Notion Of Guidance Research Articles

The Unavoidable Guidance in Language

ABSTRACTConsidering the profoundly collaborative nature of human communication, the notion of guidance needs more careful consideration and foregrounding in the philosophy of language. The practically crucial ideal of a well-balanced, fruitful relationship with a human guide motivates a conception of language as guidance, more specifically as the unavoidably applicable guidance in a communicative situation that language users are always in. The situation has at least three dimensions, with three corresponding forms of the guidance: (1) the performed guidance of the interlocutor in actual speech (cueing the speaker when to stop or change wording, for example); (2) the usage guidance of an available language; and (3) the basic teleology of the collaborative project of building up and maintaining a useful and interesting shared model of life in the world and providing for acceptable relations among communicating subjects.

Straw-People, Straw-Lives: Guidance and Compliance in Theories of Normativity

This paper argues against a conception of normativity that relies too heavily on the notions of guidance and compliance. The paper attempts to loosen the hold of these two concepts on our understanding of normativity, and in so doing to contribute to the pursuit of the following aims: first, to make us more aware of the role of the observer and the act of observation in the articulation of guidance and the assertion of compliance; second, to assist us in acknowledging the inescapable fragility of our practices of making sense of and evaluating others; and thirdly, to help us to see the need for a more socially robust account of normativity, an important part of which will be the analysis of the different dynamics of obligation, legitimation, justification, authority etc, in different kinds of relationships.