Author: Robert Schwartz
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429581394
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 277
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Book Description
For a good part of the 20th century, the classic Pragmatists—Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey—and pragmatism in general were largely ignored by analytic philosophers. They were said to hold such untenable views as whatever best satisfies our needs is true and that the end justifies the means. Despite a recent revival of interest in these figures, spurred largely by the work of Richard Rorty, it is not uncommon to continue to hear claims that pragmatism is a subjectivist, anti-realist position that denies that there is a mind-independent world, and fails to place objective constraints on inquiry. In this book, Robert Schwartz dispels these traditional views by examining the empiricist and constructivist orientation of the classic pragmatists. Based on updated and expanded versions of his influential papers, as well as a number of previously unpublished essays, in this book Schwartz demonstrates the relevance of pragmatic thought to a wide range of issues beyond concerns over truth and realism that currently dominate discussions. The individual essays elaborate and defend pragmatic, instrumentalist, and constructivist conceptions of truth and inquiry, moral discourse and ethical statements, perception, art, and worldmaking. Pragmatic Perspectives will appeal to scholars interested in the history of American philosophy and pragmatic approaches to contemporary issues in analytic philosophy.
Author: Mirjam Fried
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027207836
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
The ten volumes of the "Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights" focus on the most salient topics in the field of pragmatics, thus dividing its wide interdisciplinary spectrum in a transparent and manageable way. While the other volumes select specific philosophical, cognitive, grammatical, cultural, interactional, or discursive angles, this sixth volume focuses on the dynamic aspects of language and reviews the relevant developments in variationist and diachronic scholarship. The areas explored in the volume concern several general themes: specific methodological approaches, from comparative reconstruction to evolutionary pragmatics; issues in intra-lingual variation in terms of standard and non-standard varieties; cross-linguistic variation, including its cross-cultural dimension; and the study of diachronic relations across linguistic patterns, including changes in all areas of pragmatic patterns and categories. The contributions document two prominent and interrelated trends that shape contemporary variationist and diachronic research. One, it has moved from situating change within context-independent systems toward incorporating patterns of language use and the speaker s role in language change. And two, it has reoriented its focus away from cataloguing instances of variation and toward seeking theoretically informed accounts that aim at "explaining" variation and change. On the whole, the volume argues for accepting and developing actively a systematic connection between research in diachrony, synchronic variation, and typology, while also incorporating the socio-cognitive perspective in linguistic analysis as a particularly promising source of useful methodology and explanatory models."
Author: Ondrej Svec
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1315453886
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 271
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Book Description
This collection offers complex analysis of the pragmatic theses that are present in the works of leading phenomenologists, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. It will be of interest to scholars of phenomenology who are interested in moving beyond the analytic-continental divide to explore the relationship between practice and theory.
Author: Jef Verschueren
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027250065
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 852
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Book Description
This volume contains a selection of reviewed and revised papers, originally presented at the International Pragmatics Conference held in Viareggio, Italy, 1 5 September 1985.
Author: Adam Jaworski
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 0803949677
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 208
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Book Description
This book provides a theoretical account of a variety of different communicative aspects of silence and explores new ways of studying socially-motivated language. A research overview shows the influence of related work in the fields of media studies, politics, gender studies, aesthetics and literature. The author argues that in theoretically pragmatic terms, silence can be accounted for by the same principles as those of speech. A later, more applied section of the book explores the power of silencing in politics. A concluding chapter shows the importance of silence beyond linguistics and politics in terms of artistic expression. The approach is intentionally eclectic in order to explore the concept of silence as a rich and
Author: Christoph Schubert
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443896853
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280
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Book Description
In sociolinguistic research on Englishes world-wide, little has been published on the pragmatics of postcolonial varieties. This interdisciplinary volume closes this research gap by providing integrative investigations of postcolonial discourses, probing the interstices between linguistic methodologies and literary text analysis. The literary texts under discussion are conceptualized as media both reflecting and creating reality, so that they provide valuable insights into postcolonial discourse phenomena. The contributions deal with the issue of how postcolonial Englishes, such as those spoken in India, Nigeria, South Africa and the Caribbean, have produced different pragmatic conventions in a complex interplay of culture-specific and global linguistic practices. They show the ways in which hybrid communicative situations based on ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity result in similarly hybrid social and communicative routines. The central pragmatic paradigms discussed here include im/politeness, speech act conventions, conversational maxims, deixis, humour, code-switching and -mixing, Othering, and linguistic exclusion.
Author: Daniel Silva
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027265224
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258
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Book Description
This book combines scholarship in pragmatics, linguistic anthropology, and philosophy to address the problem of violence in language. How do words wound? What is the relation between physical and linguistic violence? How do racial invectives, misogynous language, homophobic slurs, among other forms of hate speech, affect the body and make us vulnerable to conditions of injurability that language brings about? While investigating the limits that violence poses for everyday speech action, understanding, representation, and our shared frameworks of intelligibility, this collective volume theoretically bridges knowledge from canons in linguistic pragmatics, continental philosophy and linguistic/semiotic anthropology and the dialogic perspective of subjects who are located in the peripheries of South America and Europe. The scholarship gathered here intends to offer a perspective on the violence of words that is attentive to practices and sensibilities that do not always fit into hegemonic ideologies of self and language.
