Contending discourses underlie many of the worlds most intractable conflicts, producing misery and violence. This is especially true in the post-9/11 world. However, contending discourses can also open the way to greater dialogue in global civil society and across states and international organizations. This possibility holds even for the most murderous sorts of conflicts in deeply divided societies. In this timely and original book, John Dryzek examines major contemporary conflicts in terms of clashing discourses. Topics covered include the alleged clash (...) of civilizations; societies divided by ethnicity, nationality, or religion; economic globalization versus resistance; plus an in-depth discussion of the 'war on terror'. Dryzek concludes by highlighting the limitations of current neoconservative and cosmopolitan approaches, arguing that only deliberative global politics offers unprecedented new possibilities for democratic engagement in the international system. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, politics, philosophy, and sociology. (shrink)

In this article we argue that discourse structure constrains the set ofpossible constituents in a discourse that can provide the relevantcontext for structuring information in a target sentence, whileinformation structure critically constrains discourse structureambiguity. For the speaker, the discourse structure provides a set of possible contexts for continuation while information structure assignment is independent of discourse structure. For the hearer, the information structure of a sentence together with discourse structure instructs dynamic semantics how rhematic (...) information should be used to update the meaning representation of the discourse. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysis (CDA) and other forms of discourse analysis are regularly used to study identity, but rarely do researchers systematically compare and contrast them with other theories to identify exactly what a discursive approach contributes. In this paper, we take the example of a particular identity – the older worker – and systematically compare the contribution of CDA with other approaches, including economics, labour market research, gerontology and cultural studies. In so doing, we show the kinds of (...) research questions that CDA can address, which other theories grappling with identity cannot. In this way, we hope to delineate more clearly what CDA is, to identify specifically how it contributes to the study of identity, and to show what it can do, compared to other theories. Cynthia Hardy has been Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne since 1998. Previously, she was a professor in the Faculty of Management at McGill University in Canada. Her main research interests revolve around the study of power and politics in organizations, organizational discourse theory and critical discourse analysis, and she is particularly interested in how power and politics occur within a larger discursive context. She recently published Discourse Analysis: Investigating Processes of Social Construction with Nelson Phillips, as well as co-editing a special issue of Organization Studies on organizational discourse and the Sage Handbook of Organizational Discourse. In total, she has published 12 books and edited volumes, including the Handbook of Organization Studies, published by Sage, which won the George R. Terry Book Award at the 1997 Academy of Management. She has written over 60 journal articles and book chapters, and her work has appeared in many leading international journals, including the Academy of Management Journal, Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Human Relations, Organization Science and California Management. Susan Ainsworth is currently a lecturer in work and organizational studies at the University of Sidney. Her research interests include gender and employment, older workers, critical organization studies, discourse analysis, the social construction of identity, the impact of information and communication technologies on work and organizations and public policy. She has published in Organization Studies (2003), Gender, Work & Organization (2002) and Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science (2001) and has a joint chapter (with Cynthia Hardy) on discourse and identity in the Sage Handbook on Organizational Discourse Analysis (2004). (shrink)

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions-including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language -exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, Silk develops an improved contextualist theory of (...) CR-expressions within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The Discourse Contextualist framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. The similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the variety of ways in which context affects and is affected by uses of language. Discourse Contextualism provides a fruitful framework for theorizing about various broader issues in philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Government, media, and medical accounts of Emma Goldman converged to create her public presence in the U.S. as a "dangerous individual." The prevailing discourses constituted Goldman as violent, utilizing her alleged menace to distract attention from far more egregious violence against labor by state and corporate forces. Goldman responded by denying, confronting, and redirecting the alarmed gaze toward greater risks left underarticulated in hegemonic accounts. Goldman's bold confrontations with authorities constituted a kind of anarchist parrhesia, fearless speech, a relentless truth-telling (...) practice that risked her own security in pursuit of her "beautiful ideal." The labor of remembering America's history of class violence hones our attention to the complex discursive processes by which some historical facts come to count in prevailing narratives, while others fade into obscurity. (shrink)

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) and appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in American English. In three self-paced reading experiments, we examined whether both RRCs and ARCs interfere with the matrix clause (...) content and give rise to the agreement attraction effect. While the standard attraction effect was consistently observed in the baseline RRC structures, the effect varied in the ARC structures. These results collectively suggest that discourse structure indeed constrains syntactic dependency resolution. Most importantly, we argue that what is at stake is not the static discourse structure properties at the global sentence level. Instead, attention should be given to the incremental update of the discourse structure in terms of which discourse questions are active at any given moment of a discourse. The current findings have implications for understanding the way discourse structure, specifically the active state of discourse questions, constrains memory retrieval. (shrink)

