Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is "occasion-sensitivity": what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties (...) thoughts less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a partition semantics for sentences containing objective predicates that takes into account the phenomenon of occasion-sensitivity associated with so-called Travis cases. The key idea is that the set of worlds in which a sentence is true has a more complex structure as a result of different ways in which it is made true. Different ways may have different capacities to support the attainment of a contextually salient domain goal. I suggest that goal-conduciveness decides (...) whether some utterance of a sentence is accepted as true on a particular occasion at a given world. The utterance will not be accepted as true at a world which belongs to a truth-maker which is less conducive to a contextually salient goal than other truth-makers. Finally, the proposed occasion-sensitive semantics is applied to some cases of disagreement and cancellability. (shrink)

On the most common interpretation of occasion-sensitivity what varies cross-contextually is the truth-conditional content of representations. Jerry Fodor argues that when extended to mental representation this view has some problematic consequences. In this paper I outline an approach to occasion-sensitivity which circumvents Fodor’s objections but still maintains that the aspect of thought that guides deliberation and action is occasion-sensitive. On the proposed view, what varies cross-contextually are not truth conditions but rather the conditions for accepting (...) a representation as true relative to a practical goal that is pursued on an occasion. I show that although the proposal entails an error theory this theory is not problematic since it is meant to compensate for the over-generating nature of semantic competence, namely, the fact that not all of the representation’s truth-makers are conducive to a given contextually salient goal. (shrink)

In the literature on linguistic context-sensitivity, a recurrent move has been made with the intention of attacking Charles Travis's occasion-sensitivity. The move is to provide a semantic analysis of the meaning of an expression which makes the content of that expression context sensitive but without providing any reason to think that the meaning of the expression is a character. I argue that this move is off-target. Such proposals are entirely consistent with occasion-sensitivity and so don't (...) constitute an attack on it. (shrink)

This is not a critical review of Travis' book. It's an attempt to summarize the key thesis (occasion-sensitivity) in a way that makes the book accessible and distinguishes it from similar looking theses (such as relevance theory and truth-conditional pragmatics).

In endorsing a conventionalism about the rules of sport, Morgan fails (according to his critics) to ground the normativity of such rules, especially once the historical specificity of their invention and implementation is granted. But how can normativity be grounded in the contingencies of the sporting practices of particular times and places? In particular, do Morgan’s concerns with dependence on ‘conventions’ flow only from the choice of options apparently on offer: roughly the choice between a realism (to reflect ‘facts of (...) the matter’) and a conventionalism in the ‘norm-based’ version that I urge is misguided. Exploring some of the variety of occasions for the operation of normativity in sporting contexts, and acknowledging their occasion-sensitivity, shows this to be a false dichotomy. In this light, the paper elaborates a Morgan-style conclusion by drawing a parallel with language-use to conclude that rule-following in sport has all the grounding it could get—and that, as with normativity for language-use, this is all the grounding one needs. (shrink)

A continuous Oxford tradition on knowledge runs from John Cook Wilson to John McDowell. A central idea is that knowledge is not a species of belief, or that, in McDowell's terms, it is not a hybrid state; that, moreover, it is a kind of taking in of what is there that precludes one's being, for all one can see, wrong. Cook Wilson and McDowell differ on what this means as to the scope of knowledge. J.L. Austin set out the requisite (...) foundations for McDowell to be right. McDowell has shown why the tradition, and his version of it, need to be right. But he does not accept Austin's innovation. That is a shame. For, despite McDowell's very great insightfulness, precisely that much separates him from a very powerful, and correct, view of what knowledge is. (shrink)

This chapter provides some tentative conclusions about the likely linguistic status of context‐sensitive semantic properties. It argues that pragmatism is fully aligned with a standard approach to syntax, and should be the default view of the notion of a linguistic 'context', viz., context is not a well‐behaved linguistic notion. But rather a potentially open‐ended way of marking the role extra‐linguistic factors can play in fixing what is said on an occasion of the use of a linguistic type. Context (...) class='Hi'>sensitivity is not restricted to the construal of overt linguistic material. It also appears that the construal of tokens of many constructions depends upon contextual factors that are not explicitly encoded in linguistic material; that is, if pronouns are explicit variables, then there appear to be implicit or covert variables as well. Truth‐value of a sentence in context is assigned relative to the value a coordinate of the index takes under the scope of the operator. (shrink)

According to cognitivist truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence, aspects of our linguistic behavior can be explained by ascribing to speakers cognition of truth theories. It's generally assumed on this approach that, however much context sensitivity speakers' languages contain, the cognized truththeories themselves can be adequately characterized context insensitively—that is, without using in the metalanguage expressions whose semantic value can vary across occasions of utterance. In this paper, I explore some of the motivations for and problems and consequences of dropping (...) this assumption. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that there are good motivations for a relativist account of the domain-sensitivity of quantifier phrases. I will frame the problem as a puzzle involving what looks like a logically valid inference, yet one whose premises are true while the conclusion is false. After discussing some existing accounts, literalist and contextualist, I will present and argue for an account that may be said to be relativist in the following sense: (i) a domain of quantification is (...) required for determining truth value, but is idle in determining semantic content, and (ii) the same sentence, as used on one and the same occasion, may receive different truth values relative to different domains. (shrink)

This volume contains the invited lectures and a selection of the contributed papers and posters of the workshop on "Fluctuations and Sensitivity in Nonequil ibrium Systems", held at the Joe C. Thompson Conference Center, Un i vers ity of Texas at Austin, March 12-16, 1984. The workshop dealt with stochastic phenomena and sensi­ tivity in nonequilibrium systems from a macroscopic point of view. Durin9 the last few years it has been realized that the role of fluctuations is far less (...) trivial in systems far from equilibrium than in systems under thermodynamic equilibrium condi­ tions. It was found that random fluctuations often are a determining factor for the state adopted by macroscopic systems and cannot be regarded as secondary effects of minor importance. Further, nonequilibrium systems are also very sensitive to small systematic changes in their environment. The main aims of the workshop were: i) to provide scientists with an occasion to acquaint themselves with the state of the art in fluctuation theory and sensitivity analysis; ii) to provide a forum for the presentation of recent advances in theory and experiment; iii) to bring toge­ ther theoreticians and experimentalists in order to delineate the major open problems and to formulate strategies to tackle these problems. The organizing committee of the workshop consisted of W. Horsthemke, O. K. Konde­ pudi, G. Dewel, G. Nicolis, I. Prigogine and L. Reichl. (shrink)

