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... This natural urge to maximize the truth of what other say is often referred to as the principle of charity (Wilson 1959;Quine 1960;Davidson 1973Davidson -1974. But it is only one of charitable construal. ...
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To determine whether one disagrees with somebody, one must have a sound understanding of what that person is saying. But it is sometimes difficult to distinguish cases of misunderstanding others from cases of substantive disagreement. One can best resolve that quandary by making every effort to understand accurately, and that requires construing what the other person says as charitably as possible. But such charity is more complicated than often recognized, since it applies in several ways: in respect of how others use individual words, what assertions they make, and what inferences they regard as acceptable. And applying charity must rely on how one sees the relevant things; charity is unavoidably by one's own lights. An additional type of charity applies to the background explanatory pictures that sometimes figure in what people say. Construing in respect of one factor can affect how we construe in respect of another. So tradeoffs in how one construes the several factors are sometimes necessary, which can even lead to equally good alternative construals. Charitable construal of our own thoughts also occurs, often unconsciously, in resolving difficulties and, more generally, in guiding and regulating our thought processes.
... In these circumstances, the "cooperative principle" that governs communication ceases (Grice 1975: 45). As a consequence, the persons taking the oath can use the principle of charity to their own advantage (Gauker 1986;Wilson 1959), by uttering a statement that is taken by the hearer to be "such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange, " but failing to comply with these expectation. While the hearer -who performing a speech act s/he was not entitled to -interprets the utterance assuming that the speaker is cooperative, the latter breaches this interpretative principle. ...
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The Holy Scriptures can be considered a specific kind of normative texts, whose use to assess practical moral cases requires interpretation. In the field of ethics, this interpretative problem results in the necessity of bridging the gap between the normative source – moral precepts – and the specific cases. In the history of the Church, this problem was the core of the so-called casuistry, namely the decision-making practice consisting in applying the Commandments and other principles of the Holy Scriptures to specific cases or moral problems. By taking into account the sin of lying, this paper argues that casuistic texts reveal an extremely sophisticated interpretative method, grounded on “pragmatic” contextual and communicative considerations and argumentative structures that resemble the ones used in legal interpretation. These works show how the underspecified biblical text expressing an abstract norm was enriched pragmatically by completing it and modulating its meaning so that it could be used to draw a conclusion in a specific context on a specific case. The mutual interdependence between biblical interpretation, pragmatics, and argumentation sheds light on a much broader phenomenon, namely the pragmatic nature of argumentation.
... Throughout his long and rich philosophical trajectory, we encounter a thorough and intense exploration of this principle and method. 6 Davidson's interest in this notion was sparked by Quine (1960), who in turn borrowed the term 'charity' and the core idea from Wilson (1959). More recently, investigations into the Principle of Charity and charitable or rationalizing interpretation that are particularly relevant to the matters explored here include, among others, Jackman (2003Jackman ( , 2020, Hirsch (2005Hirsch ( , 2009, and Schroeter (2014, 2015). ...
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This paper raises a new form of speaker error objection to the analysis of disputes as metalinguistic negotiations in cases in which disputants reject that analysis. It focuses on an obvious but underexplored form of speaker error: speakers’ misattribution of contents both to others and to themselves. It argues that the analyses of disputes that posit this type of speaker error are uncharitable in three different ways: first, by portraying speakers as mistaken interpreters of their interlocutors; second, by portraying speakers as uncharitable interpreters of their interlocutors; third, by portraying speakers who retract their claims as mistaken interpreters of their own prior utterances. Taken together, these unfavorable consequences weigh significantly against the plausibility of this type of analysis for the cases in question.
... Davidson toma el término deQuine (1960), quién a su vez lo toma deWilson (1959). ...
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En 1962, Wilfred Bion introdujo el concepto de visión binocular en el psicoanálisis con el fin de describir un estado mental de percepción ampliada: la capacidad para transitar de lo consciente a lo inconsciente y viceversa. Dieciséis años después, Hans Loewald, otra figura emblemática de esta disciplina, también pensó en esta noción para caracterizar la vivencia en la que la realidad y la fantasía se experimentan simultánea y separadamente, enfoque que posibilita una comprensión más extensa de ambos fenómenos. Por ello, los editores de este libro, Bárbara Bettocchi y Raúl Fatule, han escogido este concepto para expresar una posible articulación entre dos disciplinas que se aproximan a los mismos fenómenos y que, a su vez, mantienen una estrecha y muchas veces problemática vinculación: el psicoanálisis y la filosofía. Así, esperan que, en el encuentro de sus convergencias y divergencias, ambas disciplinas puedan enriquecerse.
