Propositional Content Research Articles

О вечной ценности идей в сиюминутных воплощеньях

Opinions have degrees of epistemic “value”, measured in the framework of a given culture. These degrees do not necessarily coincide with degrees of momentary actuality in the society and in the cultural environment. Parameters of social-cultural evaluation vary with time gaining and/or losing actuality. They even depend on whether those who pronounce these opinions are acquainted with those whom these opinions are ascribed to or with “certified” authors of the ideas. This social dimension of opin-ion evaluation may be manipulatively used in mass media so that even openly fake news and fake ‘truths’ are taken for granted by addressees. Two approaches are extensively discussed in the literature on such “quotational” view of language use: the “semantic” approach and the “formal” approach. The for-mer takes the content of propositions not to depend on the sentence forms presented to the audience. For the second approach, the propositions taken as ideas wholly de-pend on the form of presentation, even on syntactical details of formal realizations of ideas in discourse, being socially adapted to the cultural environment. This view im-plies that evaluation of ideas depends even on “syntactic vagaries” of a given lan-guage, such as Russian or English additionally to the ways they present propositions and propositional attitudes in formal logical systems.

Inference and Self-Knowledge

A growing cohort of philosophers argue that inference, understood as an agent-level psychological process or event, is subject to a “Taking Condition.” The Taking Condition states, roughly, that drawing an inference requires one to take one’s premise(s) to epistemically support one’s conclusion, where “takings” are some sort of higher-order attitude, thought, intuition, or act. My question is not about the nature of takings, but about their contents. I examine the prospects for “minimal” and “robust” views of the contents of takings. On the minimal view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion only requires focusing on propositional contents and putative epistemic support relations between them. On the robust view, taking one’s premise(s) to support one’s conclusion also requires knowledge (or being in a position to have knowledge) of the attitudes one holds toward those contents. I argue that arguments for the Taking Condition do not entail or sufficiently motivate the robust view. Accordingly, contra several philosophers, the Taking Condition does not illuminate a deep relationship between inference and self-knowledge.

О ТИПОЛОГИИ СУДЕБНОГО НАРРАТИВА

The study is based on the assumption about the narrative nature of courtroom discourse and aims at analyzing the structure and varieties of courtroom narrative. Courtroom narrative is defined as a way of organizing courtroom discourse whose propositional content is a story with crime event elements included in this story in their chronological sequence that correlate with reality and the speaker’s experience. Four classification criteria for courtroom narrative practices are proposed: 1) the degree of completeness; 2) the ways of description; 3) the type of determinants; 4) the way of reality representation. By the degree of completeness, there are complete and truncated narratives; by the way of description - neutral and evaluative; by the type of determinant - phenomenological and professional; by the way of representing reality - narrative construction and narrative reflection. The article concludes that the study of courtroom narrative is a promising research field, since there are avenues for researchers such as the status of interpretive schemes in the narrative, narrative structures in different legal cultures, the ratio of narrative and recontextualization.

Virtue Epistemology as Anti-luck Epistemology

The idea that knowledge as an individual mental attitude with certain propositional content is not only true justified belief but a belief the truth of which does not result from any kind of luck, is widely spread in contemporary epistemology. This account is known as anti-luck epistemology. A very popular explanation of the inconsistency of that concept of knowledge with the luck-dependent nature of truth (so called veritic luck taking place when a subject’s belief could not be true if not by mere coincidence) presumes that the status of propositional knowledge crucially depends on the qualities of actions that result in the corresponding belief, or processes backing them, which reflect the socalled intellectual virtues mainly responsible for subject’s relevant competences. This account known as Virtue Epistemology presumes that if a belief is true exclusively or mainly due to its dependence on intellectual virtues, it just cannot be true by luck, hence no place for lucky knowledge. But this thesis is hard to prove given the existence of true virtuous beliefs which could nevertheless be false if not for some lucky (for the knower) accident. This led to an appearance of virtue epistemological theories aimed specifically at an assimilation of such cases. Their authors try to represent the relevant situations as such where the contribution of luck is not crucial whereas the contribution of virtues is crucial. This article provides a critical analysis of the corresponding arguments as part of a more general study of the ability of Virtue Epistemology to provide justification for the thesis of incompatibility of propositional knowledge with veritic luck. It is shown that there are good reasons to doubt that Virtue Epistemology can do this.

МОДАЛЬНОСТІ ВИСЛОВЛЕННЯ –ЕНУНЦІАЦІЇ

The article is devoted to the study of the modality of enunciation expression. The article on the material of the Spanish language considers and analyzes sentences with the use of enunciations. Modality is an interlevel communicatively directed grammatical supercategory that indicates the relationship of sentence content to reality from the speaker's point of view, has a complex, multifaceted expression, structured by three types of categories: morphological modality, syntactic modality and lexical and grammatical modality. The modality of expression manifests itself in two ways: on the one hand, it concerns the speaker, whose goal is self-representation, as well as the establishment of the social status of the addressee; on the other hand, it affects the interlocutor when it comes to receiving a certain reaction (positive or negative) to the message, when there is a need to encourage the communication partner to perform or not perform a certain action. Therefore, there is a process of subjective coding (sender) and decoding (addressee) of the propositional content of a statement. An utterance is an act of creating a message, a complex process of its creation or, in other words, an individual act of using language, in comparison with the utterance, the result of the utterance. Thus, in general, the analysis of the statement is to study the reflection of the subject in the message.

Turn Control and the Right to Speak in the Moroccan Classroom A Critical Discourse Analysis

Turn Control and the Right to Speak in the Moroccan Classroom A Critical Discourse Analysis Abdelhak BZIOUI, PhD Abstract This article aims at studying how talk is distributed among the participants in the classrooms observed. It considers both the structure of turn-taking and the propositional content of participants‘ turns. The focus is finding out in what ways the turn-taking system in the classroom reflects a certain power structure that bears on the observation of human rights principles inside the classroom; namely, the right to speak, to self-express, to argue, to hold and voice a different opinion, and other related rights. The turn-taking sequence is analysed in light of Rymes‘ (2009) analytical framework. There are three main dimensions to this analysis of turn-taking, namely, the interactional context, the social context, and individual agency. The study shows that teachers tend to strictly maintain T-S-T exchange patterns, ask largely closed questions, and allow relatively short thinking time; a situation which would endanger the spirit of dialogue and the students‘ sense of ―I‖ in the target classes. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/jehd.v10n1a11

영어 TV 뉴스와 한국어 번역에서의 헤지의 양상에 대한 연구

This study aims to investigate hedges used in English TV news and their Korean translations. Forty TV news articles (twenty in English and their twenty Korean translations) about nuclear facilities of North Korea were collected for this study, analyzed and compared with the correspondence list of hedge expressions in English and Korean. The result shows that most of the hedges used in both texts are about the speaker’s responsibility for the contents of propositions. Next, hedges related with the contents of propositions are examined the second most. Lastly, small numbers of hedges concerned with the relationship between the speaker and hearer are used. A few discrepancies in hedges in English texts and Korean translations are found. In learning English with news texts, it is recommended that teachers should teach such discrepancies in hedges in both texts to learners. Studies on other linguistic strategies (e.g., booster, attitude marker) or other genres (e.g., newspaper, magazine) are suggested for future research.

On the Linguistic Analysis of Fake News Texts in German Political Discourse

The article analyzes fake news texts from the perspective of linguistic pragmatics and its key concept, speech act theory. The specificity of fake news lies in the fact that, while ontologically functioning as a carrier of factual information, this type of text contains intentionally false information deliberately presented as real facts, often rendered provocative. Linguistic study of the fake news phenomenon is especially relevant since there is a clear demand for effective tools that would help disclose fake news texts, understand their nature, and describe functional features of such texts in political communication. Analyzing the modern German political discourse, the authors identify a trend of using fake news texts to vilify and destroy the authority and reputation of certain political forces and describe a number of key features of fake news texts. The article outlines issues related to the linguistic study and verification of fake news texts with the hope to develop reliable models for describing this text type and to develop practical guidelines that would enable users to detect fake news in discourse. The study justifies the high explanatory potential of the speech act theory which offers objective means to examine the manipulation mechanism in fake news texts in terms of the illocutionary force and the perlocutionary effect of an utterance. The analysis of the illocutionary struc-ture of fake news messages leads to the conclusion that false propositional content in conjunction with the constitutive rules of the illocution “statement” of the text type “news” is conditional on the high perlocutionary effect of fake news in the modern German political discourse. The article evaluates the prospects of studying fake news texts from within the paradigm of the speech act theory and links them to identifying linguistic markers of deliberate distortion of the true propositional content.

Va a ser que no

Abstract This study seeks to gain a better insight into the origin and expansion of the construction <va a ser que sí/no > (lit. goes to be that yes/no) in Peninsular Spanish. We argue that this construction derives from the use of the periphrastic future construction <ir a ‘go to’ + inf> in a pseudo-cleft sentence whose subject is a deictic element or an element that conveys the speaker’s attitudinal assessment of the propositional content expressed in the attribute, a complement que-clause. The etymological structure evolves through a process that formally implies the suppression of the explicit subject and the fusion of the components va a ser que leading to the conventionalization of refutative and assertive values. To demonstrate this directionality, we examine recent stages of change and develop syntactic and semantic-pragmatic arguments grounded in a data-based approach.

The Word gid in Najdi Arabic: An Evidentiality Head

This research paper investigates the word gid which is used in Najdi Arabic, a dialect spoken in Najd region in Arabic peninsula. This particle is analyzed syntactically using the recent assumptions of the minimalist program (Chomsky 1993, 1995, and subsequent work). As for the findings, it turns out that gid functions as a head that instantiates its maximal projection above TP and under CP. So, this word is not a property of TP domain nor a CP domain. Due to the fact that this word is only used when a speaker is certain of the propositional content of his/her utterance, we argue that gid is an evidential head that scopes over the tense layer. Furthermore, we argue that gid has an EPP feature, hence the specifier position of the functional phases headed by it must be filled by some element which is the subject. This accounts for the fact that subject must precede gid in declarative sentences. Additionally, gid has [PAST] feature which is uninterpretable and hence must be deleted before the derivation is handed over to the LF following the general lines of feature deletion of Chomsky (1995 and 2005). We argue that the deletion of [PAST] feature is conducted through an Agree operation that is established between gid and the verb. This is why gid comes exclusively with past tense. Otherwise [PAST] feature on gid remains active, leading to the ungrammaticality of the given sentence.

Characterising the alternative and polar questions of Irish

This paper gives an account of the similarities and differences between alternative and polar questions, where these question forms stand at the intersection of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. We contrastively examine the nature of alternative and polar yes-no questions. We characterise the forms of these question types and the functions they serve. We examine the semantic and pragmatic dimensions of each question form and their answers. We characterise the felicity conditions necessary for their successful realisation of the speech act of requesting information via the alternative and yes-no interrogatives and assume that information is freely exchanged under a Gricean presumption of cooperation. We show that alternative questions have some similarities, but also significant differences, to polar yes-no questions. Alternative questions do not allow for yes-no answers. Instead, an appropriate answer must contain one of a selection from the alternative choice options listed in the framing of the question. Alternative questions are dependent on the presence of disjunction. We characterise the syntax and semantics of polar yes-no questions. We demonstrate in respect of the answers to polar yes-no questions of Irish that they contain instances of ellipsis and are full clausal expressions with a complete semantics where the elided elements are from the question part of the question-answer pair. The propositional content of polar yes-no questions is inferred from the context, specifically from the question with which the answer is paired. Irish does not have any exact words which directly correspond to English ‘yes’ or ‘no’ and so employs different strategies where a yes-no answer is required.

Connectionist models of mind: scales and the limits of machine imitation

This paper is devoted to some generalizations of explanatory potential of connectionist approaches to theoretical problems of the philosophy of mind. Are considered both strong, and weaknesses of neural network models. Connectionism has close methodological ties with modern neurosciences and neurophilosophy. And this fact strengthens its positions, in terms of empirical naturalistic approaches. However, at the same time this direction inherits weaknesses of computational approach, and in this case all system of anticomputational critical arguments becomes applicable to the connectionst models of mind. The last developments in the field of deep learning gave rich empirical material for cognitive sciences. Multilayered networks, mathematical models of associative dynamics of learning, self-organizing neuronets and all that allow to explain the principles of human conceptual organizing and after this to emulate these processes in computer systems. At all engineering achievements of this technology there is a traditional criticism from representatives of cognitive psychology who cannot accept a thesis about learning ability of a neuronet on the basis of redistribution of scales. Process of learning of natural intelligence, according to cognitive models, happens due to attraction of knowledge broadcast in a symbolical form (mental representations, concepts) at the expense of the systems of output knowledge expressed in the propositional contents. Some philosophical aspects of «neural metaphor» in modern cognitive sciences create the problem field which demands comprehensive understanding, the first step towards which is taken in this work.

Contingent Objects, Contingent Propositions, and Essentialism

AbstractTrevor Teitel (2017) has recently argued that combining the assumption that modality reduces to essence with the assumption that possibly some objects contingently exist leads to problems if one wishes to uphold that the logic of metaphysical modality is S5. In this paper I will argue that there is a way for the essentialist to evade the problem described by Teitel. The proposed solution crucially involves the assumption that some propositions possibly fail to exist. I will show how this assumption affords a motivated contingentist response to Teitel’s argument.

La cortesía verbal en Sófocles: análisis del optativo potencial en actos de habla directivos

El presente trabajo, centrado en las tragedias completas de Sófocles, analiza el uso del optativo potencial en actos de habla directivos. Las gramáticas analizan el optativo potencial en este tipo de actos de habla como una expresión de cortesía. No precisan, sin embargo, si el optativo tiene un funcionamiento idéntico en todos los contextos. El análisis de los datos seleccionados para este trabajo permite concluir que el uso del optativo en segunda persona refleja, en general, una estrategia de cortesía diferente del uso en primera y en tercera persona. De hecho, en segunda persona el optativo funciona en la mayor parte de los casos como una expresión convencional de cortesía. En primera y en tercera persona, por el contrario, el optativo ha de analizarse como una expresión de cortesía off record que tiene como fin reducir la implicación del interlocutor en el cumplimiento del contenido proposicional del acto de habla.

Semantic Relativism and Logical Implication

Semantic relativism is the view that the truth-value of some types of statements can vary depending on factors besides possible worlds and times, without any change in their propositional content. It has grown increasingly popular as a semantic theory of several types of statements, including statements that attribute knowledge of a proposition to a subject (knowledge attributions). The ways of knowing claim is the view that perception logically implies knowledge. In my “Semantic Relativism and Ways of Knowing” (2019) I argued that a relativist semantics for knowledge attributions is incompatible with the ways of knowing claim. I suggested that this incompatibility depends on some basic features of the logic of relativist semantics, and therefore can be shown to generalise beyond the discussion of knowledge attributions to semantic relativism more broadly. Here I make this generalisation. I demonstrate that for any proposition p expressed by a statement that does not have a relativist semantics, and for any proposition q expressed by a statement that does have a relativist semantics, p fails to logically imply q. I explain why this happens, discuss some of its philosophical consequences, and consider a way to modify relativist semantics to avoid it. I conclude that semantic relativism raises interesting philosophical questions that have gone largely unnoticed in discussions of this view until now.

Laughter as language

Understanding the import of laughter, has interested philosophers and literary scholars for millennia and, more recently, psychologists, biologists, neuroscientists, and linguists. However, the assumption has been that laughter lacks meaning akin to what words and phrases possess and that it does not contribute to the compositional construction of meaning. In this paper, we argue that, in fact, laughter (and other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, frowning) has propositional content—it involves reference to external real world events, has stand alone meanings, and participates in semantic and pragmatic processes like repair, implicature, and irony. We show how to develop a formal semantic and pragmatic account of laughter embedded in a general theory of conversational interaction and emotional reasoning and show how to explain the wide, indeed in principle unbounded range of uses laughter exhibits. We show how our account can be extended to other non-verbal social signals like smiling, sighing, eye rolling, and frowning. Should laughter and its ilk be incorporated in the grammar? We suggest that they probably should be, if one assumes a conversationally–oriented view of grammar. But various open issues remain.

Why Not Say It Straight? On the Pragmatics of Indirect Speech in Coptic

Indirect speech with full adjustment of person deixis in Coptic is shown to occur exclusively in contexts where the report is not based on an original assertive speech act or when the reporter (i.e. the real speaker) considers its propositional content invalid or unacceptable. As opposed to the much commoner direct speech, indirect speech thus seems to have represented a pragmatically charged and modally marked strategy of reporting at this stage of the Egyptian language.

Asking, answering and assessing with hands: how co-speech hand gestures contribute to question-initiated interactions in Chinese kindergarten classroom

ABSTRACT In teacher-fronted kindergarten classrooms, questions are an efficient strategy to attract students' attention and guide them through a lesson. However, few studies have examined the related issues by taking co-speech hand gestures into consideration. By annotating and analyzing a videotaped lesson in a Chinese public kindergarten, the present study intends to solve the following problems: (1) What types of questions are posed by the teacher? (2) What types of hand gestures co-occur with these questions and how do gestures contribute to them? (3) What are the patterns of question-initiated sequences and how do the co-occurring hand gestures function? Three types of Mandarin questions (yes-no questions, specific/content questions and positive–negative questions) and a variety of sequence patterns are seen to recur in the selected class. Meanwhile, hand gestures function in multiple ways: (1) signifying, visualizing and reproducing a propositional content (i.e. referential function), and (2) indicating an off-propositional aspect of a question, an answer or a comment (i.e. pragmatic function). This study demonstrates that analyzing extra-speech modes, and especially co-speech hand gestures, is worth both the academic efforts of linguists and practitioners of early childhood education.

Predicates of personal taste, semantic incompleteness, and necessitarianism

According to indexical contextualism, the perspectival element of taste predicates and epistemic modals is part of the content expressed. According to nonindexicalism, the perspectival element (a standard of taste, an epistemic situation) must be conceived as a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation, which engenders “thin” or perspective-neutral semantic contents. Echoing Evans, thin contents have frequently been criticized. It is doubtful whether such coarse-grained quasi-propositions can do any meaningful work as objects of propositional attitudes. In this paper, I assess recent responses by Recanati, Kolbel, Lasersohn and MacFarlane to the “incompleteness worry”. None of them manages to convince. Particular attention is devoted to an argument by John MacFarlane, which states that if perspectives must be part of the content, so must worlds, which would make intuitively contingent propositions necessary. I demonstrate that this attempt to defend thin content views such as nonindexical contextualism and relativism conflates two distinct notions of necessity, and that radical indexicalist accounts of semantics, such as Schaffer’s necessitarianism, are in fact quite plausible.

Quoting to persuade

Abstract This paper examines how quotations are linguistically constructed by expert contributors in US, UK, and Australian opinion texts, vis-à-vis their form, function, and processes. Cope’s (2016) study found that authoritative expert contributors integrated a considerable number of quotations on blame and responsibility for the global financial crisis in single-authored US, UK, and Australian opinion texts. By examining the form, function, and processes of quoting in this paper, she found evidence that quoting is an intertextual form of positioning. Empirically grounded linguistic analyses investigate the language of quoting frames – how the quoted source is specified, the quoting verb used, e.g., strong meanings (demanded, thundered, promised) or neutral (said, told) – and evaluate the language of propositional content in quotations. Such analyses reveal authorial positions taken in quoting. A greater number of quotations incorporated by general newspaper opinion authors, than by specialized financial newspaper opinion authors, furthermore implies that quoting increases a writer’s authority in non-specialized media sources. The specially created integrated linguistic framework draws on Martin & White’s (2005) Appraisal system from systemic-functional linguistics, White’s (2012, 2015) attribution and endorsement, and Bazerman’s (2004) intertextuality techniques. Contextual factors in language use and quoting are evaluated throughout. This paper thus provides evidence of, and implications for, quoting in cross-cultural opinion texts, and contributes to knowledge on the increasingly mediatized practice of language recycling and to media literacy.