The aim of this Swedish study was to develop the concept of moral sensitivity in health care practice. This process began with an overview of relevant theories and perspectives on ethics with a focus on moral sensitivity and related concepts, in order to generate a theoretical framework. The second step was to construct a questionnaire based on this framework by generating a list of items from the theoretical framework. Nine items were finally selected as most appropriate and consistent (...) with the research team’s understanding of the concept of moral sensitivity. The items were worded as assumptions related to patient care. The questionnaire was distributed to two groups of health care personnel on two separate occasions and a total of 278 completed questionnaires were returned. A factor analysis identified three factors: sense of moral burden, moral strength and moral responsibility. These seem to be conceptually interrelated yet indicate that moral sensitivity may involve more dimensions than simply a cognitive capacity, particularly, feelings, sentiments, moral knowledge and skills. (shrink)

Although applications are being developed and have reached the market, nanopharmacy to date is generally still conceived as an emerging technology. Its concept is ill-defined. Nanopharmacy can also be construed as a converging technology, which combines features of multiple technologies, ranging from nanotechnology to medicine and ICT. It is still debated whether its features give rise to new ethical issues or that issues associated with nanopharma are merely an extension of existing issues in the underlying fields. We argue here that, (...) regardless of the alleged newness of the ethical issues involved, developments occasioned by technological advances affect the roles played by stakeholders in the field of nanopharmacy to such an extent that this calls for a different approach to responsible innovation in this field. Specific features associated with nanopharmacy itself and features introduced to the associated converging technologies- bring about a shift in the roles of stakeholders that call for a different approach to responsibility. We suggest that Value Sensitive Design is a suitable framework to involve stakeholders in addressing moral issues responsibly at an early stage of development of new nanopharmaceuticals. (shrink)

When are the meanings of two utterances the same? And how, if at all, could we determine this sameness? In this paper I take a look at the contextualist answer of Hilary Putnam and Charles Travis. One characteristic trait of Hilary Putnam's conception of meaning is what he calls 'semantic externalism' and what I shall label 'public semantics' to avoid confusion with the topological or what I call 'locational' connotation of externalism in other contexts:1 the meaning of a word and (...) the full meaning/sense of a sentence or utterance are not determined by some private mental state(s) of the speaker but are determined by the use of words on an occasion or in a saying. According to Hilary Putnam and Charles Travis (both elaborating on Wittgenstein's discussions in his Philosophical Investigations), the varieties of such situational uses or occasions, the varieties of public semantics, can themselves not be described or determined once and for all. It is therefore not possible to reduce or absorb each and every pragmatic aspect into semantics. That means that semantics is essentially open and questions as to the sameness of meaning or sense of utterances cannot be answered independently of a pragmatic approach. Travis extends this diagnosis in his most recent book {Unshadowed Thought) to thought, beliefs and attitudes: no one thought, attitude or belief can be individuated independently of relevant situational aspects, these including, among others, acts in accord with, say, an attitude on some occasion or other. The approach pursued here claims that pragmatics is in either of these areas unavoidable and genuine. It cannot be explained away or be re-absorbed into semantics or epistemology.2 This has important consequences for what it means to do philosophy, as can be seen in Putnam's arguments as to the unintelligibility of various philosophical positions. (shrink)

I argue, in this thesis, that proper name reference is a wholly pragmatic phenomenon. The reference of a proper name is neither constitutive of, nor determined by, the semantic content of that name, but is determined, on an occasion of use, by pragmatic factors. The majority of views in the literature on proper name reference claim that reference is in some way determined by the semantics of the name, either because their reference simply constitutes their semantics (which generally requires (...) a very fine-grained individuation of names), or because names have an indexical-like semantics that returns a referent given certain specific contextual parameters. I discuss and criticize these views in detail, arguing, essentially, in both cases, that there can be no determinate criteria for reference determination—a claim required by both types of semantic view. I also consider a less common view on proper name reference: that it is determined wholly by speakers’ intentions. I argue that the most plausible version of this view—a strong neo-Gricean position whereby all utterance content is determined by the communicative intentions of the speaker—is implausible in light of psychological data. In the positive part of my thesis, I develop a pragmatic view of proper name reference that is influenced primarily by the work of Charles Travis. I argue that the reference of proper names can only be satisfactorily accounted for by claiming that reference occurs not at the level of word meaning, but at the pragmatic level, on an occasion of utterance. I claim that the contextual mechanisms that determine the reference of a name on an occasion are the same kinds of thing that determine the truth-values of utterances according to Travis. Thus, names are, effectively, occasion sensitive in the way that Travis claims predicates and sentences (amongst other expressions) are. Finally, I discuss how further research might address how my pragmatic view of reference affects traditional issues in the literature on names, and the consequences of the view for the semantics of names. (shrink)

In this critical notice we review Bozickovic's recent attempt to settle two interrelated issues: (i) the issue of the cognitive significance of indexical thoughts expressed at a time in the face of difficulties posed by cases in which the subject either mistakes two objects for one or one for two different objects; (ii) that of the cognitive dynamics of temporal indexical thoughts in the face of difficulties posed by cases in which the belief seems to be retained while the proper (...) adjustments fail to be made (that is, in cases such as Rip Van Winkle's). We argue that, despite its elegance and merits, the proposal falls short of accounting for the problematic cases in their full complexity. For one thing, the intended non-modal construal of Frege's Criterion of Difference promoted by Bozickovic does not block, in our view, the "proliferation" of senses brought about by the occasion-sensitivity of the individuation of demonstrative thoughts. For another, the proposal fails to appreciate the need for the subject to have an adequate conception of the object of her thought when it comes to orienting herself in space and time. That being so, we conclude that neither (i) nor (ii) is settled. (shrink)

Odd and memorable examples are a distinctive feature of Charles Travis's work: cases involving squash balls, soot-covered kettles, walls that emit poison gas, faces turning puce, ties made of freshly cooked linguine, and people grunting when punched in the solar plexus all figure in his arguments. One of Travis's examples, involving a pair of situations in which the leaves of a Japanese maple tree are painted green, has even spawned its own literature consisting of attempts to explain the context (...) class='Hi'>sensitivity of color adjectives ("green", e.g.). For Travis, these examples play a central role in his arguments for occasion-sensitivity, which he takes to be a pervasive feature of how we understand natural language. But how, exactly, do these examples work? My aims in this paper are to put Travis’s examples under the microscope, using recent experimental studies of Travis-style cases to raise worries about aspects of the way Travis's cases are informally presented, but then show how his examples can be redesigned to respond to these doubts. (shrink)

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True, as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

According to Charles Travis our language is occasion-sensitive. The truth- conditions of all our sentences, and their correctness-conditions more generally, vary depending on the occasions on which they are used. This is part of a broader view of language as unshadowed. This paper develops objections Travis has made from this viewpoint against Michael Dummett’s anti-realism. It aims to show that the arguments are suggestive but inconclusive. For all it shows unshadowed anti-realism is a possibility.

