argumentation, which is systematically tested within discourse or critical discussion. Dialectical theoretical model of legal argumentation ensures mutual acceptability of legal argumentation by the parties. Dialectical approach deals with legal argumentation mainly in the “context of justification.” Dialectical approach to legal arguing implies specific standard of soundness of the argumentation – acceptability standard. Empirical component of legal argumentation includes reconstruction of argumentation and its weighting (analytic component) as well as analysis of particular legal reasoning (practical component). Dialectical approach highlights hermeneutical nature of legal reasoning. Dialectical approach to legal argumentation lets us assume some ontological issues concerning legal argumentation. Legal argumentation is considered as the form of rational communication of particular persons to reach mutual acceptability of legally important conclusions within the procedure of discussion. Legal argumentation is the result of such impact embodied in acceptability of legally binding issues within the procedure of rational discussion.

Teachers and Sowers

This chapter begins by considering the relation between the models of the teacher and the sower, which might seem very similar to each other. In Plato’s Phaedrus, the thought leader sows ideas by teaching; and teachers leave behind students capable of teaching others, so extending the original teacher’s legacy. The models are nonetheless distinct, even if they often converge: the teacher model focuses on the relationship between the leader and their immediate followers, stressing the need for rational communication; the sower looks beyond the relationship between the leader and their immediate followers towards subsequent generations, and to the perpetuation of ideas. Most of the chapter is then taken up with two case studies that show the two models working hand in hand: Florence Nightingale, who revolutionized nursing, and Margaret Mead, the US anthropologist, who helped transform attitudes to the family and sex in twentieth-century America.

Interpretation and Rationality

Although influential in philosophy and relevant to international political theory’s (IPT) key concerns, Donald Davidson has not received commensurate attention in IPT. I aim here to commence filling this gap. I explore Davidson’s insights which fruitfully challenge established disciplinary views. The notions of rationality, objectivity and truth, and, on the other hand, those of intersubjectivity, language and interpretation are often needlessly separated and constricted by seemingly alternative approaches. Davidson firmly reconnects these notions. He helps rethink the realist, strong post-positivist, but also liberal, ‘thin’ constructivist and critical (not thoroughly contextualist) approaches. He bridges the normative cosmopolitan–communitarian distinction. Eventually, Davidson laid foundations for a perspective foregrounding possibilities for rational communication and agreement between very different contexts and also for the non-dogmatic, pluralist and dynamic nature of communication itself.

The use of framing of affect or reason in communications in a services failure recovery scenario in education

The study of decision-making of people has its origins in economic theory, with a more rational approach. However, several studies have shown that decision-making follows also an emotional model. In great part, decisions are influenced by information we receive through communication framing. In education, students decisions are largely affected by the information they receive through communication issued by the service provider. In a scenario of service failure recovery the influence of emotional or rational messages is little studied. The motivation of this study is the absence of works relating attitudes to services when failure recovery occurs in higher education services, particularly when the framing of the communication signals some position to students, aiming to persuade them. The results showed that rational communication was more effective than emotional ones. It was also found that interpersonal influences tends to reduce positive responses from students to HEI communication strategy, though a moderation process.

Glitch

Glitches, formally artifacts of errors in electronic transmission like CD stutters or dead pixels, interrupt communication and distract audiences without wrecking the systems they occur in. Permanent irritants, they operate as irruptions of difference into the indifferent flux of commodity exchange. They reveal the exclusions, notably of noise, that enable rational communication, and the underpinning dependence of ostensibly unique items in semantic chains on their mutual indifference. Glitches are symbols whose nonhuman labor reveals the limits of humanism.