Pragmatic Agreement Research Articles

Bioethics on dialogue

Bioethics is dialogical as a ‘bridge’ between two cultures, scientific culture and humanistic culture and because of pluralism. The article analyzes the different theoretical ways to conceive dialogue in the liberal-libertarian perspective (as negotiation procedures), in the utilitarian vision (agreed calculation of convenience) and personalist view (recognition of the dignity of each human being). Bioethics Committees play a key role, both at national, regional and international levels, engaging in dialogue, considering both interdisciplinarity and pluralism in order to identify (if possible) an ‘ethical mediation’, which should not be reduced to a mere compromise or pragmatic agreement, but as a minimum level (or maximum possible level) of shared ethical principles/values on specific topics. Beyond the institutionalization of Bioethics with the Committees, the role of ‘active citizenship’ and ‘citizen participation’ is growing in importance in bioethics, along with the need to build platforms for dialogue with society (beyond experts), which enable dynamic updating and active interaction between experts and citizens.

Honorifics in Newspapers: The Announcement of Queen Elizabeth Death. A Pragmatic Study

The significance of words is not based on sensory input but in terms of what that input means when it is perceived. This is the basis of social relationships, and it is the basis that reflects the social knowledge. Politeness is realised through the choice of suitable language expressions according to the situational and social context. Honorific forms are the typical linguistic expressions for exhibiting politeness since their use presumes pragmatic agreement with the situation. Honorifics are a politeness method in a specific language which may be particular words, or sentence structures. The current study aims to find out how the newspapers announced the death of Queen Elizabeth and how they honored her by using different types of honorific expressions. Ten newspapers (five from The United Kingdom and five from The United States of America) have been chosen to be analysed based on Levinson’s (1983) model. According to the findings, most newspapers use referent honorifics and authorised recipient kinds to indicate the nature of the speaker's regard for the person being referred to.

The Angiographic Anatomy of the Sphenoidal Segment of the Middle Cerebral Artery and Its Relevance in Mechanical Thrombectomy

Objective: The middle cerebral artery (MCA) is the most commonly treated artery in mechanical thrombectomy stroke trials; however, there is no pragmatic agreement about the segmental anatomy and nomenclature utilized. It results in significant clinical-radiological dissociation and introduces bias in research trials. The purpose of the study is to review and compare angiographic anatomy with microsurgical anatomy literature of the MCA with emphasis on the discrepancy. Methodology: Consecutive cerebral angiograms between January 2011 and March 2014 were retrospectively reviewed by endovascular surgical neuroradiologists. Information about the anatomy of the sphenoidal segment of the MCA classified as classic and non-classic pattern, the lenticulostriate artery takeoff pattern, and the course angulation of the sphenoidal segment were studied. Results: A total of 500 patients, 886 cerebral angiograms, were reviewed. We found the classic pattern of the main trunk MCA bifurcation and a straight angulation course in less than half of the cases. The lenticulostriate arteries arose not only from the main trunk but also from its divisions in more than half of the cases. Conclusion: It is important to corroborate our findings and to develop a pragmatic classification to accurately assess MCA occlusions from the radiological and clinical perspective.

A world of difference ‐ opportunities for applying the 1972 World Heritage Convention to the High Seas

Abstract The 1972 World Heritage Convention has not to date been applied to marine areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ), i.e. to high seas and deep sea bed sites. Examples are given of high seas and deep seabed sites that appear to meet the criteria of Outstanding Universal Value for inscription. The ongoing negotiations at the United Nations for a new International Legally Binding Instrument (ILBI) on the conservation and sustainable exploitation of biodiversity in ABNJ are highlighted as a significant complementary initiative. Three feasible modalities are suggested by which the Parties to the 1972 Convention might be able to allow inscription of sites in ABNJ and establish appropriate management regimes: incremental and pragmatic agreement to minor changes in the way that they apply the treaty or formally announcing a change in the way that they intend to apply a treaty among themselves in the future; agreeing to an Amendment outside the terms of the 1972 Agreement; or developing an optional protocol to the 1972 Convention could be developed through an international negotiation among States Parties, binding only on those States that choose to ratify any resulting protocol. The merits of these different options are explored. Under any scenario, a system will also need to be elaborated for the protection of World Heritage sites in areas beyond national jurisdiction. This will be an important undertaking which will require collaboration between UNESCO and the relevant competent international organizations and their States Parties.

The Use Of Tag Questions with Male and Female Speakers of English and Serbian

The paper is a report on research meant to discover the extent to which the speakers of English and Serbian employ tag questions as communicative strategies for ensuring pragmatic agreement and increasing the tentativeness of a speech act regarding the role of gender therein. This small-scale contrastive research project, largely inspired and founded on the specificities of gendered discourse style as identified by R. Lakoff (1975, 2004), and later discussed by Holmes (1986), Romaine (2003), Talbot (2003), Eckert & McConnell-Ginet (2003) and others, is based on analyzing contextualized question-tagging sampled from a corpus of texts within the journalistic register. The corpus encompasses 100 interviews provided by English and Serbian male and female interviewees from on-line newspapers and magazines. The analysis also addresses such issues as how culturally-conditioned or gender-conditioned tag-question usage is, whether a fixed form of question tagging would be less productive a pattern than the variable form, etc.