Can one and the same quotation be used on different occasions to quote distinct objects? The view that it can is taken for granted throughout the literature (e.g. Goddard & Routley 1966, Christensen 1967, Davidson 1979, Goldstein 1984, Jorgensen et al 1984, Atlas 1989, Clark & Gerrig 1990, Washington 1992, García-Carpintero 1994, 2004, 2005, Reimer 1996, Saka 1998, Wertheimer 1999). Garcia-Carpintero (1994, p. 261) illustrates with the quotation expression ''gone''. He says it can be used to quote any of the (...) following items. (shrink)

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are delivered. However, Travis does not argue that meaning varies with circumstances; only that truth-conditions do. He assumes that meaning is a stable feature of both words and sentences. After surveying (...) some of the explanations that semanticists and pragmaticians have produced in order to account for Travis cases, I propose a view which differs substantially from all of them. I argue that the variability in the truth-conditions that an utterance type can have is due to meaning facts alone. To support my argument, I suggest that we think about the meanings of words (in particular, the meanings of nouns) as rich conceptual structures; so rich that the way in which a property concept applies to an object concept is not determined. (shrink)

Beginning from an earlier claim of mine that there was really no such area of study as the philosophy of sport, Part One of the paper reconsiders the place previously given to David Best’s distinction between purposive sports and aesthetic sports. In light of a famous cricketing event in the 1977 contest between England and Australia (‘The Ashes’), in which Derek Randall turned a cartwheel after taking the winning catch, the paper clarifies that not all aesthetically-pleasing events taking place in (...) sporting competitions can be understood as the aesthetic in sport. Then, in Part Two, the force of the claim that philosophy is one subject is explored. The conclusion is that a focus just on the philosophy of sport is necessarily inappropriate, since it will present the student with only cases from sport to then apply to sport. Rather, one’s understanding must be informed by (much of) the breadth of philosophy. Charles Travis’s view of occasion-sensitivity provides a clear example of appropriately contextual appeal. Part Three of the paper returns to the need for an institutional account of sport, one recognizing that there is no one occasion on which a particular sport is played; and hence no single set of conditions which can uniquely identify that sport. Thus, soccer played with one’s children typically differs from elite soccer: but both are (genuinely) soccer. When one turns to the appreciation of sport (in the light of Stephen Mumford’s excellent Watching Sport: Aesthetics, Ethics and Emotion [2012a]), one recognizes that, in order to genuinely appreciate sport, one cannot detach oneself from the outcome as completely as Mumford’s extreme purist seems to. But reflection on that case may also return us to contextualism by moving us away from attachments to the complete or the exceptionless in our accounts of spectating as of sport: maybe there is no one thing that occurs in all the relevant cases. (shrink)

The role of words in thought expression is to make recognisable what thought is expressed. The role of a definite description in the expression of a singular thought is to make recognisable with respect to what object the thought is singular. That different definite descriptions may play this role for one object settles nothing as to how such thoughts are to be counted. What does settle this? The present brief is: nothing in the notion of a thought as such. For (...) good reason. A way of counting thoughts is under two opposing constraints. First, it must serve the needs of proof. Second, it must yield thoughts which are shareable. Simultaneously satisfying both these demands requires there to be no one way of counting thoughts which is the right one tout court. That is, the notion same thought is an occasion-sensitive notion. (shrink)

The paper addresses the intuitions of aestheticians concerning a fundamental contrast between the judgement, appreciation, and interest appropriate to artworks and those judgements, appreciations, and interests appropriate to all the other (non-art) cases of aesthetic interest. Then terms such as beauty must amount to something different in art-cases from that in other (aesthetic) cases. For the fact of being an artwork is transfigurational, allowing artistic properties to be (truly) ascribed. In arguing against the univocality of terms such as beauty (by (...) stressing occasion-sensitivity), the paper rejects the idea of a ‘look of the thing’ shared by art and non-art. And the pervasiveness of this artistic/aesthetic contrast is urged. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that defeasible inferences are occasion-sensitive: the inferential connections of a given claim depend on features of the circumstances surrounding the occasion of inference. More specifically, it is an occasion-sensitive matter which possible defeaters have to be considered explicitly by the premises of an inference and which possible defeaters may remain unconsidered, without making the inference enthymematic. As a result, a largely unexplored form of occasion-sensitivity arises in inferentialist theories of content (...) that appeal to defeasible inferences. (shrink)

It's sometimes thought that context-invariant linguistic meaning must be a character (a function from context types to contents) i.e. that linguistic meaning must determine how the content of an expression is fixed in context. This is thought because if context-invariant linguistic meaning were not a character then communication would not be possible. In this paper, I explain how communication could proceed even if context-invariant linguistic meaning were not a character.

In this article, I propose an inquisitive approach to semantic underdetermination using the model of issue resolution to describe how occasion meanings are determined in the process of pragmatic enrichment. I appeal to “Travis cases” to motivate the account of semantic underdetermination based on alternative ways for some objectato be F. When interpreting a sentence, we look how to narrow down the space of metalinguistic alternatives and achieve the state where a metalinguistic issue is resolved. I suggest that, in (...) doing this, we primarily rely on contextual domain goals, preferring those alternatives which are conducive to the goal. (shrink)

This paper compares and contrasts two ways of going on from Wittgenstein and, to a lesser extent, Austin. The first is Charles Travis'. The second is Stanley Cavell's. Focusing on our concept of propositional knowledge ('knowing that such and such'), I argue that Travis' tendency to think of language and its concepts as essentially in the business of enabling us to represent (describe, think of) things as being one way or another and his consequent neglect of the question of what, (...) in the Austinian sense, is being done with the words have led him to give an inaccurate account of the context sensitivity of 'knowing that'. By contrast, Cavell's treatment of the concept - while fully hospitable to Travis' 'occasion sensitivity' - is attentive to the limitations of the representationalist conception, and takes the question of what is being done with the words, as it relates to the question of the intelligibility of the speaker, as primary. This fundamental difference between Travis and Cavell, I finally suggest, explains the stark contrast between the ways in which each has responded to what he calls 'scepticism'. (shrink)

In this article the authors identify and analyse points of agreement and disagreement between Michael Ayers and Charles Travis, starting from their views on ‘things before us’. The authors then try to spell out what separates these philosophers in matters concerning perception, knowledge and language. In spite of their both being self-professed realists, equally critical of conceptualism and representationalism, Ayers’ empiricism and Travis’ anti-empiricism lead them to different positions in these three areas. It is shown that in the case of (...) Ayers they hinge on “ordinary” objects and a KK principle (knowledge that and how we know), whereas in the case of Travis they are articulated around occasion-sensitivity and anti-psychologism. (shrink)