... 7 In her book, The Political is Political: Conformity and the Illusion of Dissent in Contemporary Political Philosophy, Lorna Finlayson offers a sustained analysis and critique of what she terms "the informal norm of philosophic charity" (Finlayson 2015, 69). Although she acknowledges, in hermeneutics, a longstanding practice of charitable or generous interpretation and, in analytic philosophy of language, a formal account of "the principle of charity" (see, for example, Wilson 1959;Davidson 1984Davidson /2001Medina 2003), for Finlayson the informal norm of charity is not straightforwardly connected to either of these particular traditions (Finlayson 2015, 69). 8 In her view, the informal norm of charity, rather than being the grounds upon which understanding of language or discourse is built, is "a rule of conduct for criticism" (69, emphasis in original). ...
Article
In this article, I explore some harms that emerge from the call for charity in academic philosophy. A charitability gap, I suggest, exists both between who we tend to read charitably and who we tend to expect charitability from. This gap shores up the disciplinary status quo and (re)produces epistemic oppression, which helps preserve philosophy's status as a discipline that is, to use Charles Mills's language, conceptually and demographically dominated by whiteness and maleness (Mills 1998, 2). I am particularly interested in calls for charity made in response to critiques of racist or sexist authors/texts. I suggest that in these cases, interpretive charity perpetuates epistemic violence by creating conditions for testimonial smothering (Dotson 2011); that it functions as an orientation device (Ahmed 2006) designed to bring “unruly” philosophers back in line with disciplinary practices and traditions; and that it requires resistant philosophers to remain in oppressive worlds (Lugones 2003a; Pohlhaus 2011). Although charitability is risky—and charity is disproportionately demanded from already marginalized philosophers—I am hesitant to abandon charity entirely. The outright rejection of charitable orientations toward texts or others commits philosophers to a purity politics that, following Alexis Shotwell, I suggest we resist (Shotwell 2016).
... This brings me to another reason why I expect at least some philosophers to be interested in the data discussed in this chapter. Even if there is no inference from the descriptive to the normative, it is still true that few philosophers relish attributing massive error to the folk; indeed, it has been argued that we should do so only if all else fails (Wilson, 1959; see also the quote from Lewis, 1986, on p. 58). Still, attributing massive error is what we must do, given what we examined in this chapter; at least, it is what we must do if the mainstream is right and abduction is to be repudiated as irrational. ...
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A novel defense of abduction, one of the main forms of nondeductive reasoning. With this book, Igor Douven offers the first comprehensive defense of abduction, a form of nondeductive reasoning. Abductive reasoning, which is guided by explanatory considerations, has been under normative pressure since the advent of Bayesian approaches to rationality. Douven argues that, although it deviates from Bayesian tenets, abduction is nonetheless rational. Drawing on scientific results, in particular those from reasoning research, and using computer simulations, Douven addresses the main critiques of abduction. He shows that versions of abduction can perform better than the currently popular Bayesian approaches—and can even do the sort of heavy lifting that philosophers have hoped it would do. Douven examines abduction in detail, comparing it to other modes of inference, explaining its historical roots, discussing various definitions of abduction given in the philosophical literature, and addressing the problem of underdetermination. He looks at reasoning research that investigates how judgments of explanation quality affect people's beliefs and especially their changes of belief. He considers the two main objections to abduction, the dynamic Dutch book argument, and the inaccuracy-minimization argument, and then gives abduction a positive grounding, using agent-based models to show the superiority of abduction in some contexts. Finally, he puts abduction to work in a well-known underdetermination argument, the argument for skepticism regarding the external world.
... They model this by assuming that in a dialog like (2), agents assume by default that the source of the argument is reliable. This comes as a consequence of a more general principle of charity which prompts hearers to make the most of whatever is uttered by a speaker (Wilson, 1959, Davidson, 1974, and which dovetails with the Humean position already mentioned. Again, the authors present experimental evidence which supports the predictions of the Bayesian, notably that pertaining to the importance of the prior belief in the conclusion at stake in the ad hominem attack. ...
Article
This work builds on the trivial observation that everyone is not trusted equally. One’s gender, ethnic group, occupation etc. will affect how one’s information is believed and interpreted by others. We begin by reviewing past approaches to reliability and epistemic injustice, and the factors which affect how one’s reliability is evaluated by others in discourse. We then discuss recent experimental results which show that the linguistic manipulation of gender seems to affect the strategies with which the source’s reliability is evaluated. We argue that masculine sources benefit from more charitable assumptions than feminine ones. To support this claim, we present the results of a fine-grained categorization task. The results of this task seem to support our claim about charity, i.e. that a masculine source can more easily claim competence about a topic categorized as feminine, whereas the converse appears less true.
... As a result, adopting Galton's recommendation appears reasonable. The 'principle of charity' was introduced in (Wilson, 1959). ...
