My aim in this paper is to examine Mitchell S. Green’s notion of self-expression and the role it plays in his model of illocutionary communication. The paper is organized into three parts. In Section 2, after discussing Green’s notions of illocutionary speaker meaning and self-expression, I consider the contribution that self-expression makes to the mechanisms of intentional communication; in particular, I introduce the notion of proto-illocutionary speaker meaning and argue that it is necessary to account for acts (...) overtly showing general commitments that are not ‘marked’ as being specific to one or another illocutionary force. In Section 3, I focus on Green’s account of expressive norms and argue that their function is to stabilize rather than constitute the structure of illocutionary signaling systems; moreover, I examine critically Green’s idea according to which expressive norms enable us to indicate the force of our speech acts and suggest that they play a key role in the mechanisms for epistemic vigilance. Finally, in Section 4, I elaborate on the idea of discourse-constituted thoughts—or, in other words, thoughts that ex- ist in virtue of being expressed in making certain conversation-bound speech acts—and use it to develop a more comprehensive model of the expressive dimension of speech acts. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 45, Issue 3, pp 369 - 385 In “The Vestige of Art,” Jean-Luc Nancy argues that art is neither representation nor inscription, but rather _exscription_. The figure is the vestige of an expressive gesture; it represents neither a separable idea nor the one who traced it but, rather _exscribes_ their presence and their world in the event of expression. As such, Nancy’s aesthetics in _The Muses_ deploys a certain logic of expression best understood in the (...) tradition of Merleau-Pontian phenomenology. Echoing Merleau-Ponty’s notion of speech accomplishing, rather than translating, thought, Nancy’s understanding of the expressive gesture suggests an event that brings forth a self that does not pre-exist its expression and that is paradoxically always already past, always already fallen into material vestiges. By connecting Merleau-Ponty’s notion of a “past that has never been present” to Nancy’s concept of _exscription_, I argue that reading Nancy’s _The Muses_ and Merleau-Ponty’s “Eye and Mind” together suggests an importantly restructured “phenomenology” of painting that is in fact more of an ontology of intercorporeality. (shrink)

Ordinarily when someone tells us something about her beliefs, desires or intentions, we presume she is right. According to standard views, this deferential trust is justified on the basis of certain epistemic properties of her assertion. In this paper, I offer a non-epistemic account of deference. I first motivate the account by noting two asymmetries between the kind of deference we show psychological self-ascriptions and the kind we grant to epistemic experts more generally. I then propose a novel agency-based (...) account of deference. Drawing on recent work on self-knowledge, I argue that a person normally has a distinctive type of cognitive agency; specifically she is able to constitute her psychological attitudes by making judgments about what they ought to be. I then argue that a speaker expresses this agentive authority when she self-ascribes a psychological attitude and this is what justifies deferentially trusting what she says. Because the notion of expression plays a central role in this account, I contrast it with recent neo-expressivist theories. (shrink)

In referential communication, Grice's Maxim of Quantity is thought to imply that utterances conveying unnecessary information should incur comprehension difficulties. There is, however, considerable evidence that speakers frequently encode redundant information in their referring expressions, raising the question as to whether such overspecifications hinder listeners’ processing. Evidence from previous work is inconclusive, and mostly comes from offline studies. In this article, we present two event‐related potential (ERP) experiments, investigating the real‐time comprehension of referring expressions that contain redundant adjectives in (...) complex visual contexts. Our findings provide support for both Gricean and bounded‐rational accounts. We argue that these seemingly incompatible results can be reconciled if common ground is taken into account. We propose a bounded‐rational account of overspecification, according to which even redundant words can be beneficial to comprehension to the extent that they facilitate the reduction of listeners’ uncertainty regarding the target referent. (shrink)

Under normal circumstances, saying that you have a thought, a belief, a desire, or an intention differs from saying that somebody (who happens to be you) has that attitude. The former statement comes with some form of first person authority and constitutes commitments that are not involved in the latter case. Speaking with first person authority, and thereby publicly committing oneself, is a practice that plays an important role in our communication and in our understanding of what it means (...) to be a person. In their Group Agency, Christian List and Philip Pettit argue that some corporations are agents with attitudes of their own, and they claim that they are persons. The question on which this paper is focused is: Can corporations (groups with attitudes and the capacity for linguistic communication) participate in this practice, that is, can they express their attitudes with first person authority, and thereby enter first person commitments? The first section of the paper gives a rough (and, I hope, ecumenical) account of some features of first person authority and commitment. The second section examines if and how this account of first person authority carries over to corporations. It is argued that the possibility for groups to express their attitudes with straightforward first person authority, and thus to enter first person commitments, are extremely limited. The third part of the paper argues that while under normal circumstances, a member’s expression of her group’s attitudes in first person plural terms does not constitute straightforward first person authority, it does come with something resembling some aspects of the first-personal commitments encountered in the singular case. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Two Categories of the Blues What is Cultural Expression? A Too‐Loose Definition of Culture Conclusion Notes.

