The Significance of Indeterminacy

The Significance of Indeterminacy PDF Author: Robert H. Scott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers—including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond—to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy’s impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science.

The Significance of Indeterminacy

The Significance of Indeterminacy PDF Author: Robert H. Scott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351383310
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Get Book Here

Book Description
While indeterminacy is a recurrent theme in philosophy, less progress has been made in clarifying its significance for various philosophical and interdisciplinary contexts. This collection brings together early-career and well-known philosophers—including Graham Priest, Trish Glazebrook, Steven Crowell, Robert Neville, Todd May, and William Desmond—to explore indeterminacy in greater detail. The volume is unique in that its essays demonstrate the positive significance of indeterminacy, insofar as indeterminacy opens up new fields of discourse and illuminates neglected aspects of various concepts and phenomena. The essays are organized thematically around indeterminacy’s impact on various areas of philosophy, including post-Kantian idealism, phenomenology, ethics, hermeneutics, aesthetics, and East Asian philosophy. They also take an interdisciplinary approach by elaborating the conceptual connections between indeterminacy and literature, music, religion, and science.

Indeterminacy and Society

Indeterminacy and Society PDF Author: Russell Hardin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691123926
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

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Book Description
In simple action theory, when people choose between courses of action, they know what the outcome will be. When an individual is making a choice "against nature," such as switching on a light, that assumption may hold true. But in strategic interaction outcomes, indeterminacy is pervasive and often intractable. Whether one is choosing for oneself or making a choice about a policy matter, it is usually possible only to make a guess about the outcome, one based on anticipating what other actors will do. In this book Russell Hardin asserts, in his characteristically clear and uncompromising prose, "Indeterminacy in contexts of strategic interaction . . . Is an issue that is constantly swept under the rug because it is often disruptive to pristine social theory. But the theory is fake: the indeterminacy is real." In the course of the book, Hardin thus outlines the various ways in which theorists from Hobbes to Rawls have gone wrong in denying or ignoring indeterminacy, and suggests how social theories would be enhanced--and how certain problems could be resolved effectively or successfully--if they assumed from the beginning that indeterminacy was the normal state of affairs, not the exception. Representing a bold challenge to widely held theoretical assumptions and habits of thought, Indeterminacy and Society will be debated across a range of fields including politics, law, philosophy, economics, and business management.

Indeterminacy

Indeterminacy PDF Author: Catherine Alexander
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 1789200105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
What happens to people, places and objects that do not fit the ordering regimes and progressive narratives of modernity? Conventional understandings imply that progress leaves such things behind, and excludes them as though they were valueless waste. This volume uses the concept of indeterminacy to explore how conditions of exclusion and abandonment may give rise to new values, as well as to states of despair and alienation. Drawing upon ethnographic research about a wide variety of contexts, the chapters here explore how indeterminacy is created and experienced in relationship to projects of classification and progress.

Quine on Meaning and the Significance of the Indeterminacy Thesis

Quine on Meaning and the Significance of the Indeterminacy Thesis PDF Author: Pak-Kiu Chow
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description


Indeterminacy and Society

Indeterminacy and Society PDF Author: Russell Hardin
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400848962
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 183

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Book Description
In simple action theory, when people choose between courses of action, they know what the outcome will be. When an individual is making a choice "against nature," such as switching on a light, that assumption may hold true. But in strategic interaction outcomes, indeterminacy is pervasive and often intractable. Whether one is choosing for oneself or making a choice about a policy matter, it is usually possible only to make a guess about the outcome, one based on anticipating what other actors will do. In this book Russell Hardin asserts, in his characteristically clear and uncompromising prose, "Indeterminacy in contexts of strategic interaction . . . Is an issue that is constantly swept under the rug because it is often disruptive to pristine social theory. But the theory is fake: the indeterminacy is real." In the course of the book, Hardin thus outlines the various ways in which theorists from Hobbes to Rawls have gone wrong in denying or ignoring indeterminacy, and suggests how social theories would be enhanced--and how certain problems could be resolved effectively or successfully--if they assumed from the beginning that indeterminacy was the normal state of affairs, not the exception. Representing a bold challenge to widely held theoretical assumptions and habits of thought, Indeterminacy and Society will be debated across a range of fields including politics, law, philosophy, economics, and business management.

Construing Experience Through Meaning

Construing Experience Through Meaning PDF Author: M.A.K. Halliday
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441131736
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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Book Description
The subject of this book is how human beings construe their experience of the world. The construction of experience is usually thought of as knowledge, represented in the form of conceptual taxonomies, schemata, scripts and the like. The authors offer an interpretation that is complementary to this, treating experience not as knowing but as meaning; and hence as something that is construed in language. In other words, the concern is with the construal of human experience as a semantic system; and since language plays the central role not only in storing and exchanging experience but also in construing it, language is taken as the interpretative base. The focus of the book is both theoretical and descriptive. The authors consider it important that theory and description should develop in parallel, with constant interchange between the two. The major descriptive component is an account of the most general features of the ideational semantics of English, which is then exemplified in two familiar text types (recipes and weather forecasts). There is also a brief reference to the semantics of Chinese. Theoretical issues are raised throughout as they become relevant to the discussion, with the theoretical base being drawn from systemic functional linguistics. Both the theoretical and descriptive proposals offered in the book are compared and contrasted with approaches deriving from AI, cognitive science and cognitive linguistics.