Pragmatist views inspired by Peirce characterize the content of claims in terms of their practical consequences. The content of a claim is, on these views, determined by what actions are rationally recommended or supported by that claim. In this paper I examine the defeasibility of these relations of rational support. I will argue that such defeasibility introduces a particularist, occasion-sensitive dimension in pragmatist theories of content. More precisely, my conclusion will be that, in the sort of framework naturally derived (...) from Peirce’s pragmatist maxim, grasping conceptual contents is not merely a question of mastering general rules or principles codifying the practical import of claims, but decisively involves being sensitive to surrounding features of the particular situation at hand. (shrink)

Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? -/- This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine (...) the interpretation of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar and that interpretation relies on non-linguistic cues and speakers' intentions, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed here sheds new light on the nature of linguistic content and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many subfields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions such as epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic. (shrink)

This essay outlines a certain 20th century Oxonian tradition in epistemology, contrasting it with another line of thought set out by Michael Ayers. The tradition begins with Cook Wilson and the idea that knowing is never having evidence, no matter how strong. It takes a turn in J.L. Austin, introducing two ideas into philosophy: disjunctivism and occasion-sensitivity. The last section considers whether either can really live without the other. The first part of the essay is a general consideration (...) of the relation between two forms of awareness: perceptual, and ‘propositional’, and of how the first may furnish proof of the second. The second part considers Ayers’ view of the relation, particularly as expressed in his idea of primary and secondary knowledge, and its relation to disjunctivism about knowledge. (shrink)

It is increasingly common for philosophers to rely on the notion of an idealised listener when explaining how the semantic values of context-sensitive expressions are determined. Some have identified the semantic values of such expressions, as used on particular occasions, with whatever an appropriately idealised listener would take them to be. Others have argued that, for something to count as the semantic value, an appropriately idealised listener should be able to recover it. Our aim here is to explore the range (...) of ways that such idealisation might be worked out, and then to argue that none of these results in a very plausible theory. We conclude by reflecting on what this negative result reveals about the nature of meaning and responsibility. (shrink)

This thesis consists of four essays and an introduction dedicated to two main topics: indexicality and presupposition. The first essay is concerned with an alleged problem for the standard treatment of indexicals on which their linguistic meanings are functions from context to content. Since most indexicals have their content settled, on an occasion of use, by the speaker’s intentions, some authors have argued that this standard picture is inadequate. By demonstrating that intentions can be seen as a parameter of (...) the kind of context that characters operate on, these arguments are rejected. In addition, it is argued that a more recent, variable-based framework is naturally interpreted as an intention-sensitive semantics. The second essay is devoted to the phenomenon of descriptive uses of indexicals on which such an expression seems to contribute, not its standard reference as determined by its character, but a property to the interpretation. An argument that singular readings of the cases in question are incoherent is shown to be incorrect, and an approach to descriptive readings is developed on which they arise from e-type uses akin to other well known cases. Further, descriptive readings of the relevant kind are seen to arise only in the presence of adverbs of quantification, and all sentences in which such an adverb takes scope over an indexical are claimed to be ambiguous between a referential and an e-type reading. The third essay discusses a version of the variable analysis of pronouns on which their descriptive meanings are relegated to the so-called phi-features – person, gender and number. In turn, the phi-features are here seen as triggering semantic presuppositions that place constraints on the definedness of pronouns, and ultimately of sentences in which they appear. It is argued that the descriptive information contributed by the phi-features diverges radically from presuppositional information of both semantic and pragmatic varieties on several dimensions of comparison, and instead the main role of the phi-features is seen to be that of guiding hearers’ attempts to ascertain the speaker’s intentions. The fourth essay addresses an issue concerning the treatment of presuppositions in dynamic semantics. Representing a semantic treatment of pragmatic presuppositions, the dynamic framework is shown to incorrectly regard conversational infelicity as sufficient for semantic undefinedness, given the standard way of defining truth in terms of context change. Further, it is shown that a proposal for a solution fail to make correct predictions for epistemic modals. A novel framework is developed on which context change potentials act on contexts that have more structure than the contexts usually countenanced by dynamic semantics, and it is shown that this framework derives truth from context change while making correct predictions for both presuppositions and modals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: The Portrait of a Miniature Giant PAUL BAROLSKY There was a time when the art of the sixteenth -century Florentine painter Agnolo Bronzino was reviled for its aesthetic excesses. Writing in his classic “The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy,” the great nineteenth -century scholar Jacob Burckhardt wrote that “as an historical painter,” Bronzino must “be placed among the Mannerists,” a judgement equivalent to placing him (...) in an art historical hell. But, Burckhardt added, “as a portrait painter, he is inferior to none of his contemporaries, not even the Venetians.” Given the fact that among the Venetians, Titian is one of the great portrait painters, this is astonishingly high praise. Nowadays, it is not uncommon for art historians, appreciating Mannerism, to celebrate the elegance and preciosity of Bronzino’s exquisite portraits. Of all Bronzino’s portraits, that of the dwarf Morgante is one of the most beguiling. It is distinctive in so many ways. This picture is the subject of a remarkable book by the Israeli art historian Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster : The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, which is an exceptional piece of scholarship. Different aspects of his book have influenced various scholars who have written about the picture and who have fruitfully exploited its various details. What needs to be appreciated, however, is the way in which this book brings out the extraordinary synthetic character of Bronzino’s strange painting and the diarion 28.3 winter 2021 Sefy Hendler, Gracious and Beautiful Monster: The Literary Universe of Bronzino’s Nano Morgante, Maschietto Editore, 2016. 158 the portrait of a miniature giant versity of ways in which it belongs to the courtly culture in which it was painted. The beauty of Hendler’s seemingly all-encompassing book is that it tells a fascinating and highly entertaining story with admirable brevity in just over seventy pages. Hendler, who packs a great deal of deeply absorbing information and insight into his slim and learned volume, is sensitive to the sentiment of Peter Whiffle’s well-known dictum: “You cannot begin not to tell until you know more than you are willing to impart.” Hendler’s exquisitely concise story concerns a favorite dwarf of Duke Cosimo de’ Medici, one Braccio di Bartolo in Poggio di Fornione, who flourished at the ducal court in the middle years of the sixteenth-century. Bronzino painted the dwarf for the Duke in 1552. His sometime rival, Giorgio Vasari, painter, architect, and biographer, described the picture as “beautiful and marvelous” in his Lives of the artists. The painting is double-sided, featuring a frontal view of the naked dwarf on the recto of the canvas (fig. 1) and a rear view of the dwarf, similarly exposed on the verso (fig. 2), where the dwarf’s backside dominates the composition. (We might well observe here that Bronzino specialized lasciviously in painting the culo (witness the coy Cupid in his famous Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time). It is therefore not surprising that the anatomical backside rendered over and over again in Italian Renaissance art, with all its connotations, sexual and otherwise, has recently been the subject of a considerable body of scholarship. Hendler, himself writing on various writers of the period, offers little hints into the psycho-sexual dimension of Bronzino’s picture. Its depiction of so many birds leads inevitably to a consideration of the word “bird” in its sexual dimension. Enough said. If Morgante’s posterior is manifest on the verso, the recto of the painting has its own special interest. A butterfly flies by the dwarf directly and conveniently in front of his genitals—a coy if not teasing gesture of decorum. The portrait once hung in the Palazzo Vecchio, which had become a ducal residence. In recent years it has moved around quite a bit, settling in the Galleria Palatina of the Palazzo Pitti, once a ducal residence. Vasari’s description of the picture is not without a certain iro- Paul Barolsky 159 ny, since the beautiful form of the painting as painting stands in opposition to the less than beautiful dwarf. The writer Anton Francesco Grazzini captured this paradox in his poem on the occasion of the death... (shrink)