The right to join with other people to promote a particular outlook, known as the right of expressive association, is a necessary adjunct to the right of freedom of speech, which is protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. Freedom of speech would be of little practical consequence if the government could suppress ideas by bluntly prohibiting individuals from gathering with others who share their perspective. Freedom of expression must consist (...) of more than the right to talk to oneself. (shrink)

A common assumption among philosophers is that every language has at most denumerably many expressions. This assumption plays a prominent role in many philosophical arguments. Recently formal systems with indenumerably many elements have been developed. These systems are similar to the more familiar denumerable first-order languages. This similarity makes it appear that the assumption is false. We argue that the assumption is true.

The paper’s purpose is to get clearer on what it is to express a proposition. A proposition is understood as anything that can be asserted, assumed, conjectured, stated, believed, and so on. It is not something that can be asked, ordered, requested, and so on. The paper tries to provide groundwork for a successful analysis by making distinctions and clarifying problems.

I satisfies its expressive use in the deictic mode. It is the expressive use of any singular term to express thoughts. This requires that the speaker know the positive answer to the question: ‘which individual is being spoken of?’, that is, the term must achieve discriminability of reference for the speaker. Deictic terms require salience if they are to achieve discriminability of reference for the speaker, i.e., it is as the individual made salient that one must identify the referent of (...) a use of a deictic term. It is as the individual made salient that one must identify the referent of a use of I. (shrink)

The paper is a critical discussion of the rich and insightful final chapter of Mitchell Green’s Self-Expression . There, Green seeks to elucidate the compelling, but inchoate intuition that when we’re fully and most expertly expressing ourselves, we can ‘push out’ from within not just our inner representations, but also the ways that we feel. I question, first, whether this type of ‘qualitative expression’ is really distinct from the other expressive forms that Green explores, and also whether it’s (...) genuinely ‘expressive’. I then scrutinize the nature of the ‘qualitative congruences’ that lie at the heart of Green’s theory; and I wonder whether they can play the role Green claims they can in providing a novel account of artistic expression. (shrink)

Truth-theoretic deflationism holds that truth is simple, and yet that it can fulfil many useful logico-linguistic roles. Deflationism focuses on axioms for truth: there is no reduction of the notion of truth to more fundamental ones such as sets or higher-order quantifiers. In this paper I argue that the fundamental properties of reasonable, primitive truth predicates are at odds with the core tenets of classical truth-theoretic deflationism that I call fix, express, and quantify. Truth may be regarded as a broadly (...) logical, sui generis notion. However, this has little to do with the original aims of the deflationary theory of truth. (shrink)

Non-consequentialist libertarianism usually revolves around the claim that there are only “negative,” not “positive,” rights. Libertarian nega- tive-rights theories are so patently problematic, though, that it seems that there is a more fundamental notion at work. Some libertarians think this basic idea is freedom or liberty; others, that it is self-ownership. Neither approach is satis- factory.

Many domains, notably the one involving predicates of personal taste, present the phenomenon of apparent faultless disagreement. Contextualism is a characteristically moderate implementation of the relativistic attempt to endorse such appearances. According to an often-voiced objection, although it straightforwardly accounts for the faultlessness, contextualism fails to respect “facts about disagreement.” With many other recent contributors to the debate, I contend that the notion of disagreement—“genuine,” “real,” “substantive,” “robust” disagreement—is indeed very flexible, and in particular can be constituted by contrasting attitudes. (...) As such, contextualism is clearly straightforwardly compatible with facts about the existence of disagreement. There is, however, a genuine prima facie worry for contextualism involving facts about the expression of disagreement in ordinary conversations. Elaborating on a suggestion by Lewis :113–138, 1989), I argue that the presupposition of commonality approach in López de Sa shows that there are versions of contextualism that are in good standing vis-à-vis such facts about the expression of disagreement. (shrink)

This paper addresses an alleged paradox regarding gratitude—that a duty of gratitude is odd or puzzling if not paradoxical. The gist of our position is that in prototypical cases, gratitude expression falls under a distinctive deontic category we call morally expected—which has a corresponding contrary deontic category we call morally offensive. These categories, we maintain, need recognition in normative ethics to make proper sense of the moral status of gratitude expression and other morally charged restrictions on action, and (...) likewise to make proper sense of the moral status of failures to abide by such restrictions. We argue for our view largely on phenomenological grounds. (shrink)

