Common Ground: Between Formal Pragmatics and Psycholinguistics

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to Robert Stalnaker’s highly influential account of linguistic communication, successful communication does not depend on a common ground between speaker and hearer. The problem for Stalnaker’s account manifests itself in communicative situations that represent both Lingens cases, i.e., cases involving egocentric beliefs, and Frege cases, i.e., cases involving identity confusions. I describe two hypothetical cases that involve successful communication, but in which no common ground of the kind required by Stalnaker’s account is available. I therefore propose an alternative account of communication that is based on epistemic two-dimensionalism. This account maintains that communication requires the transfer of a thought content from speaker to hearer. By holding that this shared content often constitutes common ground, it preserves much of the appeal of Stalnaker’s account. However, my account allows for cases in which the shared thought content does not figure in common ground.

The aim of our paper is twofold: firstly, we attempt to present Wittgenstein’s later philosophy as coherent with neuroscientific investigations of human linguistic abilities; secondly we sketch a picture of the current neuroscience in order to find the coherent solution to the problem of “hard” basis of the grammar. The central role in our presentation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language is played by the concept of the “form of life”. We describe two most common interpretations of this concept. At the first glance it seems to refer to the common but culture-related and conventional set of practices which serve as a ground for linguistic behaviour inside a community. However, the totally contingent base of the language cannot explain many obvious human abilities with the capability to learn the mother tongue in the first place. Neither this is Wittgenstein’s point, for certain occurances of the concept of “form of life” refer to something much more stable and cross-cultural than just a convention regarding practices. We bound this meaning of the concept to another key notion of a “primitive reaction”. The question concerning biological basis of human cognitive abilities in language formation and understanding is then addressed in order to explain some of the characteristics of the remarks presented by Wittgenstein. We address the problem of the nativity of general and particular language rules, trying to find common and indisputable ground for further discussion regarding syntactic and semantic features of language communication. The inconclusive results of modern research lead us to the cautious notion of compatibility of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and the cognitive theories of cross-culturally interchangeable grammar basis. In the summary we present the view of language as imperfect tool of communication hoping to develop more precise and adequate model of cognitive grammar consistent with the philosophy of the second Wittgenstein.

Philosophy is an abstract theoretical discipline. However, a new trend that develops experimental methods in philosophical research has recently been gaining popularity extending to the fields of philosophical research that have not seen experimental methods earlier. This article addresses the question of whether it is possible to investigate philosophical questions with empirical methods. Two areas of research are considered – philosophy of language and semantics and epistemology. In these subfields of philosophy, the application of experimental methods has recently lead to a noticeable progress. Empirical methods are justified in those disciplines in which arguments in favor of a particular theory are based on the study of our intuitions. Experiments only serve to obtain more objective representations of our intuitions, and philosophical argumentation is built further based on these intuitions. The authors argue that the use of experimental methods in semantics is compatible with anti-psychologism about meaning. The latter point is particularly controversial because linguistic intuitions or intuitions about the meaning have often been viewed as something that speakers have clear cognitive access to. However, when experimental research (even when it is a collection of controlled judgments) shows results that are different from what the field has been previously assuming, a revision is called for. The authors review several cases of such refutations calling for further revisions and argue that such experimental work helps arguments in philosophy of language and epistemology gain more sound ground with respect to the empirical data that they build on. In philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics, the cases explored in this article relate to the differences between languages with and without articles and to the predictions about the availability of certain interpretations of such expressions or lack thereof. It is further shown how a similar method of identifying the existent or non-existent interpretations was used in the studies of the meaning of “most”. In epistemology, the article discusses the results of some recent experimental work relating to the knowledge ascriptions. The speakers’ intuitions about the famous Barn-examples have recently been shown to diverge from what philosophers have claimed, building their far-reaching arguments on the data that was arguably incorrect.

Classical notions of Common Ground have been criticized for being cognitively demanding given their appeal to complex meta-representations. The authors here propose a distinction between Immediate Common Ground, containing information specific to the communicative situation, and General Common Ground, containing information that is not situation-specific. This distinction builds on previous work by Horton and Gerrig [2016], extending the idea that common cognitive processes are part of the establishment and use of common ground. This is in line with the idea that multiple cognitive resources are involved in dialogue and avoids appealing to special-purpose representations for Common Ground purposes.

Human children, but not great apes, become socially closer by sharing an experience in common ground

Teaching and Learning Guide for: Pragmatics: From Theory to Experiment and Back Again

Argues that the distinction between what is asserted and what is presupposed in a statement should be described and explained pragmatically, in terms of what the speaker takes to be the background information, or common ground, shared between speaker and audience. The pragmatic notion of presupposition is used to explain two kinds of linguistic facts: first, facts about the relation between the presuppositions required by complex sentences and the presuppositions required by their constituent sentences (the projection problem) and second, facts about the behaviour of different kinds of factive verbs.