Crime, state and civil society responses in Maputo (Mozambique): Between privatisation and civilianisation

ABSTRACTIn the capital city of Maputo in Mozambique, where recent international investment is seizing opportunities in a very poor urban context, social contrasts are important. It is hardly surprising that crime and fear of crime are on the increase. Maputo is also involved in a process of privatisation and civilianisation of security, which takes different forms: the blooming of new private security companies and the privatisation of public space via the development of enclosed and protected residential areas; a system of community policing as well as informal ‘patrolling’. They all spatially reflect sizable local, national and international issues. This article will examine the origins, the characteristics and the socio-spatial repercussions of these forms of security policing. They reflect the demand for better security provision in a changing urban society, and can be considered an erosion of the ‘state’s assumed monopoly over policing’. The aim of this article is to highlight the public/private ‘share of space’ and ‘share of influence’ for the sake of citizens’ well-being. Is privatisation and civilianisation of security a consequence of rising concerns about crime in Maputo? Are we currently witnessing a kind of pragmatic agreement between the inherited centralised Mozambican state and the emerging private sector and civil society?

Toward a Practical, Civic Piety: Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, and the Race for National Priest

Abstract In 2008, two of the leading presidential candidates emerged from controversial, outsider religious groups—Mormonism and the black church tradition. Dogged by ongoing questions from the media, each candidate produced a high-profile public address. In this article, I argue that Mitt Romney’s “Faith in America” and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” craft competing visions for American civic piety. Drawing on recent literature in the area of practical piety, I read the speeches as evidence that civic piety may be more than a subordinating, pragmatic agreement between church and state. It may instead be read as a spiritually substantive space of cultural identity formation. I further conclude that the 2008 election reveals a contested piety in the midst of transition, and that this transition points in a relatively well-defined direction for American civil-religious culture.

Morphology and syntax … and semantics … and pragmatics

Agreement minimally involves interaction between morphology and syntax, as a target’s features vary according to the morphological form of a controller in a given syntactic context. However, semantics can also play a role, and the term “semantic agreement” has been used to describe various constructions where morphosyntactic feature values of the agreement target do not match the formal features of the controller, reflecting instead meaning-based properties of the noun. In this paper, we deconstruct instances of “semantic agreement,” as there is good evidence to believe that more than just the semantics is involved in the agreement process. In some cases, e.g. Russian hybrid nouns like vrač ‘doctor’, the local context provides the agreement features, giving a type of “pragmatic agreement”. In other cases, socio-cultural information plays a role, showing a broader type of pragmatic agreement. In light of these observations, we offer a deconstruction of semantic agreement phenomena in order to show the complex ways morphology interacts with syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Finally, we argue that the distinction between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic agreement is paralleled by (and benefits from) earlier discussions of syntactic versus pragmatic control.

Preschool children conflate pragmatic agreement and semantic truth

Children’s ability to ascribe beliefs to themselves and others has been shown to develop in the late preschool and early school years. This ability to represent, that is to think about, beliefs known to be false is described as metarepresentational development. This article extends these findings to the domain of linguistic representations by exploring how children come to judge statements as true or false of a given reality. It presents two models of judgment, one based on the pragmatics of the expression, the other on the basis of the semantics of the expression. Two studies show that when preschoolers object to what someone has said, they are disagreeing with the speaker, a pragmatic judgment, rather than judging the truth or falsity of what the speaker has said, a semantic judgment. True/false judgments are metalinguistic judgments, later acquired, suggesting a new consciousness of linguistic form.

Reflections on the WHO multinational study of vascular disease in diabetes (WHO MSVDD): an historical contribution from a unique study half a century on

After much discussion, we reached a pragmatic agreement to accept as diabetic patients who, after individual consideration, were recognized as such by experienced staff in each center. Treatment details were recorded, and patients were classed as insulin-dependent when insulin was started within 1 year of diabetes diagnosis. In some ethnic groups (e.g., native Americans), this was an unsatisfactory definition. The body mass index (BMI) was adopted for the first time for use in a large international study. This index of obesity was originally created in 1835 by Quetelet [6], an astronomer deeply interested in human behavior and social phenomena. He organized the first international conference of statistics in 1853.