The computational view of mind rests on certain intuitions regarding the fundamental similarity between computation and cognition. We examine some of these intuitions and suggest that they derive from the fact that computers and human organisms are both physical systems whose behavior is correctly described as being governed by rules acting on symbolic representations. Some of the implications of this view are discussed. It is suggested that a fundamental hypothesis of this approach is that there is a natural domain of (...) human functioning that can be addressed exclusively in terms of a formal symbolic or algorithmic vocabulary or level of analysis. Much of the paper elaborates various conditions that need to be met if a literal view of mental activity as computation is to serve as the basis for explanatory theories. The coherence of such a view depends on there being a principled distinction between functions whose explanation requires that we posit internal representations and those that we can appropriately describe as merely instantiating causal physical or biological laws. In this paper the distinction is empirically grounded in a methodological criterion called the " cognitive impenetrability condition." Functions are said to be cognitively impenetrable if they cannot be influenced by such purely cognitive factors as goals, beliefs, inferences, tacit knowledge, and so on. Such a criterion makes it possible to empirically separate the fixed capacities of mind from the particular representations and algorithms used on specific occasions. In order for computational theories to avoid being ad hoc, they must deal effectively with the "degrees of freedom" problem by constraining the extent to which they can be arbitrarily adjusted post hoc to fit some particular set of observations. This in turn requires that the fixed architectural function and the algorithms be independently validated. It is argued that the architectural assumptions implicit in many contemporary models run afoul of the cognitive impenetrability condition, since the required fixed functions are demonstrably sensitive to tacit knowledge and goals. The paper concludes with some tactical suggestions for the development of computational cognitive theories. (shrink)

The evaluation of labour markets and of particular jobs ought to be sensitive to a plurality of benefits and burdens of work. We use the term 'the goods of work' to refer to those benefits of work that cannot be obtained in exchange for money and that can be enjoyed mostly or exclusively in the context of work. Drawing on empirical research and various philosophical traditions of thinking about work we identify four goods of work: 1) attaining various types of (...) excellence; 2) making a social contribution; 3) experiencing community; and 4) gaining social recognition. Our account of the goods of work can be read as unpacking the ways in which work can be meaningful. The distribution of the goods of work is a concern of justice for two conjoint reasons: First, they are part of the conception of the good of a large number of individuals. Second, in societies without an unconditional income and in which most people are not independently wealthy, paid work is non-optional and workers have few, if any, occasions to realize these goods outside their job. Taking into account the plurality of the goods of work and their importance for justice challenges the theoretical and political status quo, which focuses mostly on justice with regard to the distribution of income. We defend this account against the libertarian challenge that a free labour market gives individuals sufficient options to realise the goods of work important to them, and discuss the challenge from state neutrality. In the conclusion, we hint towards possible implications for today’s labour markets. (shrink)

The Cognitive Estimation Test is widely used by clinicians and researchers to assess the ability to produce reasonable cognitive estimates. Although several studies have published normative data for versions of the CET, many of the items are now outdated and parallel forms of the test do not exist to allow cognitive estimation abilities to be assessed on more than one occasion. In the present study, we devised two new 9-item parallel forms of the CET. These versions were administered to (...) 184 healthy male and female participants aged 18–79 years with 9–22 years of education. Increasing age and years of education were found to be associated with successful CET performance as well as gender, intellect, naming, arithmetic and semantic memory abilities. To validate that the parallel forms of the CET were sensitive to frontal lobe damage, both versions were administered to 24 patients with frontal lobe lesions and 48 age-, gender- and education-matched controls. The frontal patients’ error scores were significantly higher than the healthy controls on both versions of the task. This study provides normative data for parallel forms of the CET for adults which are also suitable for assessing frontal lobe dysfunction on more than one occasion without practice effects. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Only a Wet Dream? Hope and Skepticism in Horace, Satire 1.5Kenneth J. ReckfordLong enjoyed as an entertainment piece, Horace’s “Trip to Brundisium” has continued to baffle its readers by recounting trivialities while ignoring politics. A brief, tactful hint at great affairs is quickly abandoned:huc venturus erat Maecenas optimus atque Cocceius, missi magnis de rebus uterque legati, aversos soliti componere amicos. hic oculis ego nigra meis collyria lippus illinere. interea (...) Maecenas advenit...(S. 1.5.27–31)In his first hic ego (7), Horace missed dinner because of stomach trouble. In the second (30), he misses Maecenas’ arrival—and its meaning—because of eye trouble. Is he unable to see what is going on around him? 1Horace’s persona in Satires 1.5 is well crafted: the naive, good-humored traveling companion, concerned primarily with his own intrusive comforts and discomforts. He likes good food, drink, and sleep, good health and good company, and he especially enjoys his friends: nil ego contulerim iucundo sanus amico (44). He was taken along, it would appear, rather passively from the first (egressum magna me accepit Aricia Roma), on a mission that had something to do with “reconciling [End Page 525] friends” who had fallen out. That is all he knows, and all he needs to know. 2We may well suspect that Horace was keeping a diplomatic silence, that Maecenas confided in him, here and elsewhere, precisely because he did not have a “leaky ear.” 3 He would be teasing, then: teasing prospective readers who would suspect that he was withholding privileged information with intent to annoy, and (rather beyond his intent?) teasing modern scholars who cannot even take the satire’s date for granted, let alone follow the diplomatic maneuvers of Octavian and Antony in 38-37 B.C. 4 If we follow Horace’s lead, all those amusing particulars that render the political picture so opaque convey us insistently into the “little world” of poetry, friendship, and simple human satisfactions. It is tempting to confine our attention to this “little world,” accepting Horace at face value as an amiable entertainer, with brief excursions, perhaps, into comparing the esthetics of his narrative with the reconstructed narrative of the casually autobiographical Lucilius—an attempt that, from insufficient evidence, must also end in frustration. But there is more. I propose here that the poem is both more public and more private than it seems. Reading between the lines, though without abusing allegory, we find Horace deeply implicated in issues of war and peace. Through the distorting lens of the satiric and comic imagination he portrays how a sensitive and thoughtful person might waver between hope for a peaceful, even “friendly” resolution of conflict and skepti-cal awareness of the gap between personal wish-fulfillment (the “wet [End Page 526] dream” of my title) and political reality. Yet this same wavering, and Horace’s consequent, very human vacillation between emotional involvement with Rome and Epicurean disengagement, are the stuff of which genuine poetry—and, consistently over time and through different genres, Horatian poetry—is made.My argument focuses on three aspects of Satire 1.5: the theme of amicitia, private and public; the agon, or insult-match between Sarmentus the scurra and Messius Cicirrus; and the “wet dream” and “failed miracle” sequences toward the end. But first, because Horace’s satires are in part exploratory, like all good poetry, and because meanings notoriously shift as a work progresses in time and is made available to different audiences or circles of readers, I begin with a hypothetical framework consisting of (1) the occasion and first plan, (2) the sketching-out and refining of the satire, (3) its first reading(s) to friends, and (4) its first publication in book form. Further questions of reader reception and the organization of the libellus are deferred until the close of the essay.Hypothetical Stages Of Composition And Reception(1) The poem is conceived. We begin with the happy conjunction of two opportunities (kairoi), Roman and Horatian. The larger kairos involves the diplomatic mission of 37, a renewed attempt to prevent (or postpone) conflict between Octavian and Antony, to settle their differences, and to provide... (shrink)