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OBSERVATION is a central notion to the field of Geographic Information Science. Monitoring phenomena (e.g. climate change, landslides, demographic movements) happening on the earth’s surface, and developing models and simulations for those phenomena rely on observations. Observations can be produced by technical sensors (e.g. a satellite) or humans. RESOLUTION is an important aspect of observations underlying geographic information. The consequence of using observations at various resolutions is (potentially) different decisions, because the resolutions of the observations influence the patterns that can be detected during an analysis process. Despite the importance of the notion of resolution, and early attempts at its formalization, there is currently no theory of resolution of observations underlying geographic information. The goal and main contribution of this work is the provision of such a theory. The scope of the work is limited to the characterization of the SPATIAL and TEMPORAL resolution of single observations, and collections of observations. The use of ONTOLOGY as formal specification technique helps to produce, not only useful theoretical insights about the resolution of observations, but also computational artifacts relevant to the SensorWeb. At a theoretical level, the work suggests a receptor-based theory of resolution for single observations, and a theory of resolution for observation collections, based on the observed study area and observed study period. The consistency of both theories is tested through the use of the functional language HASKELL. The practical contribution of the work comes from the two ONTOLOGY DESIGN PATTERNS suggested and encoded using the Web Ontology Language. The use of the design patterns in conjunction with the query language SPARQL helps to retrieve observations at different resolution. All in all, the work brings up ideas that are of interest to research on data quality in Geographic Information Science, and in the SensorWeb.
... ough ontology evaluation criteria are the main focus of the work, they are strongly tied to the method of ontology development as mentioned in Section 2. For this reason, the 26 papers were annotated taking into account: presence (or absence) of a design/implementation phase, ontology language(s) used for the design/implementation phase (if any), and criteria used for evaluation of each of the phases (if any). Since there is currently no consensus regarding what ontology evaluation is (let alone how to document it), the 'principle of charity' from [37] was adopted when annotating the 26 articles from the sample. at is, articles which followed the steps of ontology design/implementation (as described in Section 2), and used the criteria described in Section 3 were labelled as having a design/implementation stage, and having used the criteria (even if the terminology used in these articles was di erent from the terminology introduced in this paper). ...
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Ontologies are key to information retrieval, semantic integration of datasets, and semantic similarity analyses. Evaluating ontologies (especially defining what constitutes a "good " or "better" ontology) is therefore of central importance for the Semantic Web community. Various criteria have been introduced in the literature to evaluate ontologies, and this article classifies them according to their relevance to the design or the implementation phase of ontology development. In addition, the article compiles strategies for ontology evaluation based on ontologies published until 2017 in two outlets: the Semantic Web Journal, and the Journal of Web Semantics. Gaps and opportunities for future research on ontology evaluation are exposed towards the end of the paper. CCS CONCEPTS • Computing methodologies →Ontology engineering; • Information systems →World Wide Web
... For Davidson, it plays a prominent if not sole role in his theory of meaning. In the introduction to Inquiries into truth and interpretation (Davidson, 2001a), the phrase and the main idea are accredited to Neil Wilson (1959). The principle of charity has also been discussed as a practical tool in classroom activities, as an alternative to emphasizing students' mistakes (Porter, 2001). ...
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Abstract [en] The central concern of this thesis is to discuss interpretations of learning in educational research. A point of departure is taken in core epistemological and ontological assumptions informing three major approaches to learning: behaviourism, cognitive constructivism and socioculturalism. It is argued that all three perspectives provide important insights into research on learning, but each alone runs the risk of reducing learning and interpretations of learning to single aspects. Specific attention is therefore given to Intentional Analysis, as it has been developed to account for sociocultural aspects that influence learning and individual cognition. It is argued that interpretations of learning processes face challenges, different kinds of holism, underdetermination and the complexity of intentionality, that need to be accounted for in order to make valid interpretations. Interpretation is therefore also discussed in light of philosopher Donald Davidson’s theories of knowledge and interpretation. It is suggested that his theories may provide aspects of an ontological and epistemological stance that can form the basis for interpretations of learning in educational research. A first brief sketch, referred to as ‘epistemic holism’, is thus drawn. The thesis also exemplifies how such a stance can inform empirical research. It provides a first formulation of research strategies – a so-called ‘interpretative holism’. The thesis discusses what such a stance may imply with regard to the nature and location of knowledge and the status of the learning situation. Ascribing meaning to observed behaviour, as it is described in this thesis, implies that an action is always an action under a specific description. Different descriptions may not be contradictory, but if we do not know the learner’s language use, we cannot know whether there is a difference in language or in beliefs. It is argued that the principle of charity and reference to saliency, that is, what appears as the figure for the learner, may help us decide. However, saliency does not only appear as a phenomenon in relation to physical objects and events, but also in the symbolic world, thus requires that the analysis extend beyond the mere transcription of an interview or the description of an observation. Hence, a conclusion to be drawn from this thesis is that the very question of what counts as data in the interpretation of complex learning processes is up for discussion.