Reasonable disagreement is one of the most critical issues in contemporary political philosophy, especially within liberal-democratic constitutionalism. In emphasising the role of disagreement in the relationship between discourse and politics, many scholars such as Jeremy Waldron and Richard Bellamy – against the background of the Rawlsian idea of “reasonable pluralism” – defend the thesis of moral disagreement as the core of political deliberation. By refusing the idea of neutrality, these authors maintain that political discourse cannot be established by (...) simply removing our moral disagree- ment on political values. This essay engages the issue of “discourse and politics” by focusing on some relevant topics: the deliberative conception of democracy; the Rawlsian idea of public reason as a forum for deliberation and discourse; the fact of disagreement and its inuence on the deliberative process. In order to investigate such issues, the paper follows three ways. First, it aims at examining John Rawls’ idea of public reason, by presenting it as a tool to resolve reasonable disagreement in the context of constitutional essentials. The second section deals with reasonable disagreement from a liberal point of view, by trying to focus on some critical remarks which Bellamy raises against Rawlsian political lib- eralism. The third section briefly analyses Waldron’s arguments in defence of reasonable disagreement, as a critique of the deliberative model of democracy. From this perspective, Waldron presents deliberative democracy’s failure in considering political dissent and moral disagreement as two problematic aspects of democracy. (shrink)

Eristic has been studied more and more intensively in recent years in philosophy, law, communication theory, logic, proof theory, and A.I. Nevertheless, the modern origins of eristic, which almost all current researchers see in the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, are considered to be a theory of the illegitimate use of logical and rhetorical devices. Thus, eristic seems to violate the norms of discourse ethics. In this paper, I argue that this interpretation of eristic is based on prejudices that contradict the (...) original intention of modern eristic. Eristic is not an art of being right or winning an argument, but an art of protecting oneself from the one who deliberately violates norms of discourse ethics to gain argumentative acceptance. For this reason, eristic must be seen as a discipline of Enlightenment philosophy and a correlate of discourse ethics. Especially in the age of alternative facts and post-factual politics, this makes eristic a valuable discipline. (shrink)

Discourse on Thinking questions that must occur to us the moment we manage to see a familiar situation in unfamiliar light.

Populist Discourse: Recasting Populism Research offers a refreshingly original discourse theory perspective on populist phenomena. Reading this book will help you learn the historical genealogy of significant populist phenomena from the end of the 19th century onwards and the main conceptual/theoretical accounts established to analyze them. Specifics on how mainstream conceptualizations of populism both in academia and public discourse are discussed in order to map new promising avenues for research beyond. Inspired by the works of Ernesto Laclau (...) and Chantal Mouffe, directions and challenges that open themselves up once conceptual reflexivity, theoretical awareness and historical alertness are established as guiding principles in populism research. Accessible language without sacrificing attention to detail, bibliographical support and a focus on the future orientation of populism research, The Populist Scandal is written for an advanced undergraduate and graduate-level school political theory reader, as well as for their professors. Due to its interdisciplinary character, it will appeal to various politically-informed area studies, and the broad field of ideology and discourse analysis. (shrink)

The so-called “conciliatory” norm in epistemology and meta-ethics requires that an agent, upon encountering peer disagreement with her judgment, lower her confidence about that judgment. But whether agents actually abide by this norm is unclear. Although confidence is excessively researched in the empirical sciences, possible effects of disagreement on confidence have been understudied. Here, we target this lacuna, reporting a study that measured confidence about moral beliefs before and after exposure to moral discourse about a controversial issue. Our findings (...) indicate that participants do not abide by the conciliatory norm. Neither do they conform to a rival “steadfast” norm that demands their confidence to remain the same. Instead, moral discourse seems to boost confidence. Interestingly, we also find a confidence boost for factual beliefs, and a correlation between the extremity of moral views and confidence. One possible explanation of our findings is that when engaging in moral discourse participants become more extreme in their opinions, which leads them to become more confident about them, or vice versa: they become more confident and in turn more extreme. Although our work provides initial evidence for the former mechanism, further research is needed for a better understanding of confidence and moral discourse. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysts are being pulled in two directions. On one side, in the age of validity, inter-rater reliability and evidence-based research, it can seem subversive when researchers ‘tell stories’ (rather than ‘write reports’, ‘produce findings’ or ‘demonstrate effectiveness’). On the other side, public relations departments encourage researchers to use ‘storytelling’ techniques to engage public audiences. In this paper, I draw on social and cultural theory to assume that critical discourse analyses are always already narrative. I propose that (...) we embrace (rather than hide) the storytelling qualities of our research. Using similar strategies for all audiences, we undermine traditional power hierarchies between researchers and ‘the public’. Critical discourse analysis then performs its own critical approach. The paper also explores the potential of adopting a ‘carrier bag theory’ of storytelling (Le Guin) rather than telling ‘hero’ stories and reflects on the epistemological, relational and political work done by storytellers in critical discourse studies. (shrink)