Author: David Torres Irribarra
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030740250
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 96
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Book Description
This book aims to address the challenges of defining measurement in social sciences, presenting a conceptualization of the practice of measurement from the perspective of the pragmatic tradition in philosophy. The book reviews key questions regarding the scope and limits of measurement, emphasizing that if the trust that the public places on measures in the social sciences relies on their connection to the notion of measurement in the physical sciences, then the clarification of the similarities and differences between measurement in the physical and the social realms is of central importance to adequately contextualize their relative advantages and limitations. It goes on to present some of the most influential theories of measurement such as the “classical view” of measurement, operationalism, and the representational theory of measurement, as well as more methodological perspectives arising from the practice of researchers in the social sciences, such as the latent variable perspective, and from the physical sciences and engineering, represented by metrology. This overview illustrates that the concept of measurement, and that of quantitative methods, is currently being used across the board in ways that do not necessarily conform to traditional, classical definitions of measurement, pushing the boundaries of what constitutes our technical understanding of it. Moreover, what constitutes a technical understanding of measurement, and the theoretical commitments that it entails, must vary in different areas. In this context, disagreement on what is constitutive of measurement is bound to appear. Pragmatism is presented as a theoretical perspective that offers the advantage of being flexible and fallibilist, encouraging us to abandon the pursuit of a timeless and perfect definition that attempts to establish decontextualized/definitive demarcation criteria for what is truly measurement. This book will be of particular interest for psychologists and other human and social scientists, and more concretely for scholars interested in measurement and assessment in psychological and social measurement. The pragmatic perspective of measurement presents a conceptual framework for researchers to ground their assessment practices acknowledging and dealing with the challenges of social measurement.
Author: Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443845655
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
Pragmatics of Semantically-Restricted Domains, the second volume of Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics, edited by Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka, gathers papers which partly complement and develop the first volume, Speech Actions in Theory and Applied Studies (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010). Most of the texts collected in this book, representative of advanced independent research and that of an informed exercise in the application of a pragmatic framework, result from the Fourth Symposium on “New Developments in Linguistic Pragmatics,” organized at the University of Łódź, Poland, in May 2008. Accepting the inevitable failure of any attempt to pose a strict and clear-cut division between the research area of semantics and that of pragmatics, the volume focuses on pragmatics-oriented analyses of data which are best described as “semantically” limited. While Volume One concentrated on speech as a type of action, the present volume, without denying the inherently actional nature of language use, concentrates on limited contexts. Pragmatic phenomena in semantically-restricted domains are addressed from a variety of both theoretical and applied perspectives. The book is divided in three parts. Part One, “Pragmatics, Politics and Ideology,” gathers seven papers centered on issues pertaining to political linguistics. In Part Two, “The Pragmatics of Humour, Power and the Media,” there are eight papers which explore issues of politeness and modesty, pragmatic aspects of mediated and gendered discourse, or dynamicity of power relation in interaction. Part Three, “Focus on Textual Properties,” concentrates on text, excluding political discourse. It integrates discussions of equivalence and specialized translation, intertextual properties and pragmatically-motivated lexical choices in business communication, in law, and in science.
Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Pre
ISBN: 0822970589
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 265
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Book Description
In Cognitive Pragmatism, Nicholas Rescher tackles the major questions of philosophical inquiry, pondering the nature of truth and existence. In the authoritative voice and calculated manner that we've come to expect from this distinguished philosopher, Rescher argues that the development of knowledge is a practice, pursued by humans because we have a need for its products. This pragmatic approach satisfies our innate urge as humans to make sense of our surroundings.Taking his discussion down to the level of particular details, and addressing such topics as inductive validation, hypostatization fallacies, and counterfactual reasoning, Rescher abandons abstract generalities in favor of concrete specifics. For example, philosophers usually insist that to reason logically from a counterfactual, we must imagine a possible world in which the statement is fact. But Rescher argues that there's no need to attempt to accept the facts of a world outside our cognition in order to reason from them. He shows us how we can use our own natural system of prioritizing, our own understanding of the fundamental, to resolve the inconsistencies in such statements as, "If the Eiffel Tower were in Manhattan, then it would be in New York State." In using dozens of real-world examples such as these, and in arguing in his characteristically succinct style, Rescher casts light on a wide variety of concrete issues in the classical theory of knowledge, and reassures us along the way that the inherent limitations on our knowledge are no cause for distress. In pragmatic theory and inquiry, we must accept that the best we can do is good enough, because we only have a certain (albeit large) set of tools and conceptualizations available to us.A unique synthesis, this endeavor into pragmatic epistemology will be of interest to scholars and students of philosophy and cognitive science.
