Communicative Pragmatism and Other Philosophical Essays on Language PDF Download

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 9780847690916
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In this pioneering study of communicative conventions, distinguished philosopher Nicholas Rescher focuses on the principles at work in the communicative use of language. Rescher explores various aspects of explanatory and expository uses of language across a wide range of applications, ranging from the factual to the fictional, and from the expository to the literary. A unifying theme of the book is pragmatic conventionality. Rescher explores the fundamentally pragmatic conception of communicative conventions: rules of procedure that form part of the setting of tacit undertakings that function in various sectors of communicative practice. Only in this setting, he argues, can one achieve an adequate understanding of the way in which the business of communication is actually carried on within its wider setting of its service in the conduct of human affairs.

Author: Jürgen Habermas
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745694373
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
This volume brings together Habermas's key writings on language and communication. Including some classic texts as well as new material which is published here for the first time, this book is a detailed and up-to-date introduction to Habermas's formal pragmatics, which is a vital aspect of his social theory. Written from 1976 to 1996, the essays show the extent to which formal pragmatics underpins Habermas's theory of communicative action. They are presented in chronological order, so that the reader can trace developments and revisions in Habermas's thought. The volume includes a critical discussion of Searle's theory of meaning, and Richard Rorty's neopragmatism. It concludes with Habermas's recent defence of his theory of communicative action, in which he reaffirms his view that interpretative understanding inescapably involves evaluation. This book will be an indispensable text for students and academics who want a clear and accessible introduction to the development of Habermas's theory of communication and its relation to his broader social and political theory.

Author: Amanda Guillán
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319630431
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
This monograph analyzes Nicholas Rescher’s system of pragmatic idealism. It also looks at his approach to prediction in science. Coverage highlights a prominent contribution to a central topic in the philosophy and methodology of science. The author offers a full characterization of Rescher’s system of philosophy. She presents readers with a comprehensive philosophico-methodological analysis of this important work. Her research takes into account different thematic realms: semantic, logical, epistemological, methodological, ontological, axiological, and ethical. The book features three, thematic-parts: I) General Coordinates, Semantic Features and Logical Components of Scientific Prediction; II) Predictive Knowledge and Predictive Processes in Rescher’s Methodological Pragmatism; and III) From Reality to Values: Ontological Features, Axiological Elements, and Ethical Aspects of Scientific Prediction. This insightful analysis offers a critical reconstruction of Rescher’s philosophy. The system he created is often characterized as pragmatic idealism that is open to some realist elements. He is a prominent representative of contemporary pragmatism who has made a great deal of contributions to the study of this topic. This area is crucial for science and it has been little considered in the philosophy of science.

Author: T. Givon
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317768019
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 450

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Book Description
Scholars concerned with the phenomenon of mind have searched through history for a principled yet non-reductionist approach to the study of knowledge, communication, and behavior. Pragmatics has been a recurrent theme in Western epistemology, tracing itself back from pre-Socratic dialectics and Aristotle's bio- functionalism, all the way to Wittgenstein's content-dependent semantics. This book's treatment of pragmatics as an analytic method focuses on the central role of context in determining the perception, organization, and communication of experience. As a bioadaptive strategy, pragmatics straddles the middle ground between absolute categories and the non-discrete gradation of experience, reflecting closely the organism's own evolutionary compromises. In parallel, pragmatic reasoning can be shown to play a pivotal role in the process of empirical science, through the selection of relevant facts, the abduction of likely hypotheses, and the construction of non-trivial explanations. In this volume, Professor Givon offers pragmatics as both an analytic method and a strategic intellectual framework. He points out its relevance to our understanding of traditional problems in philosophy, anthropology, linguistics, cognitive psychology, neuro-biology, and evolution. Finally, the application of pragmatics to the study of the mind and behavior constitutes an implicit challenge to the current tenets of artificial intelligence.

Author: David K. Perry
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135657955
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
This monograph examines the past, present, and potential relationship between American pragmatism and communication research. The contributors provide a bridge between communication studies and philosophy, subjects often developed somewhat in isolation from each other. Addressing topics, such as qualitative and quantitative research, ethics, media research, and feminist studies, the chapters in this volume: *discuss how a pragmatic, Darwinian approach to inquiry has guided and might further guide communication research; *advocate a functional view of communication, based on Dewey's mature notion of transaction; *articulate a pragmatist's aesthetics and connect it to Deweyan democracy; *discuss the similarities and differences between Dewey's notion of inquiry and the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer; *apply accommodation theory, linked to symbolic interactionism and more generally to the social behaviorism of George H. Mead and his followers, to media research; *interpret media-effects evidence in light of pragmatist ideas about inquiry; and *argue that pragmatism theorizes about despair and life's sense of the tragic. This book is written to be readily accessible to students and professional academics within and outside the field of communication studies without extensive training in specialized areas of communication study.

