Search results for "Philosophy of Language"
showing 10 items of 81 documents
Default Semantics and the architecture of the mind
2011
In this paper, I explore the relationship between Relevance Theory and Jaszczolt's Default Semantics, framing this debate within the picture of massive modularity tempered by the idea of brain plasticity (Perkins, 2007). While Relevance Theory focuses on processing (see cognitive efforts and contextual effects interplay), Default Semantics focuses on types of sources from which addressees draw information and types of processes that interact in providing it. In particular, I argue that Relevance Theory interacts with default semantics by standardizing inferences which are ultimately compressed (to use a term by Bach, 1998) into a default semantics. I briefly discuss potential obstacles to t…
The Semantics of Musical Topoi
2015
The article introduces an empirical approach to studying music’s extrinsic meanings, based on the idea of musical topos as a set of musical entities that is delimited and furnished with meaning by extramusical associations in a listener population. The proposed methodology involves free, associative responses as well as responses on semantic variables addressing the imagery. After deriving potential topical structures for a given musical domain from the quantitative results, the structures are substantiated by using them to guide a rule-based, qualitative analysis of the free responses. The approach allows a view to the topical organization of a musical domain in which the identity of each …
Conceptual representations of actions for autonomous robots
2001
An autonomous robot involved in long and complex missions should be able to generate, update and process its own plans of action. In this perspective, it is not plausible that the meaning of the representations used by the robot is given from outside the system itself. Rather, the meaning of internal symbols must be firmly anchored to the world through the perceptual abilities and the overall activities of the robot. According to these premises, in this paper we present an approach to action representation that is based on a "conceptual" level of representation, acting as an intermediate level between symbols and data coming from sensors. Symbolic representations are interpreted by mapping …
Block 21 and the Pensabilità of the Representation of Auschwitz
2012
Abstract Building on the assumption that the Memorial in Honor of Italians Fallen in Nazi Extermination Camps (situated in Auschwitz I, Block 21) expresses the meta-reflexive inclination that strengthened the twentieth century (the capacity of that century to think of itself as a subject), this article aims to highlight and illustrate the dual philosophical significance of the Memorial. From the perspective of the philosophy of history, this philosophical significance, which has a symbolic value, leads us to investigate an organic and historically embodied conception of deportation. From the perspective of the aesthetics of memory, this philosophical meaning offers a new framework for the …
Commenting on Historical Writings in Medieval Latin Europe : A Reconnaissance
2015
Modern scholarship seems to undervalue medieval commentaries on historical writings. This article intends to bring this phenomenon to scholars’ attention by providing a preliminary overview of the forms and subjects of such commentaries. It examines various types of evidence including not only a few commentaries proper (Nicolas Trevet’s on Livy and John of Dąbrówka’s on Vincent of Cracow), but also different apparatus consisting of more or less systematic interlinear and marginal glosses and commentary-like additions to vernacular translations, mostly of Italian and French origin. It begins by considering various consultation-related signs and annotations, such as cross-references. Then, it…
Scattering community
2001
In discussing the cultural history of the 19th century, Walter Benjamin diagnosed the emergence of the modern novel and its form of narration as the sign of a fracturing experience. The split in experience is related to the scattering of a homogeneous idea of space and time, constituted especially during the Enlightenment and in the German historicism. Benjamin's claim reflected the fracturing temporality of modern communities as well as the transformations in the understanding of the meaning of tradition. Here, I begin by discussing Benjamin's conceptions of experience and memory in detail. Secondly, I consider his ideas on history in the framework of challenging the new forms of narratio…
Marginal Thinking Knowledge and Communication in the Postmodern Era
2020
The paradigm of late modernity and postmodernity, characterized by the sheer living manifestation of the limit, assumes the conscience of the indissoluble, by annulling any hypothesis, interrogation or problematization. The fracturing of the self coincides with the fracturing of knowledge, as an effective dialectic movement, or, in other words, as a state of continuity of the thinking, specific to the human being. The knowledge-seeking relation to the world through exclusion, that is featured by late modernity and postmodernism is manifested, in an extreme(marginal) form, by the de-presentisation of the immanent and the transcendent and by imposing the simulation as a global process of crea…
Paul Ricoeur's Surprising Take on Recognition
2011
This essay examines Paul Ricœur’s views on recognition in his book The Course of Recognition. It highlights those aspects that are in some sense surprising, in relation to his previous publications and the general debates on Hegelian Anerkennung and the politics of recognition. After an overview of Ricœur’s book, the paper examines the meaning of “recognition” in Ricœur’s own proposal, in the dictionaries Ricœur uses, and in the contemporary debates. Then it takes a closer look at the ideas of recognition as identification and as “taking as true.” Then it turns to recognition (attestation) of oneself, in light of the distinction between human constants (and the question “What am I?”), and h…
Habermas’ Universal Pragmatics: Theory of Language and Social Theory
2013
Although Habermas’ universal pragmatics has played a marginal role in studies on pragmatics, it can still make an important and meaningful contribution, precisely because it highlights the system of validity claims that lie in speech acts. This type of analysis allows one to consider the dialogic dynamics that engage speakers in the activity of reciprocal giving and asking for reasons for saying and doing things. The reasons why a speaker knows he or she can say what he or she says in the presence of other speakers constitute an essential element of the production of meaning; and reciprocally identification of the speaker’s reasons by the listener is an indispensable condition of the activi…
A decidable word problem without equivalent canonical term rewriting system
1989
We present a weak associative single-axiom system having the following property: the word problem is decidable with an efficient algorithm even though there does not exist any finite equivalent canonical term rewriting system.