It is widely held within contemporary metaethics that there is a lack of linguistic support for evaluative expressivism. On the contrary, it seems that the predictions that expressivists make about evaluative discourse are not borne out. An instance of this is the so-called problem of missing Moorean infelicity. Expressivists maintain that evaluative statements express non-cognitive states of mind in a similar manner to how ordinary descriptive language expresses beliefs. Conjoining an ordinary assertion that p with the denial of being (...) in the corresponding belief state famously gives rise to Moorean infelicity:?? It’s raining but I don’t believe that it’s raining. If expressivists are right, then conjoining evaluative statements with the denial of being in the relevant non-cognitive state of mind should give rise to similar infelicity. However, as several theorists have pointed out, this does not seem to be the case. Statements like the following are not infelicitous: Murder is wrong but I don’t disapprove of it. In this paper, I argue that evaluative statements express the kind of states that are attributed by ‘find’-constructions in English and that these states are non-cognitive in nature. This addresses the problem of missing Moorean infelicity and, more generally, goes to show that there are linguistic facts which support expressivism about evaluative discourse. (shrink)

It is widely believed that open and public speech is at the heart of the democratic ideal. Public discourse is instrumentally epistemically valuable for identifying good policies, as well as necessary for resisting domination (e.g., by vocally challenging decision-makers, demanding public justifications, and using democratic speech to hold leaders accountable). But in our highly polarized and socially fragmented political environment, an increasingly pressing question is: do actual democratic societies live up to the ideal of inclusive public speech? In this (...) essay, I explore Maxime Lepoutre's defence of discursive democracy from the challenge of defective public discourse. I argue that political ignorance, dogmatism, and social fragmentation present more formidable challenges to discursive democracy than Lepoutre acknowledges. As a result, his account occasionally veers from warranted optimism to unwarranted idealism. (shrink)

Critical discourse analysis is a useful and productive qualitative methodology but has been underutilized within nursing research. In order to redress this deficiency the research presented in this article represents an exploration of the way in which critical discourse analysis may be applied to the analysis of public debates around policy for nursing practice. In this article the author discusses the history of the application of critical discourse analysis and provides an example of its application to the (...) debate around the use of nurse practitioners within the Australian healthcare system. (shrink)

ABSTRACTAlthough dominant discourses of various kinds are frequently reproduced on talk radio, the fundamentally collaborative nature of the medium also means that it is able to serve as a channel...

(1995). Discoursing on method in the university world of Descartes's France 1 . British Journal for the History of Philosophy: Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 3-28.

Discourse analysis is a relatively recent form of inquiry without a strict step‐by‐step method. The methodology of discourse analysis has a longer history in Continental Europe than in other countries.1 The complex theoretical assumptions, the goals and the target (discourse) have been explicated, but the methodology may be applied in different ways. This paper will describe discourse analysis and give examples of some of the possible variations. It is the claim of this paper that discourse (...) analysis deserves consideration as a methodology for nursing inquiry. (shrink)

Fictional Discourse: A Radical Fictionalist Semantics combines the insight of linguistic and philosophical semantics with the study of fictional language. Its central idea is familiar to anyone exposed to the ways of narrative fiction, namely the notion of a fictional teller. Starting with premises having to do with fictional names such as 'Holmes' or 'Emma', Stefano Predelli develops Radical Fictionalism, a theory that is subsequently applied to central themes in the analysis of fiction. Among other things, he discusses the (...) distinction between storyworlds and narrative peripheries, the relationships between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrative, narrative time, unreliability, and closure. The final chapters extend Radical Fictionalism to critical discourse, as Predelli introduces the ideas of critical and biased retelling, and pauses on the relationships between Radical Fictionalism and talk about literary characters. (shrink)