... These are summed up under the 'principle of charity'. The term is Wilson's (see Quine 1960, p. 59;Wilson 1959); and it is an intentional misnomer. There is nothing charitable about its application: it must be applied if we are to be engaged in interpretation. ...
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I examine Quine’s and Davidson’s arguments to the effect that classical logic is the one and only correct logic. This conclusion is drawn from their views on radical translation and interpretation, respectively. I focus on the latter, but I first address, independently, Quine’s argument to the effect that the ‘deviant’ logician, who departs from classical logic, is merely changing the subject. Regarding logical pluralism, the question is whether there is more than one correct logic. I argue that bivalence may be subject matter dependent, but that distribution and the law of excluded middle can probably not be dropped whilst maintaining the standard meanings of the connectives. In discussing the ramifications of the indeterminacy of interpretation, I ask whether it forces Davidsonian interpreters to adopt Dummett’s epistemic conception of truth vis-à-vis their interpretations. And, if so, does this cohere with their attributing a nonepistemic notion of truth to their interpretees? This would be a form of logical pluralism. In addition, I discuss Davidson’s arguments against conceptual schemes. Schemes incommensurable with our own could be construed as wholesale deviant logics, or so I argue. And, if so, their possibility would yield, in turn, the possibility of a radical logical pluralism. I also address Davidson’s application of Tarski’s definition of truth.
... Eleven of these are classified under "Social Science," eight under "International and Regional," and three under "Land Use," all of which are major overlapping themes in the interdisciplinary field of development studies. (Wikipedia, 2017). This pattern suggests a semantic radiation, where the historical root word differentiated over to time to lead to a variety of highly specialized uses. ...
Article
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Development” is a central term in an interdisciplinary discussion that brings together a diverse range of more conventional disciplines, including economics, politics, anthropology, and history. While this word is often used in highly specific ways within each of these contributing fields, the use can vary widely between them, leaving explicitly interdisciplinary discussions of “development” open to unnecessary semantic confusion. This paper breaks this multifaceted term down into the individual facets and constructs a descriptive typology that can be used to interpret individual uses in a text. This typology is then applied to four classic works that attack conventional understandings of “development” and a selection of articles in the journal World Development from 1973, 1993, and 2013. This analysis appears to document a maturation of interdisciplinary discussions of “development,” as evidenced through observation of increasing rigor, specificity, and a now nearly standard reliance of adjacent qualifying terms when “development” is used in an interdisciplinary text. However, it also finds that while these qualifiers are a semantic aid, they are not a satisfactory replacement for careful use of the term and clear presentation of the underlying ideas.
... The first to name 'the principle of charity' is Wilson (1959). 4 ...
... None ofWilson (1959),Quine (1960), norDavidson (1984) specifically allow for this, but perhapsDennet (1987) does.4 This was recognised in Allan (1986c, Vol. ...
Chapter
This essay examines the properties of reports and the diagnostic value of illocutions in reports. Essentially a report is X’s re-presentation to Y of what Z said. Because X is not identical with Z, what Z said is necessarily transmuted by X. X may use a different medium (e.g. written in place of spoken); X will have a different voice; and X will re-present what Z said, more often than not using different lexis and grammar, even when attempting a verbatim quote. X may have misheard or misinterpreted Z’s utterance: she may add an affective gloss. All of these distinguish X’s report ρ from Z’s utterance υ in both form and content, which renders every report “indirect” to some extent; there are different degrees of indirectness, but a truly indirect report utilises pragmatic enrichment, e.g. when Z’s utterance It’s never stopped raining since we arrived is reported as Z complained about the terrible weather there or I won easily is reported as a boast, mistake, or lie. The accuracy of X’s report ρ depends on whether or not the message in Z’s υ can be reconstructed from it. In other words, the content of ρ is dependent on the content of υ. If υ deviates from the truth in respect of what Z speaks of, then ρ will also deviate from the truth unless X recognizes this deviation and repairs it. An accurate report ρ re-presents the illocutionary point of the source utterance υ. So a report can function as a diagnostic of the illocutionary point of the source utterance. For instance reports of them show that explicit performative clauses are statements and have truth values. Reports are a means of identifying different functions of imperatives and of disambiguating different utterances of e.g. Out! as a verdictive in a tennis match or a command on some other occasion. And reports help determine whether e.g. ‘whimperatives’ are primarily questions or primarily requests.
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Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind is an annual publication of some of the most cutting-edge work in the philosophy of mind. The themes covered in this fourth volume are twenty-first-century idealism, acquaintance and perception, and acquaintance and consciousness. It also contains a book symposium on David Chalmers’ Reality+, and a historical article on Aristotle’s philosophy of mind.