The paper focuses on the review of current literature on formal philosophy. Special attention is paid to the review of the book «Introduction to Formal Philosophy» [Hansson, Hendricks, 2018]. The book is a consistent introduction to the problems of formal philosophy, a research tradition that relies on the precise mathematical tools in order to study traditional philosophical problems. The methods of formal philosophy are successfully applied not only to the problems of ontology, epistemology and philosophy of language but also relevant for the problems of ethics, axiology and social philosophy. The book demonstrates that it is not correct to identify formal philosophy with another area of study – philosophical logic, since formal philosophy uses not only logical methods of analysis, but also uses the tools of game theory, decision theory, probability theory, Bayesian statistics, and other theories. Although the book has a propaedeutic character, it also contains some open problems. These problems include the aggregation of the opinions of the group under the condition of a conflicting base of premises in the theory of public choice, there are still open problems in the interpretation of Arrow’s impossibility theorem and others. Certainly, formalization in itself is not a general solution to the particular philosophical problem, but only a tool that allows to formulate a problem in a more rigorous and precise way, which sometimes allows to reveal some unexpected consequences, some implicit contradictions and new solutions. Despite the importance of the concept of coherence in ethics, decision theory, philosophy of law, Bayesian epistemology, philosophy of science, the existing formalizations of the concept of coherence are highly specialized for epistemology, researchers recognize the lack of the relevant explanatory models. Overall, the book is an excellent introduction in to the field of formal philosophy, which provides a general overview of different aspects of formal philosophy and the opportunity to study particular research topics by means of an extensive bibliography accompanying each of the chapters.

Theories of pronoun resolution often assume that pronouns' referents reside in the immediate discourse context. However, language users regularly produce and comprehend unheralded pronouns that violate that assumption. This article provides a taxonomy of unheralded pronouns that makes reference to speakers' and addressees' common ground. Data from a corpus analysis demonstrates the relative ubiquity of the types of pronouns within the taxonomy. In addition, we review extant theory and research that suggests how addressees are able to resolve these pronouns, despite the absence of proximal referents.

Law is Law and Art is Art and Shall the Two Ever Meet? Law and Literature: The Comparative Creative Processes

<p>Artykuł poświęcono sloganom reklamowym jako jednemu ze źródeł nowych jednostek frazeologicznych. Celami badania są przegląd uwarunkowań przejścia sloganów do grupy frazeologizmów reklamowych i analiza specyfiki funkcjonowania sloganów reklamowych we współczesnej prasie rosyjskiej. Materiał źródłowy stanowi autorska kartoteka frazeologizmów zebrana metodą przypadkowego wyboru z publikacji współczesnej rosyjskiej prasy (w tym również elektronicznych wersji periodyków) z lat 2000–2010. Wykorzystano następujące metody: opisową, analizy definicji słownikowych i analizy kontekstualnej. Sfrazeologizowane slogany reklamowe są produktywnym źródłem nowych frazeologizmów współczesnego języka rosyjskiego. Wchodzą do potocznego obiegu użytkowników języka i zaczynają być aktywnie wykorzystywane w różnych sytuacjach komunikacyjnych, podobnie jak inne stałe połączenia wyrazowe (paremie, aforyzmy, skrzydlate słowa).</p>

This article outlines the philosophy of language of the vitalist philosopher Ludwig Klages, as it can be found in his late work Language as the Source of Psychology ( Die Sprache als Quell der Seelenkunde). First published in 1948, this treatise is full of examples of how everyday usage of words should give us pause for thought – underlining the link between philosophy and life that is inherent to the project of vitalism or Lebensphilosophie. In line with the remit for submissions to this issue of the Journal of European Studies intended to mark 50 years since its inception, the article reflects the interest of its contributor (translation studies and the history of ideas), forms part of a larger project to retrieve the thought of a largely forgotten thinker, and showcases a work that occupies a key position in the history of twentieth-century thought and has been seminal to the contributor’s own development. For ultimately Klages’s philosophy of language illustrates the truth of Goethe’s maxim, ‘the point of life is life itself’.

First paragraph: MacDonald (2013) proposes that distributional properties of language and processing biases in language comprehension can to a large extent be attributed to consequences of the language production process. In essence, the account is derived from the principle of least effort that was formulated by Zipf, among others (Zipf, 1949; Levelt, 2013). However, in Zipf's view the outcome of the least effort principle was a compromise between least effort for the speaker and least effort for the listener, whereas MacDonald puts most of the burden on the production process.

▪ Abstract This paper reviews a range of approaches to the analysis of government termination, by any account a very important substantive concern for political science. One essential preliminary matter is the distinction between government duration and government durability—the former an essentially empirical concept, the latter essentially theoretical. It is also important to note that empirical research into government termination is heavily conditioned by the precise definition of what marks the end of one government and the beginning of the next. Approaches to analyzing government termination can be divided into those that are fundamentally empirical and those based on a priori modeling. Both research traditions are reviewed. The empiricist approach has evolved into a body of work that applies increasingly sophisticated event-history models to a dataset that has become to a large extent common within the profession. The a priori approach has developed within the traditions of noncooperative game theory to model the responses of key actors to new information, for example, about the likely results of an election that might be called if the government were to fall. There is clearly unfulfilled potential to merge these two research traditions into a single more comprehensive account of government termination.

Social informatics: Beyond emergence