I critically discuss the contextualist approach to essentialism, which was developed as an explanation of the seeming inconstancy of our essentialist intuitions. The problem is supposed to be that we vacillate a great deal in judging what properties an object has essentially from one occasion to another, which obviously undermines the reliability of our essentialist intuitions. Contextualists solve the problem by combining the metaphysical view that objects have essential properties with the semantic thesis that the term “essentially” is a (...) context sensitive expression. Once we are aware of the context shifting, the conflict of intuitions turns out to be onlyapparent. My aim is to show that contextualism is not the answer that a proponent of essentialism should adopt. First, I outline the contextualist strategy and argue by help of an example that our linguistic practice does not seem to support the contextualist claim that “essentially” is a context-sensitive term. Secondly, the contextualist strategy deals only with the vacillation of intuitions in one person, but offers a very unfavorable explanation of the conflict of intuitions among different persons. Thus, contextualists face the challenge of proving the reliability of essentialist intuitions nevertheless. I conclude with David Lewis’s proposal in order to illustrate that the contextualist approach only provides the appearance, but not the real essentialism. (shrink)

Poe’s influence on the Symbolists has been traced on many occasions, though not in detail. The classical study in English is Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” a Library of Congress lecture delivered three years after Valéry’s death.2 Eliot defines Poe as irresponsible and immature—irresponsible in style, immature in vision. He had, Eliot comments, “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”; “all of his ideas seem to be entertained rather than believed” . How, then, we ask, did he (...) hoax the sophisticated French? Although Eliot raises the issue of their relative ignorance of English, he prudently does not make much of it: after all, we know that Baudelaire spent seventeen years on the tales, Mallarmé still longer on the poems—thirty years for the definitive text; while Valéry, to whom Baudelaire and Mallarmé left little to translate, managed a version of the Marginalia. Each might have said, as Mallarmé did in 1885, that he had learned English for one sole reason: “to read Poe better.”3 In the matter of linguistic competence, then, Eliot is content to remark that the French poets “were not disturbed by weaknesses of which we are very much aware” . He underlines, however, that Poe showed different facets of himself to each of his readers who adopted him in various ways: Baudelaire focused on the Poète maudit, Mallarmé on the prosodist, and Valéry on the theoretician in whom he discovered “a method and an occupation—that of observing himself write” . So Poe had a diverse effect, which Eliot accepts more readily in respect of Baudelaire and Mallarmé than he does of Valéry. To explain this last case which intrigues him especially, he introduces a paradox: “with Poe and Valéry, extremes meet,” he writes, “the immature mind playing with ideas because it had not developed to the point of convictions, and the very adult mind playing with ideas because it was too skeptical to hold convictions” .Thus Eliot damns Poe with faint praise. The distance between cause and effect, master and disciples is so vast that it can only be thought the product of monstrous error. And yet “from Poet to Valéry” and the complementary studies in English or French of the past thirty-five years neglect some deeper factors that drew the Symbolists. Misreadings there were no doubt since such are in the nature of things, but these authors were sensitive to currents that others overlooked. They attempted to go to first principles, not only because Poe was “ce poète incomparable, ce philosophe non refute” 4 and, therefore, worthy of scrutiny, but because they held him to be vital to their future thought. In a period of great social and aesthetic change they found a figure of radical independence—classicist, visionary, logician supreme—whom they explained by convergent tropes of daemonic power. In this regard the newly published correspondence of Mallarmé and the massive Valéry notebooks have added to our knowledge. I would like, then, to consider the nature of Poe’s action, this submerged dialogue in time and successive rewriting by which—“à l’égal de nos maître les plus chers ou vénérés,” as Mallarmé put it5—he entered the mainstream of French poetry. 2. The lecture was later published in Hudson Review 2 : 335; all further references to this work, abbreviated “FPV,” will be included in the text.3. Mallarmé, “Autobiographie,” Oeuvres completes, p. 662.4. Baudelaire, “Le Poème du hachisch,” Oeuvres complètes, 1:427.5. Mallarmé, “Scolies,” Oeuvres completes, p. 223. James Lawler, Edward arson Waller Distinguished Service Professor of French at the University of Chicago, has written extensively on nineteenth- and twentieth-century French poetry. Among his books are Lecture de Valéry, The Language of French Symbolism, The Poet as Analyst, and René Char: The Myth and the Poem. He is currently completing a study of Buadelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Byzantine Matters by Averil CameronPanagiotis RoilosAveril Cameron. Byzantine Matters. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014. xviii + 164 pp. 3 black-and-white maps. Cloth, $22.95.From C. P. Cavafy to W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and more recently, Julia Kristeva, literary authors and intellectuals have eloquently (and as a rule more effectually than academics) shown that Byzantine matters are of noteworthy relevance to broader, i.e., not only scholarly, domains of (...) (post)modern culture too. Despite (or, at times, even because of) certain rather ineluctable limitations mainly deriving from its marked genre (general survey of the state of the field), Byzantine Matters belongs to that rare group of scholarly books that contribute considerably to the promotion of the Byzantine “cause” beyond the confines of the specific research and academic area. Written by one of the most eminent and influential scholars of late antiquity and early Byzantium, this book fulfills its valuable self-imposed aims: in a commendable, as a whole, interdisciplinary manner, it outlines the research trajectories that Byzantinists should pursue today, if they wish to expand their field’s methodological self-awareness and achieve a competitive level of theoretical sophistication.An important constituent of Averil Cameron’s critique of widespread preconceptions about Byzantium even in contemporary scholarly discourses (either in [End Page 719] the specialized research field or, more explicitly, in relevant ones) is her exposure of the detrimental ideological parameters of the exoticism and exceptionalism that often inform approaches to that past culture. The author’s task is not easy; on the contrary, it is bound to cause some distress or uneasiness in conservative scholarly circles (or “schools”).Cameron begins her discussion of the present state of Byzantine studies and of the related research desiderata by diagnosing the “absence” of Byzantium from hegemonic historiographic discourses in the so-called Western world. Origins and causes of this “absence” are astutely (albeit partially) traced back to influential Anglo-centric interpretive paradigms, these being of entirely derogatory (see Edward Gibbon’s notorious “history” and more recently the dogmatic conservatism of Arnold Toynbee and Samuel Huntington) or exoticizing, Orientalizing orientation (as exemplified in the activities of, e.g., Robert Byron and David Talbot Rice). Byzantium is shown to have been reduced to the state of the historical and historiographical “subaltern” of the West (9). Although I would have preferred to describe this idiosyncratic position of Byzantium in the dominant historiographic practice and the imaginary of the West in terms of what elsewhere I have defined as “para-marginality,” I must stress that Cameron’s sensitive outline of the Byzantine “absence” from established scholarly paradigms attests to her openness to sophisticated methodological schemata that might contribute to a creative and, whenever necessary, critical dialogue of Byzantine studies with related disciplines and broader theoretical debates.In her reappraisal of current scholarly views concerning the status of Byzantium as an empire, the author rightly emphasizes the adaptability and flexibility of Byzantine sociopolitical and economic structures and mechanisms, thus exposing the widespread view of an “unchanging Byzantium” as a mere “popular myth” (35). Equally noteworthy is her focusing on the contribution of ritual occasions and performances of ideologically and politically manipulated rhetoric to the reaffirmation, communication, and effectiveness of imperial power in Byzantium.Cameron’s learned approach to Byzantine art, which is introduced with a general discussion of the attraction it held for British authors (where, however, Ruskin’s work is conspicuously missing), and to the current state of its research places a judicious emphasis on the tension between iconoclasm and iconolatry as well as on issues of periodization. Of special significance is Cameron’s reference to the performative functions of icons in Byzantium and her call for new, interdisciplinary approaches to Byzantine art. However, the opposition between the written word and the image that the author, endorsing Michael Squire’s approach (74), puts forward is an unconvincing rhetorical construct rather than an always valid hermeneutic tool. Theology and religious practice in Byzantium never really reduced the written word to a state inferior to that of the image, as is evinced not only by the frequent coexistence of text and pictorial representation in Byzantine art but also by the extremely... (shrink)

