Ordinary Language Research Articles

The Poetry of Ordinary Language

Abstract The general argument of this essay is that poetry is an everyday ambition and an everyday accomplishment. The evidence for this – a good bit of which I will amass enthusiastically in what follows – is everywhere in our language. I explore this according to three guiding intuitions: (i) people, at least some of the time, want to give their words a similar intensity or fullness and show the same skill in unleashing verbal power, as poets do – seeking words that will carry their voices; (ii) people say things give me the same aesthetic bliss and ache of gratitude that poetry gives me; and (iii) there seems to be a poetic or aesthetic dimension to all of language, without which words would not have the significance for us that they do. I end the essay by saying why the poetry in our everyday speech complicates the relation between the ordinary and (different versions of) the extraordinary as other philosophers have imagined it.

‘Experience’, ordinary and philosophical: a corpus study

Common arguments for realism about phenomenal consciousness contend that this is a folk concept, with proponents expecting it to be lexicalised in ordinary language. In English, the word ‘experience’ is typically regarded as the best candidate. This predicts that ‘experience’ will be used to refer to mental states and episodes, not only in philosophical but also in ordinary discourse. We conduct a corpus study in order to assess this claim and to understand the actual use of the word in non-academic, academic, and philosophical discourse. In non-academic discourse, uses that refer to knowledge or sources of knowledge, and to public events, are found to dominate. Uses that refer to mental states or episodes dominate only in the philosophy of mind (and not even in philosophy at large).

Quentin Skinner’s Attempt to Clarify Collingwood

This paper examines the methodological propositions of Quentin Skinner, whose influence on intellectual history, including the history and philosophy of science (HPS), cannot be disregarded. It is well known that Skinner’s method is based on John L. Austin’s theory of speech acts. Nonetheless, the very idea of applying ordinary language philosophy to the subject matter of history rests on other assumptions that form Skinner’s philosophy of historiography. The paper focuses on reconstructing this philosophy of historiography and especially on R. G. Collingwood as a primary source of inspiration. This famous British philosopher, historian, and archaeologist authored many inspirational texts concerning the historical craft. The complex and sometimes contradictory structure of his posthumously published texts requires careful interpretation, and many philosophers see Collingwood as an obscure thinker. The paper argues that even though Skinner openly denounces Collingwood’s central concept of re-enactment, his philosophy of historiography is deeply influenced by a specific understanding of Collingwood’s legacy.

Caring for the Ordinary in Palestine: When Ongoing Occupation Becomes Maddening

ABSTRACT: This article offers a reading of contemporary life in Palestine that interrogates the braiding of hope and despair through an examination of expressions of optimism and madness in Palestinian everyday life. Whereas I neither aim to define what madness nor optimism could be taken to mean, I examine vernacular notions of how, when, and why the notion of madness is used in ordinary language, anchored in ethnographic fieldwork in occupied Palestine as well as conversations with Palestinian interlocutors over the last sixteen years. The aim being to explore the experiential and linguistic abyss between a collective feeling of Israel's occupation as a maddening force and, on the other hand, the accompanying call on part of the Palestinians to act as if it was not, the will to endure and resist being unwavering. Ultimately, I pursue the argument that the chasm between these two different pressures causes a feeling of skepticism due to the braided struggle of finding a language that can both acknowledge the occurrence of mental disorder as a consequence of the military occupation simultaneously as Palestinians carve out a space to sustain an ordinary in the wake of maddening oppression. Concludingly, I argue that gender is at the heart of how we might understand, even locate the refusal to end in Palestine—the maddening consequences intrinsic to such a refusal being the locus of my inquiry.

