Ordinary Language Research Articles

Aristotle on Materiate Paronymy: Concerning an Apparent Inconsistency in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

Abstract Aristotle offers apparently inconsistent explanations for paronymous expressions derived from matter: on the received picture, derived from Metaphysics Θ.7, such expressions are used in all and only cases of substantial change, because predicating the matter directly of a substance would be false; on the error picture, derived from Metaphysics Z.7, the same expressions are used in all and only cases of change from an unclear and nameless privation, because ordinary language users conflate such privations with matter. I propose a resolution: the received picture explains why the usage is fitting, but the error picture explains how the usage originated.

Proverbial economies of STS.

This article discusses examples from an extended family of aphorisms, stories, and themes that have circulated widely in STS and remain associated with the formation and integration of the field. Drawing upon Harvey Sacks's insightful remarks about features of everyday conversation, which he related to ancient practices in oral culture, we argue that familiar citation magnets in STS operate in many respects like proverbs, parables, and an extended family of neatly and memorably packaged viral articulations in ordinary language. After discussing the contingent production of proverbial truth, the article focuses on three well-known examples that combine memorable proverbs and themes with parables: Winner's account of the low parkway bridges designed by city planner Robert Moses to show that technology has politics; Pinch and Bijker's concise history of the bicycle to illustrate the social construction of technology, and Star and Griesemer's viral two-word theme of 'boundary objects' as artifacts that sustain collaboration across organizational contexts. The discussion of these cases suggests that different elements of these examples become the focus of subsequent citations and applications, and that ambiguities about the origins and meanings of the cited items opens new avenues for critical reflection on practicing citational justice and the nature of STS as an affiliative discipline.

Speeches on Poetry

Paul Celan’s ‘Speeches’ determine what poetry is and why we need it. He does not want ‘timeless’ poetry but still ‘lays claim to infinity’; he would ‘reach through time’. He neither refuses poetry as contrary to reason, nor elevates it as pure immediacy of meaning. He questions the ambivalent attitudes towards art—as ‘artifice’ or as ‘profound’. Celan cuts into the loose fabric of such ordinary language to shape it. Those who trumpet ‘plain sense’ against such incisive art deface it as degenerate. Celan’s poetic language presents us as ‘of the earth’ and as ‘released from it’—Büchner’s Lenz seeks clarity in the silence of alpine light but falls into madness in his isolation. He is drawn towards the life of the villagers at the foot of the mountains. He perceives the warm household fires, but it is an illusion that he can be a part of that scene. Thus, Celan enquires into art’s intensity. It is at the risk of reciprocity that a reader entertains the language of a poem. Eliot’s old ‘shadow’ between ‘the idea and the reality’ now falls between the poet’s production and the reader’s reciprocation. The reader may need someone with a free hand to hold a lantern to the script.

Plato’s Theory of Mimesis in the Cratylus: from Ideal Language to Ordinary Language

This article reinterprets the theory of mimesis in the Cratylus, exploring how language functions as an image that imitates its objects. Contrary to prevailing studies contending that Socrates fails to reconcile naturalism and conventionalism, this article argues that Socrates proposes a form of naturalism that acknowledges the role of convention. This naturalism reveals that human language has a dual nature by demonstrating the relation between images and originals. Through instrumentalism and sound-symbolism, Socrates envisions language as an ideal instrument for imitating the Forms of things, whereas the difference between images and originals leads to inevitable falsehood in the establishment and use of ordinary language. The real purpose of the theory of mimesis is to defend the possibility of knowledge and language by opposing the sophists’ doctrine of flux.

Peculiarities of the Use of Professionally Oriented Vocabulary by Future Agrarians while Learning English

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of bilingualism of students of non-linguistic specialties when learning English. The terminological vocabulary allows accurate and accessible presentation of a content of this subject area and ensures correct understanding of the text. To represent the relations of information units (represented in terms), commonly used words are needed, which requires the use of ordinary language and leads to an appearance of ambiguity during their use. Purpose. The objective of study is consideration of linguistic particularities of agrarian professionally oriented vocabulary, which is used while studying a foreign language at the university. The methodology covers a comprehensive set of theoretical and empirical research methods, including the analysis of scientific sources, regulatory documents, pedagogical observation, description, classification and systematization. The study was related to students of the second year of full-time study of the agronomy specialty in Vinnytsia National Agrarian University, Ukraine. Results. The fact that the terms carry the main semantic load that in the literature of the agrarian direction, occupying the main place among other general literary and official words, is illustrated with examples. A detailed (conceptual) description of the agrarian industry has been carried out. It is noted that English-language agronomic texts differ in syntactic structure and complexity and are characterized by adverbial, infinitive and gerund inflections, as well as other purely language constructions, which in turn complicate text understanding and pose additional challenges to a translator. It is proved that the dictionary of agricultural terms is replenished by borrowing lexical units from everyday speech and by reinterpreting or narrowing their meanings. It is indicated that the colloquial language is enriched due to the expansion of the meanings of special terminological units. This dynamic two-way process testifies to a language development and translation complication activity due to the need to select the appropriate translation variant of multi-meaning lexical units. The investigation concluded that the clustering of many terminological constructions requires a correct division into immediate components and a serious familiarization with reference materials, a deeper immersion in the subject area. It is shown that agrarian terminology needs careful lexical and grammatical analysis in order to determine the optimal ways of its use. However, terminology alone is not sufficient to transfer or disseminate knowledge, as knowledge is culturally defined in human society.