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This paper aims to discuss a well-known concept from argumentation theory, namely the principle of charity. It will show that this principle, especially in its contemporary version as formulated by Donald Davidson, meets with some serious problems. Since we need the principle of charity in any kind of critical discussion, we propose the way of modifying it according to the presupponendum—the rule written in the sixteenth century by Ignatius Loyola. While also corresponding with pragma-dialectical rules, it also provides additional content. This will be termed the dialectical principle of charity, and it offers a few steps to be performed during an argument in order to make sure that the participants understand each other well and are not deceived by any cognitive bias. The meaning of these results could be of great significance for argumentation theory, pragma-dialectics and the practice of public discourse as it enhances the principle of charity and makes it easier to apply in argumentation.
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In the last 35 years many philosophers have appealed to reference magnetism to explain how it is that we mean what we mean. The idea is that it is a constitutive principle of metasemantics that the interpretation that assigns the more natural meanings is correct, ceteris paribus. Among other things, magnetism has been used to answer the challenges of grue and quus, Quine’s indeterminacy of translation argument, and Putnam’s model-theoretic argument against realism. Critics of magnetism have usually objected to the base notion of naturalness. Here I assume naturalness for the sake of argument, but argue that even still, reference magnetism should be rejected. The supposed force of reference magnetism is arbitrarily weak, and the best explanation of this is that it simply does not exist.
Article
Donald Davidson, building in part on the work of W. V. O. Quine, who was a major influence on him, makes a pair of claims that, if true, would seem to undermine the work of practising translators. The first is that there is ‘no such thing as a language’, at least as concerns the traditional notion of what a language comprises. So translation as traditionally conceived may need rethinking. The second claim is that translation is inevitably indeterminate, and not only in the sense that it is underdetermined by the data we could possess about what other people mean by their utterances. Rather, more radically, Davidson claims that there is simply no fact of the matter about correct translation. I begin by attempting to mitigate the first claim, before turning to do the same to the second.
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This paper presents the results of a novel experimental approach to relative quantifier scope in German that elicits data in a less direct manner. Applying the covered-box method (Huang et al. 2013; Sayeed et al. 2019) to scope phenomena, we show that inverse scope is available to some extent in the free constituent order language German, thereby validating both earlier findings on other syntactic configurations in German (Radó & Bott 2018) and empirical claims on other free constituent languages (Japanese, Russian, Hindi), as well as recent corpus findings in Webelhuth (2020). Moreover, the results of the indirect covered-box experiment replicate findings from an earlier direct-query experiment on parallel target items, in which participants were asked directly about the availability of surface scope and inverse scope readings. The configuration of interest was constituted by canonical transitive clauses with deaccented existential subject and universal object QPs in which the restriction of the universal QP is provided by the context.
Article
Speech recognition software can be used as a compositional tool in poetry and as such constitutes a form of homophonic translation, in which phonemes are substituted for each other based on near similarity. The end result bears a degree of similarity to the original based on phonemic patterning. One of the conclusions drawn in this article is that the phoneme is not an invariant fundamental particle of language, but can be thought of as bearing information in the sense that a voice can be defined as a distinctive patterning of phonemes, and thus the phoneme can be understood to bear information, in a probabilistic sense, about its neighbours. Drawing on Albert Bregman’s work on auditory scene analysis, as well as recent research into non-arbitrary aspects of the relation of signifier to signified, this article proposes stylometric analysis of misheard or mistranslated poetry to see if distinctive phonemic patterning can be measured.
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The paper undertakes a critical analysis of the so-called Presupposition of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, which prescribes the benevolent interpretation of the other’s words. We aim to identify the anthropological and epistemological background of the pedagogical guidelines contained therein and to explicate the intellectual and moral virtues needed to put them into practice. We argue that practising the Presupposition is both virtuous and mutually beneficial in pedagogical practice.
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El presente "Curso" ofrece una aproximación a la semántica léxica del español. Su carácter introductorio y enfoque didáctico lo convierten en un instrumento útil para orientarse en el amplio, complejo y heterogéneo mundo del contenido lingüístico; más específicamente, del significado léxico. Por su orientación general y abarcadora representa un compendio básico con vistas a analizar y describir las estructuras semánticas que se descubren en el sistema léxico de la lengua española. Se trata de una obra en la que se definen y ejemplifican los conceptos fundamentales con que opera la semántica léxica: los campos semánticos, las relaciones léxicas (sinonimia, antonimia, hiponimia, meronimia…), la polisemia, las solidaridades lexemáticas, los procesos neológicos. Dada la notoria escasez de visiones de conjunto de la semántica léxica del español, el presente Curso puede ser de utilidad para que los docentes de la lengua española se familiaricen con los aspectos del significado que, intuitivamente, actualizan a diario. También posee interés para cualquier persona atraída por el fascinante mundo del lenguaje humano y de las unidades léxicas de la lengua.