The hope that art could be personally or socially transformational is an important part of art history and contemporary art practice. In the twentieth century, it shaped a movement away from traditional media in an effort to make social life a medium. Artists imagined and created participatory situations designed to facilitate potentially transformative expression in those who engaged with the works. This chapter develops the concept of “transformative expression,” and illustrates how it informs a diverse range of such (...) works. Understanding these artworks in this way raises two interesting questions, one about the nature of aesthetic value and the other about the nature of action. Answers to these questions lie in understanding the social and aesthetic character of our capacity to distance ourselves from our commitments and act in the expressive, playful, spontaneous, or imaginative ways that participatory art invites. (shrink)

While the metarepresentational structure of ostensive communication may explain the unleashing of human expression, it neither explains the open-endedness of the thoughts expressed/communicated, nor how the multiply embedded nature of the metarepresentational structure invoked arose. These both require the recursivity of human language, a capacity which must be distinguished from external (public) languages and their use in communication.

Philosophers ask just whose expression, if anyone’s, we hear in lyric poetry. Walton provides a novel possibility: it’s the reader who “uses” the poem (just as a speech giver uses a speech) who makes the language expressive. But worries arise once we consider poems in particular social or political settings, those which require a strong self-other distinction, or those with expressions that should not be disassociated from the subjects whose experience they draw from. One way to meet this challenge (...) is to consider the poem expressive of a plural subject, which frees us from looking for a particular individual whose voice we hear in the work, whether she be fictional or actual. Some lyrics give voice to a group whose experience is attended to in the work. This may be done through a posited fictional speaker, but the ontology of the speaker is shown to be less important. Attending to a group whose concerns are voiced allows us to explain how poems can manage to address our-worldly concerns even when lacking actual persons whose expressions we encounter in the poems. (shrink)

The U.S. election in November 2016 raised and amplified doubts about first-past-the-post (“plurality rule”) electoral systems. Arguments against plurality rule and for alternatives like preferential voting tend to be consequentialist: it is argued that systems like preferential voting produce different, better outcomes. After briefly noting why the consequentialist case against plurality rule is more complex and contentious than it first appears, I offer an expressive alternative: plurality rule produces actual or apparent dilemmas for voters in ways that are morally objectionable, (...) and avoidable under preferential voting systems. This expressive case against plurality rule is both simpler and more ecumenical than its consequentialist counterpart, and it provides strong reasons to prefer alternatives to plurality rule. Moreover, it suggests a distinct way of evaluating different alternatives like preferential voting. (shrink)

I apply Karl Popper’s conception of critical rationality to the question of personal fulfilment. I show that such fulfilment normally depends upon the person achieving positive freedom, and that positive freedom requires negative freedom, including freedom of expression. If the state has legitimacy, its central duty must be the enforcement of those rules that provide the best prospects for personal fulfilment for the people under its jurisdiction. The state is therefore morally debarred from suppressing (...) class='Hi'>freedom of expression. I consider and rebut arguments from falsity, harm, offence, and democratic principles, which are intended to show that the state should prohibit the expression of some types of content. I go on to argue that typical university speech codes are incompatible with the aims of an institution of higher education. (shrink)

It is commonly claimed that, when a constituent is the focus of an occurrence of a sentence, certain alternatives to that constituent are relevant to our understanding of the sentence. Normally these are alternatives to the denotation of the focused constituent. However, Krifka (2007) briefly discusses the notion of expression focus, where the alternatives are linguistic items. Yet an adequate account of expression focus has not been given within the literature. This is despite the fact that it holds (...) the potential to provide analyses of several important metalinguistic phenomena, including metalinguistic negotiation, metalinguistic negation and embedded pejorative expressions. This paper provides an account of expression focus and shows the explanatory power it holds with respect to metalinguistic phenomena. (shrink)

This paper presents a logical characterization of coalgebraic behavioral equivalence. The characterization is given in terms of coalgebraic modal logic, an abstract framework for reasoning about, and specifying properties of, coalgebras, for an endofunctor on the category of sets. Its main feature is the use of predicate liftings which give rise to the interpretation of modal operators on coalgebras. We show that coalgebraic modal logic is adequate for reasoning about coalgebras, that is, behaviorally equivalent states cannot be distinguished by formulas (...) of the logic. Subsequently, we isolate properties which also ensure expressiveness of the logic, that is, logical and behavioral equivalence coincide. (shrink)