In his works from the past decade, Menachem Fisch offered an analysis of a crucial distinction between two modes of rationalized transformation: an intra-framework transformation and an inter-framework one, the latter entailing a revolutionary shift of the framework itself. In this article, I analyze the attempt to produce such a framework transition in the tradition of Jewish Halakha (i.e., Jewish Law) by one of the key figures in its history, Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), and to explore how this transition was rationalized (...) and promoted by the utilization of crisis discourse. Using discourse analysis, I analyze the introduction to Maimonides’ great legal code, Mishneh Torah, and explore the modes by which he sought to establish, install and stabilize a homogenous and centralistic legal order at the center of which will lie one – that is, his own – Halakhic book. (shrink)

In response to William Rehg’s and Barbara Fultner’s criticisms, I clarify and extend some arguments found in my book Reflection Revisited. I first redescribe how Hegel’s critique of Kant’s theory of reflection opens up the possibility for an intersubjective reflection. Habermas, I argue, can exploit such a theory of reflection since it is immune from the problems attendant on a ‘theory of consciousness’. Second, I address how by means of meta-discourses temporal claims can be formalized for the pragmatics Habermas is (...) developing. Finally, I take up Fultner’s suggestion that Robert Brandom provides a fruitful point of comparison with Habermas’s theory, and argue that norms are in fact formed and critiqued on the basis of - as Brandom describes - the modal capabilities or incompatibilities of their entailments. (shrink)

Discourses of interdisciplinary health‐care are becoming more centralised in the context of global healthcare practices, which are increasingly based on multisystem interventions. As with all dominant discourses that are narrated into being, many others have been silenced and decentralised in the process. While questions of the nature and constituents of interdisciplinary practices continue to be debated and rehearsed, this paper focuses on the discourse of interdisciplinary collaboration using psychiatry as an example, with the aim of highlighting competing and alternative (...) discourses. The fundamental premise of this paper is that collaborative relationships form the basis of interdisciplinary practices in psychiatry. Through a critical engagement and a deconstructive reading of the pretext, context and subtexts of interdisciplinarity, we interrogate the concept of interdisciplinary practice within psychiatry. We contend that an important part of understanding and further conceptualising the discourse is through fracturing it. This process is illustrated in the successive stages of our conceptual map of discourse development: establishing, maintaining and developing discourses. An understanding of interdisciplinary practice is not only critical for psychiatry, but also offers important insights into the performance of collaborative failures and indeed successes across nursing and allied health professions. (shrink)

Within discourse theory, language is seen as constitutive of reality. Furthermore, facts and values are viewed as inseparable. This has consequences for business ethics. In this paper the relationship between discourse theory and business ethics is discussed. Both the descriptive and prescriptive aspects of business ethics are taken into account. Furthermore, an example of an empirical study is presented. A discourse analysis is conducted to answer the questions of how bankers in Holland conceptualize and thus treat their (...) customers and whether there are differences between the largest three banks. The article contains the description of five different discourses on customers within the banks. (shrink)

Based on our respective research programs (psychiatry, forensic psychiatry, public health, HIV/AIDS, harm reduction) this article aims to use purposely non‐conventional means to present the substantial contribution of poststructuralist perspectives to knowledge development in nursing science in general and in our current research in particular. More specifically, we call on the work of Michel Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari to politicize nursing science using examples from our empirical research programs with marginal and often highly marginalized populations. We discuss the concepts (...) of power, discourse, and resistance to illustrate the essential contribution of poststructuralism to marginal, even “nomadic”, nursing research. (shrink)

Excerpt from Discourses of Epictetus Thus we owe to an accident the existence of these "Discourses," which form one of the world's vital books. The "Manual" is a collection of aphorisms taken substantially from the larger work. Epictetus was not the founder of a new philosophy. Zeno, the originator of the Stoic system, was his master, and Zeno himself derived his fundamental principles from Antisthenes, the author of the cynic school and the friend of Socrates. The Greeks are the creators (...) of philosophy, and their earliest attempt at systematic thought was an effort to understand Nature. But they soon learned that it was necessary to begin from within, since to know anything man must first know himself. Thus the problem of the conduct of life forced itself upon them. This is the constant preoccupation of Socrates, who was born five hundred years before Epictetus. He taught that the good is to be sought not in outward things, nor in the indulgence of appetite, but in virtue, which for him, however, is an intellectual rather than a moral habit. His calm and rational temper led him to the belief that man always acts in accordance with his knowledge, does what insight shows him to be useful to himself. He who does evil, does it from a mistake of judgment. Sin is error. Virtue, then, being chiefly knowledge, may be taught, and to teach it is the philosophers life work. But Socrates moved in a circle from which there was no escape. To know the useful is virtue. But what is the useful? That which makes for virtue. Antisthenes does not attempt to determine the meaning of the good. He simply declares that virtue is the only good, and, in his view, virtue is the intelligent conduct of life. Right life is the essential good; virtue is its own reward, and one need not look to its results. It is, in the midst of whatever vicissitudes, a sure possession. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works. (shrink)