Ordinary Language and Race: Hanna Pitkin and Toni Morrison in Tandem and Tension

Previous articleNext article No AccessOrdinary Language and Race: Hanna Pitkin and Toni Morrison in Tandem and TensionGeorge ShulmanGeorge ShulmanNew York University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Polity Ahead of Print The Journal of the Northeastern Political Science Association HistoryPublished online May 31, 2023 Keywordsordinary languageWittgensteinracepolitical theory© 2023 Northeastern Political Science Association. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Functions of the Invective Lexicon

Invective vocabulary has recently been of interest to linguists, so we paid attention to the semantic development of this layer of language. The article aims to investigate this layer and how this layer is formed. The formation of invective vocabulary occurs mainly with the help of the following lexico-semantic methods: the transition of ordinary language into invective due to the means of linguistic expressiveness. Of particular interest is the communicative aspect of the use of invectives. Even though that many words are quite often used as abuses not only in live communication but also in many texts, this possible meaning is not always recorded in dictionaries.

Hypallage is a rare bird. Not.

Hypallage, a “marginal” rhetorical trope, is defined as a combination of seemingly incompatible features and has been exploited since antiquity in poetic and narrative discourse, e.g., angry crowns of kings (Odes of Horace). Here the hypallactic incompatibility arises from the position of angry as a prenominal modifier of crowns rather than of kings. We deny that hypallage is a rare phenomenon restricted to belles-lettres; rather, we claim that hypallage is a highly entrenched mechanism in ordinary language. We demonstrate that structural and semantic parallelisms exist between prototypical hypallactic transpositions and the marked placement of constituents in clausal, morphological, and speech act constructions, as well as quantifier and adverbial placement. Hypallactic expressions constitute a violation of the Iconic Proximity Principle. Nevertheless, they are a means for a speaker to convey complex meanings at any level of grammar and discourse with a minimum of coding effort. The exploitation of hypallactic anti-iconicity by a speaker and its resolution by a hearer are made possible by shared conceptual models, the conceptual metonymies and/or metaphors operating on them, and pragmatic inferencing. We conclude that the prioritizing of figurative motivation at the expense of iconicity is a pervasive cognitive mechanism in language.

Why bounded rationality (in epistemology)?

AbstractBounded rationality gets a bad rap in epistemology. It is argued that theories of bounded rationality are overly context‐sensitive; conventionalist; or dependent on ordinary language (Carr, 2022; Pasnau, 2013). In this paper, I have three aims. The first is to set out and motivate an approach to bounded rationality in epistemology inspired by traditional theories of bounded rationality in cognitive science. My second aim is to show how this approach can answer recent challenges raised for theories of bounded rationality. My third aim is to clarify the role of rational ideals in bounded rationality.

International Communication through the Mind of an Interpreter

Interpretation as a form of intercultural communication plays an important role in modern geopolitical conditions, hence the role of the interpreter as a mediator between languages and mentalities acquires even greater significance as high-quality interpretation ensures successful international communication. The authors focus on studying simultaneous interpreting as a cognitive process and set the goal of analyzing how the incoming message is perceived and processed in the mind of the interpreter and then transformed into a target language message. Applying the method of comparative cognitive transformation, the authors arrive at the conclusion that, since the interpreter operates on the cognitive level, the process of deverbalizing the source message is a transformation of the ordinary language into a language of thought, thus rendering the gist of the original can be achieved through identifying the underlying concepts in the source language message and finding correlations in the target language. Before attempting to formulate the target message, the interpreter should first deverbalize the original and get rid of its linguistic form, that is, cognitively imagine the sense of the message as a certain space of connections. Effective international communication with the target language recipients means that the interpreter needs to account for the pragmatics of the speech act and find a ready-made concise variant expressing a similar idea in the target language.

What is Hate Speech? The Case for a Corpus Approach

Contemporary public discourse is saturated with speech that vilifies and incites hatred or violence against vulnerable groups. The term “hate speech” has emerged in legal circles and in ordinary language to refer to these communicative acts. But legal theorists and philosophers disagree over how to define this term. This paper makes the case for, and subsequently develops, the first corpus-based analysis of the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” We begin by demonstrating that key interpretive and moral disputes surrounding hate speech laws—in particular, surrounding their compatibility with the rule of law, democracy, and free speech—depend crucially on the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Next, we argue, drawing on recent developments in legal philosophy, that corpus linguistics constitutes a distinctively promising tool for ascertaining the ordinary meaning of “hate speech.” Finally, we offer a proof of concept, by outlining, and analyzing the interpretive and moral implications of, the first such study.