With increased frequency, reproductive technologies are placing prospective parents in the position of choosing whether to bring a disabled child into the world. The most well-known objection to the act of “selecting against disability” is known as the Expressivist Argument. The argument claims that such acts express a negative or disrespectful message about disabled people and that one has a moral reason to avoid sending such messages. We have two primary aims in this essay. The first is to critically examine (...) the standard Expressivist Argument, which we analyze in terms of the expression of ableist attitudes. We distinguish three interpretations of the argument and argue that each version faces serious objections. Our second aim is to articulate two closely related arguments that also pertain to expressed ableist attitudes. The Expressive Harms Argument maintains that there is a moral reason to avoid actions that give rise to the perception of ableist attitudes in cases where this is likely to have negative consequences for disabled people. The Ableist Motivation Argument speaks against selecting against disability in cases where one would be motivated by ableist attitudes. While these two arguments face various objections, we seek to establish that they are more promising than the most natural interpretations of the Expressivist Argument. (shrink)

Upon completing Marthe Atwater Chandler's Expressing the Heart's Intent: Explorations in Chinese Aesthetics I am struck by how much can be gleaned retroactively from the title. At the outset the title indeed made me somewhat wary, having seen how on many occasions Chinese philosophical terms become mangled in English-language translation in ways that unnecessarily import, either implicitly or explicitly, misleading conceptual frameworks. Words like "expressing," "heart," and "intent" all triggered various suspicions on my part. Fortunately, these suspicions were quickly addressed, (...) as Chandler advances an adept reading of the shi yan zhi 詩言志 conceit so central to Chinese aesthetics since its introduction in the... (shrink)

The vision underlying the development of the Semantic Web is that the whole complex of our knowledge forms a huge semantic network, which should be represented and made explicit by means of languages such as RDF, RDFS or OWL. However, these languages have important expressive limits, since none of them reaches the full expressive power of a first-order language. As a result, large parts of our knowledge—in particular, mathematical and scientific theories—cannot currently be made available on the Semantic Web as (...) linked data, not even in principle. In this work, we are going to define FOOL (first-order ontology language), a new ontological language compatible with RDF, which allows the expression of any formula of a first-order language as a connected RDF graph. FOOL is as expressive as a first-order language, but unlike it, its statements do not have a serialized form. Instead, like a RDF statement, each statement of a FOOL knowledge base is a connected graph, and different statements link to each other through the meaningful nodes they share. In this way, the semantic relationships between statements are made explicit, and given FOOL’s compatibility with RDF, virtually the entire complex of our knowledge can in principle be made available on the Semantic Web as linked data. The semantic relationships made explicit by a FOOL ontology are not those of logical consequence, but they are meaning connections between statements represented as graphs. It is not far-fetched to think that, by devising appropriate measures of the linking patterns between statements, such relations can be mechanized, thus opening the way to new and possibly unforeseen results and applications. (shrink)

In the big data era, sequencing technology has produced a large number of biological sequencing data. Different views of the cancer genome data provide sufficient complementary information to explore genetic activity. The identification of differentially expressed genes from multiview cancer gene data is of great importance in cancer diagnosis and treatment. In this paper, we propose a novel method for identifying differentially expressed genes based on tensor robust principal component analysis, which extends the matrix method to the processing of multiway (...) data. To identify differentially expressed genes, the plan is carried out as follows. First, multiview data containing cancer gene expression data from different sources are prepared. Second, the original tensor is decomposed into a sum of a low-rank tensor and a sparse tensor using TRPCA. Third, the differentially expressed genes are considered to be sparse perturbed signals and then identified based on the sparse tensor. Fourth, the differentially expressed genes are evaluated using Gene Ontology and Gene Cards tools. The validity of the TRPCA method was tested using two sets of multiview data. The experimental results showed that our method is superior to the representative methods in efficiency and accuracy aspects. (shrink)

Music is not representational; nevertheless, it has expressive content, and one of the perennial puzzles of musical aesthetics is to show what that means and why it is important. Certain intuitions about the matter are expounded and systematized, and tests laid down that any theory of expression must pass. In particular, expression must be connected to musical understanding: it is part of what is understood by the person who understands what he hears.