Bilingual Discourse and Cross-Cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India. Edited by Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani with an introduction by Dominic Goodall. Collection Indologie, vol. 121. Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry / École Française d’Extrême-Orient, 2013. Pp. x + 466. Rs. 900, €38.

This paper examines voluntary corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting as a form of moral discourse. It explores how alternative stakeholder perspectives lead to differing perceptions of the process and content of responsible reporting. We contrast traditional stakeholder theory, which views stakeholders as external parties having a social contract with corporations, with an emerging perspective, which views interaction among corporations and constituents as relational in nature. This moves the stakeholder from an external entity to one that is integral to corporate (...) activity. We explore how these alternative stakeholder perspectives give rise to different normative demands for stakeholder engagement, managerial processes, and communication. We discuss models of CSR reporting and accountability: EMAS, the ISO 14000 series, SA8000, AA1000, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Copenhagen Charter. We explore how these models relate to the stakeholder philosophies and find that they are largely consistent with the traditional atomistic view but fall far short of the demands for moral engagement prescribed by a relational stakeholder perspective. Adopting a relational view requires stakeholder engagement not only in prescribing reporting requirements, but also in discourse relating to core aspects of the corporation such as mission, values, and management systems. Habermas’ theory of communicative action provides guidelines for engaging stakeholders in this moral discourse. (shrink)

Discourse, in general, and gist reasoning specifically, are valuable tools to explore cognitive brain health across the life span. Gist reasoning is a higher-order cognitive function that entails a constructive/integrative process in which explicit content of the stimuli is combined with personal knowledge to generate meaning that is transformed and personally salient. In this article, we discuss gist reasoning ability as a marker of cognitive brain health and its potential in differentiating normal cognitive brain health from brain diseases. We (...) highlight the benefits of gist reasoning training as an approach to strengthening cognitive health across the life span. (shrink)

This edited work presents a unique and authoritative look at morality - its development within the individual, its evolution within society, and its place within the law. The contributors represent some of the foremost authorities in these fields, and the book represents a collection of essays presented at a symposium on social constructivism and morality.

ABSTRACTWork on religious discourse is still limited and linguistic research on preaching scarce. The present study makes explicit the ways that pastors in the conservative Protestant Christian chu...

Discourse analysis has been introduced into nursing research as an approach which has the potential to offer new perspectives and to pose new questions to taken‐for‐granted assumptions. However, critique has arisen that when applied to nursing studies, the epistemological foundation of the discourse analysis is often overlooked. It is furthermore claimed that the methodological inspiration does not lead to any new insights and that these studies can hardly be differentiated from more traditional studies. This study supports this critique, (...) arguing that the challenges of implementing discourse analysis in nursing research reflect a dominant pattern of thought in the discourse of the nursing profession that have held sway throughout the last century. We argue that this pattern of thought stems from the Western philosophy of consciousness and the conception of the sovereign subject. By applying a discourse analytical perspective to the discourse of the nursing profession itself, this study elucidates the challenges of applying discourse analysis in nursing research. (shrink)

In the discourse of the knowledge-based economy, the link between creativity and innovation is usually taken for granted. However, not only is this link of recent date, it joins together two diametrically opposed concepts: the economic concept of innovation and the humanistic concept of creativity. In research too, there is a lack of enquiry into the nature of the processes of creativity and innovation and into how these processes are similar yet different. Building on the original insights of Henri (...) Poincaré and Joseph Schumpeter, I present the hypothesis that creativity and innovation are similar in nature, not in regard to knowledge or skills, but in that both are ways of relating to the novel. My findings suggest, meanwhile, that creativity and innovation differ in that creativity is about experiencing the novel in the creative process, whereas innovation is about willing the novel as a strategy for the innovative process. Furthermore, my findings suggest that there exists a structural similarity between creativity and innovation and Aristotle’s concepts of practical and philosophical wisdom, in that innovation is a form of practical wisdom in regard to the novel, whereas creativity is a form of philosophical wisdom in regard to the novel. (shrink)

