Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution of language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate communication research should be “pragmatics, the field of linguistics that examines the role of context in shaping the meaning of linguistic utterances”. After distinguishing two different conceptions of pragmatics that advocates of the pragmatics-first approach have implicitly relied on, I argue that neither conception adequately serves the purposes of pragmatics-first approaches to the origins of human (...) linguistic communication. My main aim in this paper is to motivate–and begin to articulate–an intermediary conception whose scope is narrower than Carnapian pragmatics but broader than Gricean pragmatics. To do so, I first spell out what I take to be the key insight offered by proponents of the Gricean approach concerning the emergence of linguistic communication, namely, its being communication ‘from a psychological point of view’. I then develop this insight using key elements from the anti-Gricean ‘biosemantic’ account of linguistic communication due to Ruth Millikan, Philosophical Perspectives 9, Ridgeview Publishing, Atascedero CA, 1995, Millikan R Varieties of Meaning. Mass.: The MIT Press, Cambridge, Millikan, Beyond concepts: unicepts, language, and natural information, Oxford University Press, Oxford UK, 2017, and elsewhere). I argue that the intermediary pragmatics-first approach that I propose, which draws on both Gricean and Millikanian resources, would be better equipped to serve the purposes of those who search for potential precursors of human linguistic communication in animal communication. (shrink)

What I call “Rorty’s Dilemma” has us caught between the Scylla of Cartesian Dualism and the Charybdis of eliminativism about the mental. Proper recognition of what is distinctively mental requires accommodating incorrigibility about our mental states, something Rorty thinks materialists cannot do. So we must either countenance mental states over and above physical states in our ontology, or else give up altogether on the mental as a distinct category. In section 2, “Materialist Introspectionism—Independence and Epistemic Authority”, I review reasons for (...) being dissatisfied with materialist introspectionism as a way out of the dilemma. In section 3, “Constitutivism”, I outline two constitutivist alternatives to materialist introspectionism. In section 4, “A Neo-Expressivist View”, I offer my neo-expressivist view (defended in Bar-On, Speaking my mind: Expression and self-knowledge. Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2004 ), according to which the distinctive status of mental self-ascriptions is to be explained by appeal to the expressive character of acts of issuing them (in speech or in thought). This view, I argue, allows us to stay clear of eliminativism without committing to Cartesian substance dualism, thereby offering a viable way of slipping between the horns of Rorty’s dilemma. (shrink)

Discussions on the right to privacy usually involve persons in the Lockean sense. However, psychological properties that make up the person can be lost due to neurodegenerative diseases, cerebral tumors or trauma. Depending on the severity of the disease or the trauma the patient may end up in PVS or a coma. In this article the privacy rights of these patients will be discussed. In light of two examples − the publication of photographs showing Bülent Ecevit and Barış Akarsu in (...) a coma − it will be argued that the privacy rights secured by the Turkish Constitution are being violated by the Turkish Press. (shrink)

This book joins a small number of efforts in the last decade to present the complex scientific issues of geomagnetism to a broader, semi-technical audience. The author approaches this goal more closely than most scientists and science writers. He specifically eschews mathematical equations knowing that even one equation leads some readers to give up trying. He offers instead a mix of description and story-telling, the former directed at phenomena and procedures, the latter drawn mostly from personal experience.As Merrill notes, his (...) wife insisted that he “explain the material in a way she could understand it” (vii). A virtue of this is an enforced candor often obscured by mathematics, even in semi-popular accounts. This is most clear in addressing fundamental questions, such as when he asks what produces the magnetic field of magnets. In a paragraph that begins with a simple bar magnet, the author successively halves the magnet until he has only an electron remaining. This he calls a po. (shrink)