This conversation-analytic study examines a type of action accomplished through a reversed polarity question responding to initial assessments in everyday Japanese conversation. This study demonstrates that RPQs deployed in this specific position express alternative views to initial assessments by appealing to participants’ common sense or knowledge and index participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable. These RPQs do not simply convey the speakers’ disagreement with initial assessments, however, but are designed to be situated as ‘new’ first assessments by triggering the (...) conditional relevance of the question–answer adjacency pair, thereby inviting agreement from the prior speaker. This study also reveals two commonly observable practices by which the speaker secures the participants’ epistemic symmetry over a particular assessable and thereby creates the basis for producing RPQs. It is further shown that these two practices can affect the strength of disaffiliation expressed by the RPQ. (shrink)

Video game spaces have vastly expanded the built environment, offering new worlds to explore and inhabit. Like buildings, cities, and gardens before them, these virtual environments express meaning and communicate ideas and affects through the spatial experiences they afford. Drawing on the emerging field of embodied cognition, this book explores the dynamic interplay between mind, body, and environment that sits at the heart of spatial communication. To capture the wide diversity of forms that spatial expression can take, the book (...) builds a comparative analysis of twelve video games across four types of space, spanning ones designed for exploration and inhabitation, kinetic enjoyment, enacting a situated role, and enhancing perception. Together, these diverse virtual environments suggest the many ways that video games enhance and extend our embodied lives."--Publisher's website. (shrink)

In this article I articulate the Theory of Affective Pragmatics, which combines insights from the Basic Emotion View and the Behavioral Ecology View of emotional expressions. My core thesis is that emotional expressions are ways of manifesting one’s emotions but also of representing states of affairs, directing other people’s behaviors, and committing to future courses of actions. Since these are some of the main things we can do with language, my article’s take home message is that, from a communicative point (...) of view, much of what we can do with language we can also do with nonverbal emotional expressions. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Gilbert Ryle’s account of misleading expressions, which is rightly considered a milestone in the history of analytic philosophy, is continuous with Brentano’s. Not only did they identify roughly the same classes of misleading expressions, but their analyses are driven by a form of ontological parsimony which sharply contrasts with rival views in the Brentano School, like those of Meinong and Husserl. Section 1 suggests that Ryle and Brentano share a similar notion of analysis. Section 2 spells (...) out the notion of misleading expression by means of the surface-grammar/truth-conditions distinction, which I argue is implicit in their accounts. Section 3 zooms in on a specific class of misleading expressions, namely expressions about ficta. Finally, Section 4 draws the consequences of what precedes for a correct understanding of the notion of meaning. (shrink)

Le droit culturel international a été renforcé grâce à l'adoption par l'Unesco de la Convention sur la protection et la promotion de la diversité des expressions culturelles. Ce texte relie la culture à la coopération internationale, au développement et aux droits de l'homme. Sa mise en oeuvre devient un véritable défi, et son suivi se révèle une nécessité. La diversité culturelle, déjà objet d'étude de l'anthropologie, doit à présent devenir un concept politique et être mis en pratique. La culture doit (...) être envisagée comme vecteur de la vie politique, économique et sociale, tant au niveau national qu'au niveau des rapports entre les différentes aires culturelles. Réfléchir à la problématique de l'Autre, gérer l'acculturation et la cohabitation culturelle devient une question politique, et la gestion des rapports entre culture, communication, société et politique requiert la construction de théories spécifiques et adaptées.The international cultural right has been strengthened with the adoption by the Unesco Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. This text connects culture international cooperation, development and human rights. Its implementation is a challenge, and its follow-up reveals a necessity. Cultural diversity, already an object of study of anthropology, has now become a political concept and be put into practice. Culture should be considered as a vector of political, economic and social, both nationally and relationships between different cultural areas. Consider the problem of the Other, managing acculturation and cultural cohabitation becomes a political issue, and the management of the relationship between culture and communication, society and politics requires the construction of specific theories and adapted. (shrink)

Many mechanisms now exist forconsumers to express progressive values inpurchasing decisions. Although demand for suchgoods has grown, these goods remain the purviewof small niche markets. Focusing on the marketfor agricultural goods (and the choice betweenthe paradigms of industrialized versussustainable agriculture), this paper discussesthree major reasons (market failures, entrybarriers, and biased policies) why it isdifficult for consumers to express their valuesfor a more sustainable system in this way, andwhy policy change is needed to create a fairerplaying field. The current policy, voluntarylabeling, (...) is inadequate. A new set of policies,including taxes and subsidies to correct marketfailures, is needed to create opportunities forconsumers to support values such as health,community, and stewardship. (shrink)

The term 'referring expression' is often used without definition, and models of referring usually ignore the question of how NP's are recognized as referring expressions in discourse. In this paper, I review some relevant distinctions from the research in generics and, on that basis, provide a definition of referring expressions as specific and non-kind-referring noun phrases. I discuss some complications to the definition. Using Kronfeld's model of referring as my framework, I discuss the interaction of the recognition of referring (...) expressions and the recognition of relevant identification criteria. I propose that all present suggestions for identification constraints fall into three groups, and argue that the recognition of referring expressions always depends on the recognition of some identification constraints. On this basis, I extend the framework with procedural information. (shrink)