Author: Robert Danisch
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3030143430
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 225

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Book Description
This collection of essays engages with the current resurgence of interest in the relationship between American pragmatism and communication studies. The topics engaged in this collection of essays is necessarily diverse, with some of the figures discussed within often viewed as “minor” or ancillary to the main tradition of pragmatism. However, each essay attempts to show the value of reading these minor figures for philosophy and rhetorical studies. The diversity of the pragmatist tradition is evident in the ways in which unlikely figures like Hu Shi, Ambedkar, and Alice Dewey leverage some of the original commitments of pragmatism to do important intellectual, social, and political work within the circumstances that they find themselves. This collection of essays also serves as a reminder for how we might reimagine and reuse pragmatism for our own social and political projects and challenges.

Author: Paul D. Murray
Publisher: Peeters Publishers
ISBN: 9789042914520
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
In this work Paul Murray explores which style of rationality is most appropriate to Christian theology in the contemporary pluralist, postfoundationalist, postmodern context. At its heart is a fresh consideration of the American pragmatist tradition, focussing on the writings of Richard Rorty and Nicholas Rescher. Where Rorty correctly diagnoses the failures of foundationalist "objectivism", Rescher's "pragmatic idealism" is presented as healing the ills in Rorty's own neo-pragmatism. The significant resonance between Rescher's view of rationality and Christian understanding of the trinity is explored. In turn, Donald MacKinnon's influential writings are presented as exemplifying just such an approach to theology. Murray both articulates an enriched form of Christian postliberalism, committed to receiving and learning from other traditions of thought and practice and probes the claim that the dynamics of human rationality can be expected to reflect the Trinitarian dynamics of God's being. "Paul Murray presents us here with an exhaustive and insightful study of recent pragmatic theory, in which he sets up rhythms of healing and completion as well as interrogation... particularly remarkable is his exploration of Christianity as the deep and in some sense final interlocutor of pragmatic tradition. I strongly recommend this book." Olivier Davis, Professor of Christian Doctrine, King's College London. "This is a mature, wide-ranging work that by uniting the intellectual and the practical carries both rational and ethical conviction. It does equal justice to the classic teachings of Christianity and to the challenges to rethink them in dialogue with modern and postmodern approaches. The result is a conception of Christianity both generously orthodox and deeply engaged with contemporary life and thought. It is especially good to see the profound contribution of Donald MacKinnon understood and developed with such perception and relevance." David F. Ford, Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge. Paul Murray is currently Lecturer in Systematic Theology within the Department of Theology at the University of Durham, England. He has previously held posts at St Cuthbert's Seminary, Ushaw College, Durham and Newman College of Higher Education, Birmingham. Essays of his exploring issues in philosophical theology, science and theology and contemporary Roman Catholic theology have appeared in leading journals and edited collections. This is his first monograph.

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412846544
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Pragmatism is rooted in the linking of practice and theory. It describes a process where theory is extracted from practice, and applied back to practice to form what is called intelligent practice. Pragmatism was intended, by Charles S. Peirce, its founder, as a doctrine for the rational substantiation of knowledge claims. For Peirce, what mattered was successful prediction and control. Practice was to serve as the arbiter of theory. Objective efficacy, not personal satisfaction, is what matters for fixing opinion in a community of rational inquirers. According to Nicholas Rescher, later pragmatists saw the matter differently. They envisioned subjective satisfactions, rather than objectively determinable functional effectiveness, as being the aim of the enterprise. Rescher notes that William James, in particular, had an agenda different from that of Peirce. The two pragmatisms are complete opposites, Rescher argues, in terms of claims and intentions. James’s soft pragmatism abandons the classical idea of inquiry as the paramount of truth; it believes that truth is an illusion, an unrealizable figment of the imagination. By contrast, Peirce’s hard pragmatism believes that the classic idea of truth remains valid. Rescher seeks to examine and explore pragmatism dialectically, with a conviction that brings pragmatism to life for specialist and generalist alike.

Author: Wenceslao J. Gonzalez
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 303060537X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This book analyzes the role of language in scientific research and develops the semantics of science from different angles. The philosophical investigation of the volume is divided into four parts, which covers both basic science and applied science: I) The Problem of Reference and Potentialities of the Language in Science; II) Language and Change in Scientific Research: Evolution and Historicity; III) Scientific Language in the Context of Truth and Fiction; and IV) Language in Mathematics and in Empirical Sciences. Language plays a key role in science: our access to the theoretical, practical or evaluative dimensions of scientific activity begins with the mastery of language, continues with a deepening in the use of language and reaches the level of contribution when it creates new terms or changes them in sense and reference. This reveals the compatibility between objectivity in semantic contents and historicity in the progress of science. This volume is a valuable enrichment to students, academics and other professionals interested in science in all its forms, who seek to deepen the role that language plays in its structure and dynamics.

Author: Nicholas Rescher
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739104224
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
Philosopher Rescher updates his autobiographical work previously published as Mid Journey (1975), Ongoing Journey (1985), and Instructive Journey (1995). He primarily focuses on his professional life, which included positions at Oxford U., the Rand Corporation, and the U. of Pittsburgh. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.