In examining the visual culture of Victorian London during the years 1855–1870, Lynda Nead in her book Victorian Babylon explores the difficult and restless narrative of modernization that any of us who have read D. G. Rossetti's “The Burden of Nineveh” will recognize as crucial to the Victorian imagination. As Nead promptly establishes, Babylon for the Victorians was a trope evoking gain and loss, triumph and hubris, future and past ruination. Taking this ancient city as her titular image, then, Nead (...) aims to rearticulate urbanism and modernity, indeed challenging us to reconceive what we mean by “modernity.” Positioning her own arguments against the influential architectonics of Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts into Air and favoring instead the writings of Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau, Nead recasts modernity as an “untidy experience,” a “constant struggle with history” . Near her book's end, Nead provocatively claims: “Ruin is the resolution of the contradictory impulses of modernity” .Victorian Babylon explores the spaces of mid‐Victorian London and, more important, the experience of inhabiting those very spaces. This textual tour is divided tidily into three sections: a first on mapping and water, a second devoted to gas and light, and a third on obscenity, which Nead calls “improvement's other” . As Nead herself claims about the metropolitan travel literature she examines, her book speaks well to the eye. Victorian Babylon is a vicarious tour of London thanks to Nead's deft and abundant use of fresh images, which she has culled assiduously from private collections, archives, and especially illustrated nineteenth‐century periodicals. Her study thus takes us to fascinating places: readers travel along with John Hollingshead on his journey down to London's sewers; we are invited into Joseph Paxton's dreamscape of the Great Victorian Way; and we play for a night at Cremorne Pleasure Gardens, witnessing Madame Poitevin's balloon ride. We hesitantly enter the haunted and obscene Holywell Street.The catalogic abundance of Victorian Babylon works both to Nead's advantage and disadvantage. Surely the sheer range of Nead's material proves her points about the frenzy and incomprehensibility of modernity and the promiscuity of Victorian commercial culture. But invariably the variety of topics results in too much cursory analysis—a paragraph on photography followed by a paragraph on the International Health Exhibition; brief excursions into the realms of advertising, illustrated sheet music, and music halls. Subsequently, a reader might grow eager instead for book‐length studies of these issues. Yet the most egregious omission of an adequate treatment is the two‐page cursory overview of the picturesque. Here, Nead misses an opportunity to offer a more extended, theoretical treatment of the “metropolitan picturesque” and how this aesthetic category relates—or not—to the other psycho‐aesthetic touchstones for her work, which are the sublime and the urban uncanny. One might also rue the absence of an extended treatment of the relic versus the ruin at the book's close.The analysis of the book does grow stronger as it unfolds. The Cremorne Gardens in the second section make for interesting reading, and Nead is best at discussing London at night, the uncanny, and what she calls a poetics of gas. The final section on obscenity is most promising, for here the Babylonic polyphony of Victorian London—what Nead calls the twin mission, to build and destroy—hits the reader with full force. One might wish that Nead had spent a bit more time on obscenity before extending her treatment to the more symbolic, architectural expression of obscenity‐cum‐obsolescence, the Temple Bar. However, the fate of the Temple Bar is nicely evocative of the ruin and, thus, takes the reader full circle back to the ambiguities of modernity. (shrink)

Having lived in Rita Caccamo's Rome and other Italian cities for long periods, I was intrigued by Arthur J. Vidich's foreword, which notes the sociologist Caccamo's Roman background and hence her ability to see Middletown as an anthropologist might, from “the perspective of an ‘other’”—a position, he explains, very different from that of Robert S. and Helen M. Lynd, who made Muncie, Indiana, famous in their 1929 and 1937 studies. There are hints of that perspective in these pages. In the (...) preface to this edition, Caccamo remarks on the sense of alienation she felt while living in Muncie as she worked in the archives; and in a very brief concluding chapter, “The Nineties in Middletown,” she suggests that Muncie suffers, like the rest of the country, from “the lack of cumulative experience” of the sort that Rome has plenty of. But that's about it for anthropology and the “other,” at least on the surface. “We European scholars,” she writes, “need to look at these phenomena without our European points of reference” .What stands out in this assessment of Middletown , Middletown in Transition , and Theodore H. Caplow's late‐1970s investigation is Caccamo's deep affinity with the Lynds' radical, pessimistic argument: that Middletown's community life was rapidly being eroded by limited economic mobility and, especially, by a consumer culture that increasingly valued money and the things it would buy above all else—and that Munsonians, in the grip of a power elite and overwhelmed by mass culture, were helpless to do anything about it. Although Caccamo sees weaknesses in the Lynds' schema—a simplistic two‐class model, a lack of attention to immigrants and outsiders, the failure to appreciate the adventurousness that comes with modernity, little recognition of the potential of Muncie's residents to challenge and resist power—none of these arguments is pursued with much conviction. Instead, she presents the Lynds as part of a larger group of interwar sociologists who understood the American experience very well. By the same token, she takes Caplow's “Middletown III” to task for its unwarranted optimism about family life, religion, class, and other matters. In a final assessment, she underscores Muncie's obsessions with privacy and marriage and disregard for single people. Caccamo believes that late twentieth‐century Muncie manifests the same maladies that the Lynds uncovered some seventy years ago.Those familiar with the literature on Middletown will not, I suspect, find much that is new here, except perhaps for an extensive discussion of the Lynds' controversial dependence on, and use of, the work of Lynn Perrigo for their chapter “The X Family” in the 1937 volume. What they will find is part biography, part history of sociology, part polemic: an effort to understand the Lynds as “committed intellectuals” and to appreciate what it was they found so repugnant about life in a city they had decided was typical of the American experience. That Caccamo succeeds so well has much to do with what some may see as an uncritical acceptance of Marxist theory and Frankfurt school arguments about the mass media that underpinned or reinforced the Lynds' work, but much to do also with the outsider Caccamo's Rome, whose coffee bars, neighborhoods, and vibrant streets bear witness to what Muncie once was, and could have been. (shrink)