Dans la presse des trois pays analysés, une approche commune de l'événement émerge, reposant sur des valeurs, des croyances et des symboles communs qui ont certes existé auparavant, mais qui ont émergé sur la place publique à l'occasion de cet événement. Il s'agit principalement de la solidarité humaine, de ce qu'on peut qualifier « d'esprit humanitaire», porté avant tout par les jeunes regroupés au sein de ce qu'on appelle de plus en plus souvent la « génération JP2 ». En (...) revanche, les différences sautent aux yeux quand on analyse la réappropriation culturelle de l'événement dans les trois pays analysés. Chaque peuple fait appel à son histoire ancienne ou récente et à la sensibilité politique qui lui est propre. La mobilisation d'archétypes, de symboles nationaux ou religieux qui en résulte est particulière à chacune des cultures. Mais ce qui semble commun dans le traitement médiatique de la mort de Jean-Paul II c'est l'émergence d'une certaine sensibilité cosmopolite parmi la jeune « génération JP2 ». C'est sans doute le phénomène le plus frappant de cet événement international qu'est la mort du pape.In the press three countries analyzed, a common event emerges, based on values, beliefs and common symbols which certainly existed before, but which have emerged on the public during this event. It is mainly human solidarity, of what may be termed "humanitarian spirit", carried primarily by young grouped in what is called more often "JP2 generation". However, the differences are obvious when analyzing the cultural reappropriation of the event in the three countries analyzed. Every nation uses its ancient history and recent political sensitivity of its own. Mobilization of archetypes, national or religious symbols that results is unique to each culture. But what seems to be common in the media treatment of the death of John Paul II is the emergence of a certain cosmopolitan sensibility among the young "JP2 generation". This is probably the most striking phenomenon of this international event the death of the pope. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thomas Merton’s Bangkok Lecture of December 1968Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland, OSBPreparations for the Meeting and its PurposeAfter being elected abbot primate of the Benedictine Confederation in September 1967, I was encouraged by discovering that the Benedictines and the two branches of the Cistercians (those of the Common Observance and those of the Strict Observance, or Trappists) worked together on missionary issues through an office in Paris called Aide à (...) l’Implantation Monastique (AIM).1 After World War II many new monastic foundations were made in the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and South America, commonly referred to as the Third World. These fledgling monasteries needed special care that frequently could not be provided by their founding monasteries in Europe or the United States. AIM sought to fill that gap. There existed an unwritten agreement among the three superiors of the two branches of the Cistercians and the abbot primate that the historical differences in the West among those following the Rule of Saint Benedict would not be emphasized in the new areas of expansion.One of the purposes for establishing AIM was to plan and organize meetings of monks and nuns in those vast areas of the world.2 Thus, AIM and its staff acted as the prime instrument for pulling together all the threads that went into the meeting in Bangkok in December 1968. They ultimately were responsible for selecting inculturation as the main theme to be treated.At that time, I noticed that this theme was frequently being discussed among us Superiors General in Rome, especially among those religious congregations with newer foundations in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and South America.3 Many came to realize that this theme was important, not only for newer houses, but also for older ones in the Third World, as they too were rethinking how they engaged the cultures in which they had been implanted. We superiors devoted many meetings to this theme, bringing in experts in theology and anthropology to reflect with us on current thinking and to animate our discussions. Because of the positive treatment at Vatican Council II of the other great religions of the world, this theme was “in the air” at that time. In the Far East the question of inculturation for Catholic missionaries was not a new one in itself, as Christians had been posing it since the time of the first missionary efforts in China and Japan centuries before. For monks, however, it was being asked for the first time and with some urgency. Monasticism [End Page 91] posed questions of adaptation and accommodation in cultures already possessing deeply rooted manifestations of a similar way of life that went under the same label. Thus, since there was already a concept of monasticism and the existence of monks in Asian cultures, the Bangkok meeting was an occasion for reexamining the question of inculturation.At that same time there was a heightened sensitivity to any sign of a residual colonialism in many parts of the Third World. When Western groups made no attempt at inculturation, it was interpreted as old European cultural colonialism, or, as some were beginning to say, new American economic imperialism.When some Benedictine and Cistercian superiors in Asia suggested inculturation as the theme for this meeting, they added the suggestion that superiors of the founding monasteries in Europe and the United States should attend the meeting and interact with the superiors of the local houses. These superiors felt it was important for the founding superiors to gain a better understanding of the issues involved in cultural adaptation and that they be willing to give to the local superiors a broader berth for future developments. For this to occur, the presence of experts at the meeting was also imperative. It was then that Merton’s name was suggested. It was rightly felt that he was well informed about both Eastern and Western forms of monasticism and would be a font of insights and a ready guide for the discussions. In addition, his views—everyone agreed—would be well accepted by the Western superiors. Since the two languages of the meeting were to be French and English, Merton could also... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reframing Baudelaire: Literary History, Biography, Postcolonial Theory, and Vernacular LanguagesFrançoise Lionnet* (bio)In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf quips: “History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men;” literary history, she might have added, is too much about sons murdering their fathers. Canonical readings of the canon have often insisted on the vaguely Freudian (if not biblical) model of literary creation susceptible both to “anxieties (...) of influence” and to creative revisions imposed by strong misreadings. Criticism has followed the same reactive pattern in order to clear new ground for further research: the debate between “traditionalists” and proponents of “cultural studies” all but repeats this familiar and combative dialectic. Between formalist and sociopolitical readings, French texts have been mined by many different critical trends; but the perspectives that do not fit neatly into one or the other of these agonistic moves tend to be left out. Dominick LaCapra has suggested that “one issue for readers today is whether a different, ‘noncanonical’ reading of the canon, which resists symbolic resolutions as well as narrowly formalistic interpretations, may be one force in reopening texts to the[ir] broader sociopolitical effects” [731].In the case of Baudelaire, the way to do this “noncanonical” reading might well be to go back to a discursive field which includes biography and oral histories, and to resist the temptation either to eulogize the innovations of the poet of modernity or to denounce the patent racism of his images. The challenge today is to return to the scene of writing and the conditions of production of the early poetry—in other words, to look at the text from outside of conventional literary, critical or cultural history, to reclaim it for our side, that of a more global francophonie. To do so might mean to map out once again the contested terrain of culturally and politically sensitive readings such as the ones Christopher Miller and Gayatri Spivak claim to do. Their readings, however, do not take into account the residual cultural element of the poetry, that is, the vernacular language it appropriates. This language is all but buried beneath the emergent theoretical practices of postcolonial criticism and its vaguely nationalist agendas. 1 Critics have tended to look for [End Page 63] symbolic resolutions and to settle cultural scores at the expense of historical and geographical specificity, despite claims to the contrary.The facts of Baudelaire’s youthful travels in the Indian Ocean have remained relatively obscure. While doing research in the islands of Mauritius and Réunion on two separate occasions during the past few years, I came across written documents and watercolors that helped me reconstruct the historical and visual contexts that appear to have been Baudelaire’s in 1841. By re-examining the criticisms that have been lodged against the exoticizing rhetoric of his poetry, I want to foreground the links between the Creole culture with which Baudelaire became familiar and the now canonical texts he produced. These links can allow us to bypass the sterile opposition between “literary studies” and “cultural studies” or between aesthetics and politics; they demonstrate the urgency of re-visioning the canon not just from the perspectives of its margins, but as an important source of muted cultural knowledge. The questions with which I begin, then, are the following: where did Baudelaire actually go on his travels in 1841? and why does this matter to the field of French studies?Il faut en finir avec la légende de l’Inde parcourue par Baudelaire. Elle était séduisante, Gautier l’a adoptée, Banville ne l’a pas négligée.... Mais la vérité vraie est que Baudelaire, embarqué malgré lui, brûla la politesse à l’Inde.... Peut-être Baudelaire abandonnait-il complaisamment au commun public ces bruits de longues pérégrinations en pays fabuleux, parce qu’il en tirait, avec des couleurs de mystère, l’air de revenir de loin. Dans tous les cas, il ne nous parlait jamais de ces voyages. A peine, à son retour, nous dit-il quelques mots d’une station dans l’île Maurice ou l’île Bourbon. 2[It is time to put a stop to... (shrink)