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The principle of charity is most often understood as that which justifies ascribing rationality to every interlocutor, regardless of the agent appears irrational. As such, a recurring question in the field of the philosophy of psychiatry is whether the said principle should be advocated as a way of understanding delusions as rational or should be rejected as a form of over-rationalization. The aim of this paper is to show, by defending an understanding of rationality inspired by the late philosophy of Wittgenstein, that this debate relies mainly on a misconception of the said principle. Indeed, charity does not consist in making the mere hypothesis that every agent is rational, but more simply in acknowledging that rationality is the condition of every form of understanding. As such, the question we should be asking is not so much whether delusions are rational or not, but rather in what sense can speech be judged as irrational within our own norms of rationality.
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There is an embarrassing polarization of opinions about the status of economics as an academic discipline, as reflected in epithets such as the Dismal Science and the Queen of the Social Sciences. This collection brings together some of the leading figures in the methodology and philosophy of economics to provide a thoughtful and balanced overview of the current state of debate about the nature and limits of economic knowledge. Authors with partly rival and partly complementary perspectives examine how abstract models work and how they might connect with the real world, they look at the special nature of the facts about the economy, and they direct attention towards the academic institutions themselves and how they shape economic research. These issues are thus analysed from the point of view of methodology, semantics, ontology, rhetoric, sociology, and economics of science.
Article
Our ascriptions of content to past utterances assign to them a level of conceptual continuity and determinacy that extends beyond what could be grounded in the usage up to their time of utterance. If one accepts such ascriptions, one can argue either (1) that future use must be added to the grounding base, or (2) that such cases show that meaning is not, ultimately, grounded in use. The following will defend the first option as the more promising of the two, though this ultimately requires understanding the relation between use and meaning as ‘normative’ in two important ways. The first (more familiar) way is that the function from use to meaning must be of a sort that allows us to maintain a robust distinction between actual and correct use. The second sort of normativity is unique to theories that extend the grounding base into the future. In particular, if meaning is partially a function of future use, we can see our commitment to the ‘determinacy’ of meaning as a practical commitment that structures our linguistic practices rather than a theoretical commitment that merely describes them.
Article
Erich Fromm’s analysis of ‘pathological normalcy’ offers promising social-theoretical resources to help transcend the contemporary, ‘domesticated’, diagnosis of social pathologies. This article commences by briefly tracing the numerous limitations of the current orthodoxy, epitomised by the recognition-cognitive ‘pathologies of recognition’ approach. A sympathetic reconstruction of Erich Fromm’s diagnosis of pathological normalcy is then presented as a promising palliative. The strengths of Fromm’s social-theoretical framework are then outlined: Fromm’s scholarship presents a structure through which objectively inadequate and contradictory social conditions can be diagnosed, while emphasising their important connections to the social-psychological pathologies which sustain them. The efficacy of Fromm’s approach is then defended against post-modern and social-constructivist critiques. This article thus supports the rehabilitation of Fromm’s work within the sociological mainstream as an important antidote to the ‘domesticated’ framing of social pathology which continues to dominate contemporary scholarship.
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This study examines John Rawls’s answer to the problem of how a constitutional democracy may remain stable over time even under conditions of religious and moral pluralism. Its first objective is to understand Rawls’s argument as to how the institutions and practices of a constitutional democracy can generate the free and unimposed support of its citizens and continue to do so permanently. A second objective is to explain why Rawls attended to this matter in the first place and to determine its significance within his philosophical project as a whole. The core of this study therefore consists of an extensive and rigorous reconstruction of what Rawls, in three stages of his philosophical development, has to say about the possible stability of a just and democratic society. Throughout, the interpretation is guided by an attempt to appreciate the practical, systematic and descriptive character of his theorising; and by doing so, it distances itself from prevalent readings of his work. Its findings show that Rawls can be interpreted as a thinker who is continuously concerned with a problem of democratic stability; a problem which also turns out to provide the key for grasping the development of his thought over time. According to Rawls, a democratic order is stable to the extent that its basic institutions and discursive practices are regulated by a political conception of justice that is capable of being the focus of an overlapping consensus of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. Stability holds for the right reasons when the existence of an overlapping consensus is visibly authenticated by a practice of public reasoning that works towards establishing and preserving just institutions, thereby revealing the enduring exercise of a sense of justice to be congruent with the life plans of reasonable and rational persons. The interpretation brings to light three reasons as to why Rawls even sees a problem of democratic stability in the first place: First of all, he seeks to establish the capacity of democratic citizens to engage in social cooperation over time as an actual possibility – a possibility, however, that cannot be vindicated by the theory itself, but only by a real-life practice of the public use of reason. Second, Rawls subscribes to an understanding of political philosophy according to which it must present itself to the public as a framework of thought in the light of which everyone may reconcile themselves both with their own existence as well as with the world as such. Third, Rawls holds that the democratic autonomy of free and equal citizens can be expressed adequately only when there is a conception of justice capable of being the focus of a durable overlapping consensus and hence suitable to serve as a basis for the mutual raising of claims in discussions of constitutional essentials and basic matters of justice. The problem of stability thus turns out to be the locus at which Rawls shows how the theory of political liberalism might translate into practice. The study seeks to contribute to the rather narrow thread of reception that attempts to counterbalance the common disregard for both the problem of stability in Rawls’s work as well as its significance for understanding the development of his thought over time. In addition, by engaging in an extensive appraisal of the problem of democratic stability, the study claims to clear up several misconceptions that oftentimes arise from an imprecise reading of what Rawls actually says. At the same time, it maps out how the political thought of John Rawls might contribute to the self-understanding and defence of liberal democracy.