The Grammar of the Ordinary

In this paper I explore what it means to take ordinary language as the raw material of philosophy. To do so, I contrast what I call ‘grammar’ or the grammatical approach, which is characteristic of L. Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and ‘ordinary language philosophy’ (OLP) as J.L. Austin understood it. I show that, while ‘standard’ OLP tends to focus on ‘historical situations’ understood as virtually plausible stagings of our actual uses of concepts, and thus contrasts ‘normal’ and ‘parasitic’ uses of language; the grammarian focuses on the logical possibilities of language through the invention of fictitious language-games. The latter thus extends the ‘ordinary’ up to the abnormal and the extraordinary and rather contrasts it with mere apparent uses that are no uses of language at all.

Home Language and Philosophers’ Language

This paper investigates whether Wittgenstein can be considered an ‘ordinary language philosopher’. A central role in his thinking is that of what may be called our ‘home language’ - the language we bring along in coming to do philosophy. The intelligibility of philosophers’ language depends on its relation to the home language. This is the central point of Philosophical Investigations § 116. Traditional philosophical ‘uses’ of a word like ‘knowledge’ have a problematic relation to our customary uses of the word. In consequence, traditional philosophers have sometimes lost the grip on how such words are actually used in human interaction.

Names and existence

AbstractIn practice, the inquiry into whether Socrates/William Tell/Robin Hood really existed hinges on the origin of the causal sequence leading up to the present use of the name employed for the personage in question, even though the occurrence of a Kripkean ‘baptism’ is not a logical consequence of most assertions employing that name, but only an ‘implication’ like the sort that makes examples of Moore's paradox (e.g. 'It is raining, but I have no idea whether it is raining’) strike ordinary language users as ‘inconsistent’. But with any express assertions or denials of the existence of the personage named, the attribution of Kripkean sense to the name is unavoidable.

FlowCert: Translation Validation for Asynchronous Dataflow via Dynamic Fractional Permissions

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) have gained attention in recent years due to their promising power efficiency compared to traditional von Neumann architectures. To program these architectures using ordinary languages such as C, a dataflow compiler must transform the original sequential, imperative program into an equivalent dataflow graph, composed of dataflow operators running in parallel. This transformation is challenging since the asynchronous nature of dataflow graphs allows out-of-order execution of operators, leading to behaviors not present in the original imperative programs. We address this challenge by developing a translation validation technique for dataflow compilers to ensure that the dataflow program has the same behavior as the original imperative program on all possible inputs and schedules of execution. We apply this method to a state-of-the-art dataflow compiler targeting the RipTide CGRA architecture. Our tool uncovers 8 compiler bugs where the compiler outputs incorrect dataflow graphs, including a data race that is otherwise hard to discover via testing. After repairing these bugs, our tool verifies the correct compilation of all programs in the RipTide benchmark suite.

Requirements Statements Are Transfer Functions: An Insight from Model‐Based Systems Engineering

ABSTRACTTraditional systems engineering pays attention to careful composition of prose requirements statements. Even so, prose appears less than what is needed to advance the art of systems engineering into a theoretically based engineering discipline comparable to electrical, mechanical, or chemical engineering. Ask three people to read a set of prose requirements statements, and a universal experience is that there will be three different impressions of their meaning. The rise of model‐based systems engineering might suggest the demise of prose requirements, but we argue otherwise. This paper shows how prose requirements can be productively embedded in and a valued formal part of requirements models. This leads to the practice‐impacting insight that requirements statements can be non‐linear extensions of linear transfer functions, shows how their ambiguity can be further reduced using ordinary language, how their completeness or overlap more easily audited, and how they can be “understood” more completely by engineering tools.