Pain Linguistics: A Case for Pluralism

Abstract The most common approach to understanding the semantics of the concept of pain is third-person thought experiments. By contrast, the most frequent and most relevant uses of the folk concept of pain are from a first-person perspective in conversational settings. In this paper, we use a set of linguistic tools to systematically explore the semantics of what people communicate when reporting pain from a first-person perspective. Our results suggest that only a pluralistic view can do justice to the way we talk about pain from a first-person perspective: The semantic content of the folk concept of pain consists of information about both an unpleasant feeling and a disruptive bodily state. Pain linguistics thus provides new insights into ordinary pain language and poses an interesting challenge to the dominant unitary views of pain.

Plato’s Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion

<i>Plato’s Statesman: A Philosophical Discussion</i>

Physics and poetry revisited

Charles Day’s column, “Physics and poetry,” in the April 2022 issue (page 8) is correct to push back on claims that the two are “incompatible” (attributed to Paul Dirac). But I disagree with one of his later statements, “Physics is abstraction. Its use for metaphor and simile is limited.”Physics is rich with metaphors, its very abstraction itself perhaps accounting for many of them. The pendulum as an oscillation about a mean between two limits on either side of an equilibrium is a hoary metaphor in ordinary language and the social sciences. It gets an even wider meaning in the hands of a physicist who sees the same mathematics and physics of harmonic oscillations in contexts far from material bobs on strings or swaying branches. Richard Feynman, a name that Day rightly invokes, rendered poetically many a physical theme and saw in the design of a Japanese gate a poetic “explanation” for broken symmetry in nature as seen in theoretical physics.11. R. P. Feynman, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time, Basic Books (2011), p. 47. Some other examples of metaphors across physics are in my book, The Beauty of Physics: Patterns, Principles, and Perspectives (2014).ReferenceSection:ChooseTop of pageReference <<1. R. P. Feynman, Six Not-So-Easy Pieces: Einstein’s Relativity, Symmetry, and Space-Time, Basic Books (2011), p. 47. Google Scholar© 2023 American Institute of Physics.

Jizang's Anti-realist Theory of Truth: A Modal Logical Understanding of Universal Affirmation through Universal Negation

In the writings of the Chinese Madhyamaka master Jizang (549–623 c.e.), we often read arguments that deduce universal affirmation from universal negation. In previous scholarship, this seemingly paradoxical reasoning was often explained by ascribing to Jizang a type of transcendental realism—the view that reality transcends our ordinary language, logic, and reason—and reading it as his unique way of capturing such a transcendental nature of reality. More recently, an attempt at formalizing this transcendental realist interpretation of Jizang was made by Yasuo Deguchi, who suggests that Jizang could have been tinkering with a type of dialethism. This article challenges the transcendental realist interpretation of Jizang by studying strong anti-realist tendencies found across his writings, and proposes a way to understand his deduction of universal affirmation from universal negation within the boundaries of ordinary reasoning and coherently with his anti-realist philosophy by introducing the modalities of "categorical truth" and "conditional truth."

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

私的言語論と二次的意味

Wittgensteinʼs so-called “private language argument” denies the normativity of private definitions, and suggests that sensation words are taught through replacing primitive behaviour expressive of sensations. However, these observations fail to provide a full understanding of mental concepts of our ordinary language. In this article, the relevance of the concept of secondary sense is brought to the fore through examining the concept of particular feelings inherent in various experiences and also that of calculation in the head. It is shown that natural linguistic reactions present in the use of words in the secondary sense are essential in gaining an overview of our ordinary language.