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Constitutionalism Beyond Liberalism bridges the gap between comparative constitutional law and constitutional theory. The volume uses the constitutional experience of countries in the global South - China, India, South Africa, Pakistan, Indonesia, and Malaysia - to transcend the liberal conceptions of constitutionalism that currently dominate contemporary comparative constitutional discourse. The alternative conceptions examined include political constitutionalism, societal constitutionalism, state-based (Rousseau-ian) conceptions of constitutionalism, and geopolitical conceptions of constitutionalism. Through these examinations, the volume seeks to expand our appreciation of the human possibilities of constitutionalism, exploring constitutionalism not merely as a restriction on the powers of government, but also as a creating collective political and social possibilities in diverse geographical and historical settings.
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This chapter discusses education or Bildung within the context of modernity, i.e., in the context of the Enlightenment and the idea of rational self-determination. The first part of the chapter presents the philosophical signature of modernity by drawing on works from conceptual history. Reinhart Koselleck has written extensively about how modernity was developed and thematized as a new form of time and consciousness. The second part of the chapter shows how Bildung is closely linked to modern experience. Presenting the approaches offered by Schiller, Humboldt, and Hegel, the relevance of aesthetic experience, negativity, and plurality for Bildung is demonstrated. The third part discusses the educational-philosophical approaches in relation to other conceptions of modernity (Habermas, Foucault). Here, it is argued that the references and confrontations with the classical authors presented can also be framed in terms of the modern questions concerning who and what we are today.
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Zusammenfassung Ein systematischer Unterschied zwischen der Rekonstruktion der Bedeutung derselben Äußerung an zwei verschiedenen Sequenzstellen gab Anlass, seine begriffliche Fassung zu erarbeiten. In der Objektiven Hermeneutik scheint mit der Gegenüberstellung von ‚objektiver Bedeutungsstruktur‘ und ‚latenter Sinnstruktur‘ ein terminologischer Vorschlag hierfür vorzuliegen. Dieser ruft jedoch aufgrund seiner Komplexität – er amalgamiert drei verschiedene Oppositionen – Irritationen hervor. Der Beitrag skizziert zunächst die Verwendung der von Ulrich Oevermann eingeführten Termini, sodann wird anhand einer materialen Analyse das Klärungsproblem herausgestellt; schließlich wird mit Bezug auf Freges Unterscheidung von Bedeutung und Sinn ein Vorschlag zur begrifflichen und terminologischen Fassung des Unterschieds gemacht. Der begriffliche Unterschied von (a) manifester und latenter Bedeutung, (b) objektiv regelkonstitutierter und subjektiv gemeinter Bedeutung und schließlich (c) objektiver Sinnstruktur einer Äußerung und ihrer umfassenden objektiven Bedeutungsstruktur kann ohne die Konfundierung in der titelgebenden Unterscheidung terminologisch gefasst werden.
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Peter Hylton: Quine's Naturalism Revisited: Naturalism is Quine's overarching view. In thinking about the world, we must begin where we are; for Quine, that means within a system of knowledge which, as developed and improved, becomes natural science. There is no distinctively philosophical standpoint outside this system. So the philosopher draws on the results of science, which show, for example, that our knowledge of the world comes from stimulation of our sensory nerves. But the philosopher's work is also subject to scientific standards of clarity and rigor. Terms such as ?meaning?, and even ?experience?, do not meet these standards and cannot be taken for granted at the outset. Quinean epistemology attempts to account for our knowledge using only terms that Quine takes to be sufficiently clear. The Quinean analogue of metaphysics relies on an ideal of regimented theory: all of our scientific knowledge reformulated so as to make it as clear, simple, and systematic as possible. His claims about ontology, for example, are answerable to that theory. The epistemological project can then be understood as an attempt to show that human knowledge can be accounted for within the narrow confines of regimented theory ? and thus treated as a purely natural phenomenon.
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Business model innovation has become a crucial task for established firms since they need to be able to adapt to ever increasing globalization and dynamic market environments. However, pursuing the innovation of business models is known to be a challenging endeavor. There are structural, procedural and mental barriers to be overcome. So far extant research in the field has delivered useful insights on existing business models as well as methods to support the design. There are still few empirical insights on how new business models actually emerge and how firms can create supporting conditions. This thesis is motivated by insights from research projects with incumbent firms from different industries. The research at hand focuses on the question how cognitive and mental barriers can be overcome when implementing new business model designs. Whereas creativity methods can foster the design of forward-looking business models, particular difficulties emerge when converting those designs into an operative business. For the design, typically upper management and specialized functions are involved, especially in larger organizations. As extant research teaches us, for the implementation, middle management is pivotal. But the questions remain: How does one introduce middle managers to a new business model design logic, integrate different domain knowledge as well as create a shared understanding to support effective planning of the operative implementation? And as an essential element of the process, how does one challenge mental models which have been formed on the basis of existing knowledge and which substantially bias the implementation planning process? The research at hand adopts a cognitive view on business models, understanding these models as mental models of managers while reflecting upon a business’ value creation and capture activities. By following the design science paradigm, the research develops a method which not only builds upon theory on mental models from the field of cognitive sciences but also upon insights gained from an in-depth case study with a large software firm. In addition to that, knowledge from other fields addressing similar problems is integrated into the research. The resulting solution aims at guiding managers in creating a shared understanding of new business model designs in the context of existing activity and resource configurations of the firm. It does so while challenging actors’ mental models as well as integrating different domain knowledge in order to increase effectiveness in planning the operative implementation of new designs. The procedure is demonstrated and evaluated based on four intrapreneurial projects. Moreover, insights gained through the application of the procedure contribute to extant theory on processes for the innovation of business models in incumbent firms.
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One of the main aspects of the observation of a baby according to Esther Bick’s method consists in giving a meaning to whatever the baby expresses. The author borrows the concept of “Principle of Charity” to the linguistic philosophy to give an account of that requirement which reminds the requirement the anthropologist has to satisfy: to give credit to the tribes he is exploring that their expressions whatever their nature have a meaning.
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Die Theorie der Interpretation in der deutschen Aufklärung 1740–1760 wird hinsichtlich ihrer Beziehung zur klassischen Semiotik und Rhetorik in den Texten von J. M. Chladenius (1710–1759) und Georg Friedrich Meier (1718–1777) untersucht. Beide Autoren entwickelten eine Interpretationstheorie auf der Grundlage der allgemeinen Charakteristik oder Zeichentheorie, die den interpretatorischen Umgang mit Texten nach bestimmten Maßstäben und Prinzipien der Vernunft und der Rhetorik definiert. Die Theorien werden abschließend in einer historischen Konstellation gelehrter Disziplinen gesehen und der modernen hermeneutischen Theorie gegenübergestellt.
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Conceptual relativity leads to a deflationist diagnosis of many existence debates. For example, there is not only one correct answer to the question how many objects exist in a universe with three individuals. Furthermore, there is not only one correct answer to the question what species exist. While these examples illustrate the critical potential of conceptual relativity, one may worry that conceptual relativity leads to an excessive deflationism that does not leave room for substantive existence disputes and that implies the self-defeating claim that every existence claim is true relative to some legitimate conceptual framework. Conceptual relativists therefore face a “demarcation problem” and have to distinguish merely verbal and substantive existence disputes. I discuss a variety of demarcation criteria and argue that the most plausible criteria support the idea that conceptual relativity is common in the empirical sciences. Furthermore, I argue that the demarcation problem is at least as pressing for critics of conceptual relativity. While conceptual relativists have to leave room for substantive non-verbal disputes, their critics have provide an account of non-substantive verbal disputes.
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We shall take it that whatever a language is, it somehow “consists” of its phonology, its (grammatical and logical) syntax and its semantics, in the sense that once the phonology, syntax and semantics are given, that constitutes a sufficient characterization or definition of the language. Here we shall be concerned, for the most part, with the question: How does one give the semantics of a language? I shall argue that even if there were meanings, whether reified or somehow not reified, a meaning is not a semantically relevant whatsit — which is to say “meanings” are not what you give in characterizing the semantics of a language. As a consequence, the question, “Change of meaning or change of belief?” either falls or has to be recast.
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The decade 1966–1976 saw an immense amount of valuable philosophical discussion concerning the relation between mind and brain. As a result, it has seemed best to be selective, both with respect to topics and to authors. Many important books and papers have had to be passed over. This chronicle confines itself almost entirely to cases where new philosophical positions, or striking new lines of argument, have been developed about the relation of mind and brain.
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The idea of radical interpretation, using the principle of charity, plays one of the two central roles in Davidson's philosophy of language. It is introduced already in ?Truth and Meaning,? and then developed in a series of papers in the mid-1970s. Ideas shift in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. We shall here focus mostly on the early views.
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