The Irish Republic's economic success story has been simultaneously regarded as antithetical to and indicative of neoliberal hegemony. The question of the neoliberal pedigree of the Irish case is explored here from the perspective of mediatized representations of political economy. The paper's argument is advanced in three distinct stages. First, it outlines a theoretical and methodological rationale for the analysis itself. Second, it formulates a summary account of neoliberalism as discourse and ideology, introducing a key analytical distinction between ‘transparent’ (...) and ‘euphemized’ neoliberal discourses. Third, it presents an empirical overview of how neoliberal assumptions are articulated through mediatized representations of political economy. The article shows how the ‘Celtic Tiger’ can be understood as a case of neoliberal hegemony, as long as it is recognised that neoliberalism is hegemonically constituted through a plurality of discursive forms and rhetorical strategies. In addition, the paper highlights the constitutive role of media representation, especially the media rhetoric of Irish political leaders, in the production and reproduction of an Irish neoliberalism. (shrink)

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Socratic Discourses" by Plato, Xenophon. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

We argue that an adequate treatment of verb phrase anaphora must depart in two major respects from the standard approaches. First of all, VP anaphors cannot be resolved by simply identifying the anaphoric VP with an antecedent VP. The resolution process must establish a syntactic/semantic parallelism between larger units that the VPs occur in. Secondly, discourse structure has a significant influence on the reference possibilities of VPA. This influence must be accounted for.We propose a treatment which meets these requirements. (...) It builds on a discourse grammar which characterizes discourse cohesion by means of a syntactic/semantic matching procedure which recognizes parallel structures in discourse. It turns out that this independently motivated procedure yields the resolution of VPA as a side effect. (shrink)

What are ethical judgments about? And what is their relation to practice? How can ethical judgment aspire to objectivity? The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of interest in metaethics, placing questions such as these about the nature and status of ethical judgment at the very center of contemporary moral philosophy. Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches is a unique anthology which collects important recent work, much of which is not easily available elsewhere, on core metaethical issues. (...) Reinvigorated naturalist moral realism and the various versions of moral realism, as well as irrealist, expressivist, and neo-Kantian constructivist theories are all represented in this fine collection, constituting a rich array of approaches to contemporary moral philosophy's most fundamental debates. An extensive introduction by Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton is also included, making this volume the most comprehensive and up-to-date work of its kind. Moral Discourse is ideally suited for use in courses in contemporary ethics, ethical theory, and metaethics. (shrink)

The extant literature on discourse comprehension distinguishes between two types of texts: narrative and expository. Narrative discourse tells readers a story by giving them an account of events; the narration informs and/or persuades the readership by using textual elements such as theme, plot, and characters. Expository discourse explains or informs the readership by using concepts and techniques such as definition, sequence, categorization, and cause-effect relations. The present study is based on two experiments. In Experiment 1, we compared (...) the two discourse types to examine if college students would be better at extracting the meanings of novel words from one of the two types of discourse structure than from the other. The findings indicated that participants were significantly better at inferring the meaning of novel words from narrative compared to expository discourse. In Experiment 2, we examined the number of situation models that a reader is required to mentally construct, as a possible characteristic that influences the difficulty of learning new word meaning within narrative discourse. Contrary to intuition, fewer novel words were learned in a single-situation, as opposed to a multi-situation model condition, suggesting that the additional inferencing needed to construct multiple models also promotes word learning. Results are discussed with respect to how the structure of written discourse can facilitate word learning in a reader’s native language. Implications for education and assessment are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper describes the discourses underlying nursing teachers’ talk about their own norm‐critical competence. Norm criticism is an approach that promotes awareness and criticism of the norms and power structures that exert an excluding effect in society in general and in the healthcare encounter in particular. Given the unequal relationships that can exist in healthcare, for example relationships shaped by racism, sexism and classism, a norm‐critical approach to nursing education would help illuminate these matters. The studied empirical material consisted of (...) focus group interviews. Nursing teachers discussed their norm‐critical competence based on the university course “Norm‐Aware Caring” in which they had recently participated. Through a critical discourse analysis, three discourses were identified in their talk, all of which had the potential to disrupt traditional, normative nursing education. However, in all three discourses there was an underlying discourse of normality, clearly positioning the teachers as exemplifying the “normal.” The binary constructed between normality and otherness contradicts a basic tenet of the norm‐critical approach and may hamper the development of genuine norm‐critical competence in nursing education. (shrink)