УТОПИЯ СОВЕРШЕННОГО ЯЗЫКА: ЛИНГВОФИЛОСОФИЯ ХУГО БАЛЛЯ

Philosophical and poetic reflection on the role of language in the era of modernism are characterized by an intense search for a new perfect language. The result of this search is a discussion about the expressive possibilities of poetic language and attempts to create new forms of poetry. The subject of the research is Hugo Ball’s theoretical views on the problem of language. One of the founders of the Dada movement, Ball creates sound poems, which should be analyzed as a reflection of the avant-garde concept of abandoning the outdated rules of ordinary language. They represent an absolute deconstruction of language, but its significance lies in an attempt for an innovative understanding of poetic creativity and its reception, which is in the spirit of the time. Ball’s reflections on poetic language are viewed in the context of the romantic philosophy of language, modern philosophy, and also in the context of philosophical thought of the beginning of the 20th century. At the heart of the radical literary experiments of the Dadaists (as well as those of the Russian and Italian Futurists) is the idea that the existing conventional natural languages are unsuitable for poetry. Hugo Ball rethinks the concept of the language norm and the principles of poetic communication between the creator of a new formation and his listener. Doubt, concerning the success of such communication, leads Ball to comment on his own hermetic texts using conventional language. The article formulates the concept of a perfect language in the understanding of Hugo Ball. The main features of Ball’s new poetic language are irrationality, magical nature and fundamentally different sound. “Poems without words” are proposed to be interpreted as metaphors which point to the idea of a perfect language behind them.

Taking the mystery away from shared intentionality: The straightforward view and its empirical implications.

Ordinary language in Western and non-Western cultures individuates shared mental states or experiences as unitary interpersonal events that belong to more than one individual. However, a default assumption in modern Western thought is that, in this regard, ordinary language is either illusory or merely metaphorical: a mental state or experience can belong to only one person. This assumption is called Cartesian eliminativism and is often taken to be foundational in psychology. It follows that any view that contradicts Cartesian eliminativism is a priori suspected of being "mysterious," i.e., of not meeting scientific standards. This paper suggests that the very opposite may be the case. The straightforward view explains how individuals assemble and experience a shared mental state as a unitary whole whose components are distributed among the participants. The naturalistic advantages of such a view are brought to light by focusing on developmental science. Since it explains early shared emotions, goals, and attention merely by relying on domain-general, associative processes, the straightforward view is more parsimonious than current psychological theories. Indeed, it abandons the cumbersome postulates of (i) multi-level recursive mindreading and (ii) a special, conceptually elusive phenomenal quality. I outline the distinctive developmental predictions of the view and discuss how it accounts for the functions of shared mental states. As a reductionist, non-eliminativist approach, the straightforward view promises to be viable also for cognitive scientists who have so far worked within the Cartesian framework due to a lack of a rigorous and sufficiently developed alternative.

On the Role of Polysemy in Ordinary Language Philosophers' Criticism of Metaphysics

Gilbert Ryle, Ludwig Wittgenstein ve John Langshaw Austin’in başını çektiği gündelik dil felsefecileri metafiziksel sorunların gündelik dilin yeterince anlaşılmamasının bir sonucu olduğunu iddia etmektedirler. Bu çalışmanın amacı gündelik dil felsefecilerinin metafizik eleştirilerini doğal dillerdeki çok anlamlılık olgusu ile ilişkilendirmektedir. Çalışmada Platon ve Aristoteles metafizikleri Sokratik sorunlara verilen bir cevap olarak sunulacaktır. Doğal dillerdeki çok anlamlılık durumu Sokratik sorunların dayanak noktalarından birisi olarak ele alınacaktır. Çok anlamlılıkta, eşadlılıktan durumundan farklı olarak, bir kelimenin birbirlerinden farklı anlamları arasında ilişkiler bulunmaktadır. Bu durumu açıklamak için “iyi” kelimesinin farklı anlamları arasındaki ilişkiler verilebilir. Gündelik dil felsefecileri bu anlam ağının basit kurallara, yapılara indirgenemeyeceğini iddia etmektedirler. Buradaki karmaşık anlam ağının arkasında yaşam formlarımızın bulunduğunu iddia etmektedirler. Gündelik dil felsefecilerinin penceresinden bakıldığında, bu durumun yeterince anlaşılmamış olması metafiziğin çıkış nedenlerin birisi olarak görülmektedir.

Critical ordinary language philosophy: A new project in experimental philosophy

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems.