This article interprets Grice’s “Meaning Revisited” (1982) to argue that the hallmark of non-natural meaning (meaning
NN
) is not exhausted by the second-order intention condition that featured centrally in “Meaning” (1957). Instead, the how-possibly story Grice tells about how non-natural meaning evolved from natural meaning foregrounds the centrality of value, evaluation, and rationality. But how does meaning
NN
implicate these normative notions? Drawing on Don Ross, this article contrasts
personality
with human
selves
, where selves are simplified and mutually understandable constructions that help stabilize coordination in iterated, culture-dependent games. Thus, meaningful
NN
communication doesn’t just convey the contents of one’s mind to another, but is essential to the task of rendering oneself culturally legible and evaluable as a narratively constructed self. The upshot of the article relocates the human/non-human primate boundary: non-human primates may lack meaning
NN
, not because they lack the capacity to formulate second-order intentions, but because they lack the capacity to self-narrate in terms of culturally specific roles.
The meaning of interpretivism is shifting. Its key characteristics — a focus on multiple meanings, the symbolic nature of interaction, the ongoing and performative making of social and material worlds, and the use qualitative methodologies — are being problematized by digitization generally and AI specifically. At the...
Two debates in the analytic philosophy of literature have run in parallel: one asks how literary criticism can be rational when critical reasons neither entail nor inductively support the readings they back (Isenberg, Sibley); the other asks whether literature has cognitive value, and is stalled on a dilemma, since ext...
Social Representations Theory (SRT) is a theoretical framework within social psychology which focuses on communication strategies which serve to establish order and self-understanding vis-à-vis others. SRT is concerned with analyzing social processes of meaning-making or value ascriptions which serve to render famili...
William B. Bowes· Biblical Interpretation· 0 citations
Summary: This paper explores Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, advancing the working hypothesis that these reflections emerge at the intersection of three key ideas that Wittgenstein decisively resists. First, Wittgenstein challenges the assumption that language games can be analyzed independently of the...
This volume presents a dialectic-idealist overview of natural language and natural (non-artificial) thinking. Pauli Pylkkö’s view is thoroughly non-classical and takes ambiguity and contradictoriness as vital and inalienable properties of all speaking and thinking. The main function of a sentence is to change the meani...
The capacity for reasonable argument about practical and political matters is important to our daily lives. Yet what does arguing really involve? Often, our very concept of what it is to argue seems systematically distorted. Practical, political arguing is too often stylized as hyper-cognitive, ending by treating peopl...
Unknown authors· 0 citations
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