The paper begins with the prerequisite assumption that social deprivation is a fragile and porous category. Thus, our hypothesis is, that how people are affected by the restrictions against the spreading of the coronavirus is often discussed in far too general and simplistic terms. It is often taken as a given, that the virus and the restriction measures not only have caused severe difficulties for us all (due to social distancing, fear, affected health, etc.), but that the measures have exacerbated (...) already previously existing forms of social deprivation. Therefore, it is assumed that marginalized groups are particularly affected by these effects of the pandemic. Two major German studies show the alleged effects of the relevant measures on adolescents and emerging adults (COPSY and FIBS) against the backdrop of social and economic deprivation; their results confirmed that social deprivation entails a higher degree of being affected by the pandemic.However, this picture becomes thwarted by considering the results of 10 narrative interviews, that were conducted by us with emerging adults in a German vocational training institute between April and August 2021 and showed variegated forms of experiencing issues related to the pandemic. In our analysis, we used the method of objective hermeneutics. In this paper, we present our considerations by outlining two contrastive experiences with the Covid-19 pandemic, in order to highlight the divergent ways in which the pandemic has been experienced even among individuals who previously had been affected by social deprivation – at least at first glance – in similar ways. The conceptual lens through which we interpret these two examples is, firstly, the one of precariousness and precarity (Butler 2009). And secondly, the concept of recognition derived from Honneth’s pertinent theory and Butler’s account of recognizability will play a pivotal role. While Honneth’s approach allows us to emphasize the normative and existential role of the fulfilment of our basic desire for recognition and the detrimental implications of disregard, Butler provides us with the means to thoroughly analyse the socio-historical conditions of misrecognition and social invisibility. Moreover, Butler focuses specifically on the recognizability of precariousness (Honneth’s triad of love, being respected as a rights bearer and solidarity shows a different focus). Combining qualitative research on precarious live circumstances with a theoretical perspective on recognition can also be found in a stunning research on couples in atypical working relations (Wimbauer and Motakef 2019). Proceeding from these theories and ‘applying’ them to our empirical material, we seek to call into question a too generalizing and hegemonic picture of how people were affected by pertinent restrictions. Qualitative interviews are able to point us to significant differences in the experience of the restrictions.In terms of an outlook, we suggest that a sensitization for previously excluded kinds of experiences forms a crucial basis for a less normalizing, that is, more inclusive account of interpreting the affectedness and needs of variegated social groups; the pandemic has influenced and altered structures of the recognition of vulnerability and, by the same token, made them more explicit. It thus is an occasion for a critical engagement with the recognizability of needs, deprivation, discrimination, and related phenomena. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this position because (...) they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)