The Significance of Aspect Perception

The Significance of Aspect Perception PDF Author: Avner Baz
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030386252
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
In this volume, Baz offers a wide-ranging discussion of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect-perception, with special focus on Wittgenstein’s method. Baz starts out with an interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects and continues with attempts to characterize and defend Wittgenstein’s approach to the understanding and dissolution of philosophical difficulties. Baz ends with attempts to articulate—under the inspiration of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology—certain dissatisfactions, both with Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspect perception, and with his philosophical approach more generally. On the way, Baz explores connections between Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects and Kant’s aesthetics. He examines ways in which the remarks on aspects may be brought to bear on contemporary philosophical work on perception. He discusses some of the implications of Wittgenstein’s work on aspect perception for issues in moral philosophy and the philosophy of action.

James Joyce's Negations

James Joyce's Negations PDF Author: Brian Cosgrove
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
The main purpose of this book is to validate a reading of Joyce in negative terms. Central to the enquiry is an examination of the roles of irony and of indeterminacy. Irony, interpreted in metaphysical rather than merely rhetorical terms, is envisaged as deriving from two separate if related orientations, one associated with Friedrich Schlegel, the other with Gustave Flaubert. Insofar as Joyce's work (including "Ulysses") owes more to the latter than the former, it forgoes the genial humour central to Schlegel's theories, and embraces instead the ironic detachment and formal control of a Flaubertian perspective. Such irony (which entails a suspicion of sentiment and a related dehumanisation of character, as in some of the stories in Dubliners) becomes normative in Joyce, and along with a similarly deflationary parody pervades "Ulysses". In addition, a persistent indeterminacy is established as early as 'The Dead', so that it becomes impossible in that story to adjudicate between not just contradictory but mutually exclusive interpretations. Such indeterminacy is pushed to further extremes in "Ulysses", with its notorious proliferation of narrative perspectives.As a corollary to the work's encyclopaedic inclusiveness and quotidian particularism, every detail tends to assume the same significance as every other; the consequence being that (in Gyorgy Lukacs' famous formulation) we lose all sense of any 'hierarchy of meaning'. From that it is but a step to Franco Moretti's assessment that in "Ulysses" everyday existence remains 'inert, opaque - meaningless', and that in fact the whole point is to represent the meaningless precisely 'as meaningless'. Indeterminacy, in effect, ushers in the possibility of nihilism. The analysis of "Ulysses" culminates with the attempt (unavailing in both cases) to discover in either Bloom or Molly a genuine source of countervailing affirmation. The study concludes with a brief consideration of the polysemic vocabulary of "Finnegans Wake" as a logical extrapolation of the poetics of indeterminacy.

Truth and the Absence of Fact

Truth and the Absence of Fact PDF Author: Hartry Field
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199241716
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
Hartry Field presents a selection of thirteen essays on a set of related topics at the foundations of philosophy; one essay is previously unpublished, and eight are accompanied by substantial new postscripts.Five of the essays are primarily about truth, meaning, and propositional attitudes, five are primarily about semantic indeterminacy and other kinds of 'factual defectiveness' in our discourse, and three are primarily about issues concerning objectivity, especially in mathematics and in epistemology. The essays on truth, meaning, and the attitudes show a development from a form of correspondence theory of truth and meaning to a more deflationist perspective.The next set of papers argue that a place must be made in semantics for the idea that there are questions about which there is no fact of the matter, and address the difficulties involved in making sense of this, both within a correspondence theory of truth and meaning, and within a deflationary theory. Two papers argue that there are questions in mathematics about which there is no fact of the mattter, and draw out implications of this for the nature of mathematics. And the final paper arguesfor a view of epistemology in which it is not a purely fact-stating enterprise.This influential work by a key figure in contemporary philosophy will reward the attention of any philosopher interested in language, epistemology, or mathematics.

Shepard's and Pirandello's Selected Works as Indeterminate Texts: A poststructuralist Study

Shepard's and Pirandello's Selected Works as Indeterminate Texts: A poststructuralist Study PDF Author: Mehdi Sepehrmanesh
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3656247692
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
Thesis (M.A.) from the year 2011 in the subject Philosophy - Theoretical (Realisation, Science, Logic, Language), grade: none, , language: English, abstract: After the World Wars, a sense of skepticism and indeterminacy towards the objective reality and truth, thought to be attained by the heritage of modernity, became an obsession for the thinkers and philosophers questioning the nature of truth. The present study is an attempt to trace the notion of indeterminacy in the plays of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author and It Is So! and Sam Shepard's True West and Buried Child from the point of view of poststructuralist philosophers, namely Derrida, Paul de Man, Nietzsche and theories of modern Physics (Einstein's relativity and quantum physics). To achieve this purpose, a thorough investigation of the plays through the lens of indeterminacy has been conducted. The first focus is Derrida's two notions, Differance and binary oppositions. Differance reflects on the deferment of meaning; and his idea of binary oppositions concentrates on the fact that of the two sides of oppositions neither side has privilege over the other side since a part of meaning exists in the opposite one and they get their meaning from each other. Furthermore, de Man's rhetoric, pointing to the figurative nature of language, which causes the meaning to delay; Nietzsche's view of truth, having a mobile stance; and the theories of modern physics, with regard to Einstein's relativity and indeterminacy extant in quantum mechanics, have been approached. Through the application of these ideas, it is proved that neither Pirandello's nor Shepard's have fixed meanings; rather, they always grant floating meanings that never reach a definite signified. Characters of the plays have an indeterminate natures changing from one type of personality to another one. Moreover, it is seen that how the concept of relativity is working through the play causing different characters to have the same view of the same event regarding reality and truth.