Translation, Intercultural Dialogue and the Mediation of Legal Semiotics

AbstractContemporary meta-dogmatic legal discourse has frequently mobilized the signifier “translation”, in different stages and to face diverse problems ─ the multidirectional interactions between legal language and ordinary language, the plural network of (national and international, state and non-state) legal orders, the dialectics between presupposed legal materials and practical controversies, the intersubjective place of the judge as the impartial third, the invention of exemplarity as concreteness ─ always however with decisive projections in the understanding or experiencing of juridicalness (its aspirations, categories and limits). The purpose of this paper is to explore the claims to inter-semioticity which the mobilization of this signifier and the plurality of its contexts of meaning and performance seem to construct. This means, on the one hand, to resume the dialogue with Boyd White (justice as translation) and François Ost (le droit comme traduction). It also means, on the other hand, returning to the counterpoint between translation and tradition which MacIntyre’s narrativism exemplarily proposes (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), this time to discuss the relevance of treating Law (a certain Law) as a cultural artifact, i.e. as a non-universal (culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded) answer to the universal (anthropologically necessary) problem of the institutionalization of a social order (law as a form of life, as a project and as a tradition). With an unexpected helping hand coming from Greimassian’s semio-narrative, this means also asking if translation (or the ethics of humility it celebrates) can actually be experienced, in our limit-situation, as the resource (if not the place or the environment) of a plausible intercultural dialogue.

Law: Language, Symbol, Rhetoric

Legal positivists regard law as written texts enacted and disseminated to be followed as rules. But this project rests on deeply mistaken conceptions about how language works. No written text stands alone and conveys a “plain meaning.” Law is expressed through language, but language does not exhaust the meaning of the law. Legal language always already draws on the ordinary language of the community, which, in turn, draws on a deeply symbolic realm, which it can never fully subordinate or explain. Rhetoric brings the symbolic substrate to life. Legal actors constantly search for the right words to deliberate with others. There is a resonant world to embrace and experience, but it can never be fully captured, understood, or expressed in our legal texts, which hover precariously above our shared ordinary language, which, in turn, is rooted in constitutive symbols that are sustained through an endless spiral of mediation, translation, and application. Nevertheless, we may reason together in a manner that generates rhetorical knowledge even if legal positivism is a failure.

Mathematical sciences as symbolic form: the objects and objectivity of science in Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of science and culture

AbstractIn this paper, I explore how Cassirer’s early and mature epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of culture make up a coherent and comprehensive view of the mathematical sciences that is fruitful for understanding contemporary science. In Cassirer’s first systematic work, Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff, the mathematical sciences are understood through the concept of function. This implies that scientific investigation aims at increased unity in a system of functional concepts, rather than at answering the substance-rooted question of what is. In his mature work, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, Cassirer expands his inquiry to diverse notions of objects and principles of symbolic forming, recognizing the mathematical sciences as one of many ways of structuring experience, alongside other symbolic forms such as myth and ordinary language. Together, Cassirer’s early and mature works detail the preconditions and idiosyncrasies of the unfolding of scientific objects and situate the mathematical sciences within the totality of human experience. Applying these insights to contemporary interpretations of science suggests connecting common misconceptions of science to challenges in translating objects between symbolic forms. I propose the concepts of domestication and mythification of science as instructive for clearing up such misunderstandings.

O pojęciu pojęcia i używaniu nazwy „pojęcie” w literaturze prawniczej

The article deals with the history of the perception of the essence of the concept from antiquity to modern times and the mutual relationship between the concept and the name as two vertices of the so-called “semantic triangle”. The pretext to discuss these issues is quite common in legal literature treating a concept as a synonym for a name and even using the terms “concept” and “name” interchangeably. The author investigates the origins of such erroneous practice, presents its most common manifestations and tips on how to avoid this type of logical and semantic errors. The research methodology includes analysis of philosophical ideas, ordinary language philosophy and thought experiments.

Wittgenstein and Poetry: A Reading of Czeslaw Milosz’s “Realism”

In this paper I hope to cast light on Wittgenstein enigmatic remark, “one should really only create philosophy poetically”. I discuss Wittgenstein’s ambition to overcome metaphysics by way of an appeal to ordinary language. For this purpose I contrast “realism” in philosophy (i.e., metaphysical realism, particularly its modern scientific version) with “realism” in poetry. My theme is the capacity of poetry to provide a model for Wittgenstein’s resistance to the inhumanity unleashed in metaphysics—exemplified by two distinct forms of skepticism—which obliterates the ordinary world under the guise of discovering its true nature. The poem I shall use to illustrate the difficulty in maintaining our grip on reality, hence our grip on our humanity, is Czeslaw Milosz’s poem “Realism”.

The Beginning of the Poem: The Epigraph

Theoretically, a poem can begin in any way. What does it mean that in practice, poems often begin in a particular way—that is, by returning to a fragment of some prior thing? We see this in the encore of John Milton’s opening to Lycidas (‘Yet once more, O ye laurels, and once more’); differently, we see this in the widely used convention of the poetic epigraph (for instance, T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ begins with six lines from Dante’s Inferno). While there is an established model for understanding the beginning as an act that invokes poetic precedent, this paper seeks to expose the beginning’s logic of return to a broader sense of language that is beyond the remit of poetic tradition as such. With a focus on the epigraph, this paper thinks about the everyday existence of poems and about how this existence relates to ordinary language, asking, how do these different modes of language function together? How does ordinary language collude in the creation of poetry? In its enactment of the passage of language from one mode of existence to another, the beginning of a poem might offer some answers to these questions.

