DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxi1.04 The paper aims at providing an argument for a deflationary treatment of the notion of public language meaning. The argument is based on the notion of ...standards of correctness; I will try to show that as correctness assessments are context-involving, the notion of public language meaning cannot be treated as an explanatory one. An elaboration of the argument, using the notion of ground is provided. Finally, I will consider some limitations of the reasoning presented.
According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun ...developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be understood as properties of public languages.
Despite various efforts in management studies, the literature has neglected to explore the strategic use of public language, defined as the external communication by the CEO, in entrepreneurial ...settings. This study hypothesizes that entrepreneurial strategic intent leads to the intended clarity to achieve the desired business goals on a theoretical basis of upper echelons theory, sense-making and active audience theory. The analytical procedure included linguistic analysis for readability and simplicity of the public language of Tesla and four other incumbents based on the corpus spoken by CEOs under official settings. The findings reveal that Tesla’s CEO delivered intended clarity, delivering the most comprehensible information to the stakeholders, as hypothesized in the research design. This article contributes to the literature by suggesting a novel S-P-I model that investigates the ‘Strategic intent– Public language–Intended clarity’ flow. Managerial implications advise organizations adequately manage their public language to have desired results.
This is the second installment of a two-part essay. Limitations of space prevented the publication of the full essay in a previous issue of the Journal (Pereplyotchik 2020). My overall goal is to ...outline a strategy for integrating generative linguistics with a broadly pragmatist approach to meaning and communication. Two immensely useful guides in this venture are Robert Brandom and Paul Pietroski. Squarely in the Chomskyan tradition, Pietroski’s recent book, Conjoining Meanings, offers an approach to natural-language semantics that rejects foundational assumptions widely held amongst philosophers and linguists. In particular, he argues against extensionalism—the view that meanings are (or determine) truth and satisfaction conditions. Having arrived at the same conclusion by way of Brandom’s deflationist account of truth and reference, I’ll argue that both theorists have important contributions to make to a broader anti-extensionalist approach to language. Part 1 of the essay was largely exegetical, laying out what I see as the core aspects of Brandom’s normative inferentialism (1) and Pietroski’s naturalistic semantics (2). Now, in Part 2, I argue that there are many convergences between these two theoretical frameworks and, contrary to first appearances, very few points of substantive disagreement between them. If the integration strategy that I propose is correct, then what appear to be sharply contrasting commitments are better seen as interrelated verbal differences that come down to different—but complementary—explanatory goals. The residual disputes are, however, stubborn. I end by discussing how to square Pietroski’s commitment to predicativism with Brandom’s argument that a predicativist language is in principle incapable of expressing ordinary conditionals.
The article describes the implementation of the rhetorical triangle in the communicative public sphere. Senders can employ three rhetorical-communicative strategies within it: communication with the ...recipient, communication of the recipient or communication by the recipient. The characterisation of this sphere through a topographical metaphor shows that the logos, ethos and pathos of public texts depend on the cognitive-communicative strategy of the senders and the flexibility of their language, which leads either to persuasion or manipulation of the recipients.
This paper addresses circumstantially the different ways in which the Seville satirical weeklies El Tío Clarín (1864-1867) and La Campana (1867-1868) –the latter replacing the former after its ...suspension– might have been read. By studying their editorial strategies on the basis of the footprints left by their editors, it is possible to determine how satirical journalism participated in the socialisation of print culture, which developed into informational graphics, despite the paradoxical confluence of three factors: the political instability in the final years of the reign of Isabella II, the tight censorship to which the press was subjected in 1867 and the slow but continuous progress in modernising the publishing market. Based on the combination of satirical cartoons, humour and popular genres, both weeklies made current affairs more accessible through critical reasoning and by appealing to the senses, with revealing indications of the simultaneous ways of addressing such a subject. Textual reading gave way to the graphic kind, reading aloud to doing so in silence, while the spaces in which this occurred, between the public (the street) and the private sphere (the parlour at home), and the collectives involved, namely, women and children, were determined. It was these ways of relating to the two weeklies, established by their readerships, that were behind the popularity of the satirical press before the Glorious Revolution of 1868 and the transition to publication capitalism.
In this paper, we would like to discuss Wittgenstein’s critique of the idea that a person’s experiences are necessarily private, and these experiences can only be expressible in a private language. ...Taking a clue from Wittgenstein, we intend to say that the person’s experiences though private, can also be known by others. In the following sections 243 of his
Philosophical Investigations
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PI
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Wittgenstein argues against the possibility of a private language about the subject’s inner experiences. He contends that by coining names/words to name sensations and our inner experiences, we cannot create a private language. If we have a list of names, that cannot function as a language. We need predicate terms; we need the syntax to link the words in the form of a sentence. If we use private names and use the predicates from the language that everyone knows, then the private words will acquire public status like the terms ‘pain’ and ‘sensation.’ These terms are already part of the public language, and if private experiences like pain and sensation cannot be made public, we would not have these terms in our language at all. This is the reason why any application of words is public, and therefore, there is no possibility of a private language. Wittgenstein concentrates on the public rules that govern the correct application for the use of words. And the expressions are meaningful only when these are used according to rules of grammar; if these expressions do not follow any rules of grammar, these are simply meaningless.
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