Entre nationalismes irlandais et canadien-français : Les intrigues québécoises de la Self Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland

Abstract: In May of 1920, the Self Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland (SDIL), an Irish republican organization, was founded in Montreal. The League opposed the actions of the British government of David Lloyd George at the time of the Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), but it primarily presented itself as a Canadian organization. This article will describe the founding and evolution of this association still neglected by Irish-Canadian historiography. Deliberately focused on the experience of the SDIL in Quebec, the article highlights that two former Irish nationalist traditions clashed in the province: one, constitutional autonomist, and the other, republican. Despite this division of Irish-Quebec nationalist forces, the involvement of French-Canadian elites in the SDIL contributed to making the League a success in Quebec. At the time, journalists and politicians like Omer Héroux, Armand Lavergne and Henri Bourassa effectively supported the goals of the SDIL. This pragmatic agreement between Irish and French-Canadian coreligionsists who had often clashed at the beginning of the twentieth century (especially on the subject of French education in Canadian schools) incidentally constituted one of the original elements of the business of the SDIL.

Entre nationalismes irlandais et canadien-français: Les intrigues québécoises de la Self Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland

In May of 1920, the Self Determination for Ireland League of Canada and Newfoundland (SDIL), an Irish republican organization, was founded in Montreal. The League opposed the actions of the British government of David Lloyd George at the time of the Anglo-Irish War (1919–1921), but it primarily presented itself as a Canadian organization. This article will describe the founding and evolution of this association still neglected by Irish-Canadian historiography. Deliberately focused on the experience of the SDIL in Quebec, the article highlights that two former Irish nationalist traditions clashed in the province: one, constitutional autonomist, and the other, republican. Despite this division of Irish-Quebec nationalist forces, the involvement of French-Canadian elites in the SDIL contributed to making the League a success in Quebec. At the time, journalists and politicians like Omer Héroux, Armand Lavergne and Henri Bourassa effectively supported the goals of the SDIL. This pragmatic agreement between Irish and French-Canadian coreligionsists who had often clashed at the beginning of the twentieth century (especially on the subject of French education in Canadian schools) incidentally constituted one of the original elements of the business of the SDIL.

Chapitre 3. L'éthique en comités

The management of techno-scientific and multicultural societies, open and evolving, can neither be conceived nor carried out on the basis of fundamentalist, essentialist rules that are characteristic of closed, immobile societies. Within a global civilisation, fundamentalisms are only acceptable as individual or community beliefs. Against the background of our civilisation on the chaotic road to globalisation described here, what are the methodological rules for bioethics committees? A first rule concerns the composition of the committees: it must be multidisciplinary and pluralist. The second rule concerns the distinction of types, which is less evident at a time which cultivates postmodernism. The "types" which absolutely must be distinguished are: science, ethics, morals, law, politics. The third rule concerns the concluding procedures. A majority vote procedure after information and limited discussion makes it possible to conclude easily and rapidly. But it generally seems not to be very ethical, especially if it does not allow minorities to have their divergent opinions appear among the conclusions in an explicit argued manner. The "lazy dissensus" must, however also be avoided: it consists in not really engaging the interdisciplinary, pluralist discussion, simply exposing and explaining each position, on the pretext that pluralism is respecting diversity, the freedom to believe, to think and to express oneself either each for himself or in the name of one's community or tradition. This sort of "postmodern" methodology, individualistic and communitarian to an extreme, is precariously balanced in relation to the committee's ethical vocation. It is therefore very important that an ethics committee really engages in discussion and expresses, let's say, a preference for consensus. This preference is the expression of its "ethical" nature: in this word (as in the word "moral", in fact), there is a reference to what is common, to what unites and makes social life possible. The aim of consensus, the idea that it is better to get on than to ignore each other or oppose each other; is methodologically prevalent in ethics. But on the express condition that the agreement is freely and consciously accepted. The symmetrical danger to that of "lazy dissensus" which loses sight of the aim of agreement, is "forced consensus". Pragmatic consensuses are extremely precious and even indispensable in our complex societies if we want to set up common operating rules while preserving the freedom to think and the diversity of beliefs. They also ensure that it is possible to re-open the debate: a pragmatic agreement is on a different scale from an essentialist dogma or a fundamentalist norm, which try to regulate not only behaviour but also thought.

History, Human Rights, and Globalization

ABSTRACTAn illustrative comparison of human rights in 1948 and the contemporary period, attempting to gauge the impact of globalization on changes in the content of human rights (e.g., collective rights, women's rights, right to a healthy environment), major abusers and guarantors of human rights (e.g., state actors, transnational corporations, social movements), and alternative justifications of human rights (e.g., pragmatic agreement, moral intuitionism, overlapping consensus, cross‐cultural dialogue).

Semantic database prototypes

Abstract. This paper describes a technique for improving the semantic consensus of conceptual database designs. Semantic consensus is a condition where there is pragmatic agreement among database designers and all of the users about which aspect of reality is being represented by a particular database element, and how that representation is being coded. The technique, called semantic database prototyping (SDP), involves a prototype that has been designed and constructed purely as a consequence of the semantic data model. The purpose of the semantic database prototype is to promote direct user validation during the conceptual database design phase of information systems analysis and design. Its distinguishing characteristic is its capture of data element occurrences within the context of the database design. The research method was action research, and the project is also briefly described.