Logic and symbolism of switchable porous framework materials

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are highly porous materials composed of organic linkers and inorganic nodes. A subset of MOFs can switch between at least two structures differing significantly in porosity, offering new opportunities for application technologies. However, network topology, micromechanics of building blocks and their hinges, particle size, defects, agglomeration etc., are convoluted into the responsiveness of the system. Many factors are a consequence of the material’s history, including synthesis, desolvation, and all subsequent handling steps, leading to a complex interplay of factors difficult to express clearly by ordinary language systems, chemical or mathematical symbols without loss of intuitive understanding. Here, we propose a symbolic language for the rationalization of switchability emphasizing the history-dependent responsivity of many dynamic frameworks and their stimuli-induced phase transitions. The system follows a bivalent logic inspired by Freges “Begriffsschrift”, providing a fundamental logic structure for the rationalization of statements and representation of logic gates.

‘Someone lives in me’: how essayists enter our lives

ABSTRACT When we read, we imagine an author who wrote what we are reading and we imagine what they are like. This essay describes how authorial personae are shaped, in particular those of essayists, by considering the work of Michel de Montaigne and Joan Didion in relation to their use (or lack) of friendliness and knowingness. Drawing on ordinary language philosophy, with particular reference to Toril Moi, along with philosopher Alexander Nehamas’s conception of friendship, I explain the sense of quasi-conversational connection that readers can experience when reading Montaigne and Didion, and argue that applying a language of sociality to reading can reveal how our picture of an author influences our interpretation of their text.

Salient semantics

Semantic features are components of concepts. In philosophy, there is a predominant focus on those features that are necessary (and jointly sufficient) for the application of a concept. Consequently, the method of cases has been the paradigm tool among philosophers, including experimental philosophers. However, whether a feature is salient is often far more important for cognitive processes like memory, categorization, recognition and even decision-making than whether it is necessary. The primary objective of this paper is to emphasize the significance of researching salient features of concepts. I thereby advocate the use of semantic feature production tasks, which not only enable researchers to determine whether a feature is salient, but also provide a complementary method for studying ordinary language use. I will discuss empirical data on three concepts, conspiracy theory, female/male professor, and life, to illustrate that semantic feature production tasks can help philosophers (a) identify those salient features that play a central role in our reasoning about and with concepts, (b) examine socially relevant stereotypes, and (c) investigate the structure of concepts.

Tagmem pada Frasa Keripik Pisang dan Frasa Nasi Tiwul (Kajian Tagmemik)

Apart from having an eclectic, universal nature, Tagmemik studies can also be used to analyze language such as the phrases "banana chips" and "tiwul rice". So, the aim of this research is to describe the tagmemes in the phrase banana chips and describe the tagmemes in the phrase nasi tiwul. This research method uses a qualitative research approach and descriptive research type. The researcher's presence will be in May, June 2024. The research setting is this research. The research data is language in the form of banana chips phrases and tiwul rice phrases. The research data source is a researcher who lives in Punung subdistrict, Pacitan district with the name Yeni Utami. Secondary data sources are Mrs. Suparni who has made tiwul rice, Mrs. Suwatmi who sells tiwul rice at the Margo Mulyo Punung market, the internet pacitanku.com, and prabangkanews.com as sources for the phrase tiwul rice while the secondary source for the phrase banana chips is the written language of banana chips "sweet crunchy" Mrs. Sri Wahyuni ​​Pagutan, Pringkuku, Pacitan. The data collection procedure is by listening through field observations and internet observations. Then also use advanced note-taking techniques by using the data as the research object in the title. Data analysis technique by connecting tagmem theory with the data or research object stated in the title, namely banana chips and tiwul rice. Data validity techniques using theory triangulation and research method triangulation. Presentation of data using ordinary or formal language. The results of the research describe how slot, class, role, and cohesion are in the phrase "banana chips" and the phrase "tiwul rice" and the result is that it is true that a phrase is a noun phrase. Each phrase "banana chips" and the phrase "tiwul rice" in the slot section has a core and extra-core function. The class dimension has the form of basic morphemes, nouns, and has a subclass of noun phrases. The dimension of the role as a perpetrator or sufferer which has a function as a subject with the role of sufferer. The cohesion dimension can function as a filler for clauses that are transitive, intransitive or equative. Both as fillers for subject and object clauses. Suggestions for further research are that language researchers should use research objects in the form of data on phrases or clauses that are commonly used in everyday life, whether culinary, cultural, religious and social. So, research directly examines the language or uses research objects in the form of language.