Sexual languages/cultural bodies: Transforming psychoanalysis

Abstract

This paper explores what transformation is necessary for a psychoanalytic practice that is sensitive to the languages of lesbian, gay and bisexual identities in their cultural and historical specificity. It draws on phenomenological texts, in particular Merleau-Ponty, the writing of the psychoanalyst Franz Fanon and also of the feminist theorist and novelist, Audre Lorde. It argues for a practice that challenges the dominant language of psychoanalysis with its dualisms of inner/outer, conscious/unconscious, mind/body, and universal notions of drives and mechanisms. The clinical example of the work of women in a therapy workshop entitled ‘Am I a Lesbian?’ highlights the critical importance of the specificity of language, whether verbal, visual or gestural, and its relation to embodiment in psychotherapy.     

Pure Extensions, Proof Rules, and Hybrid Axiomatics

In this paper we argue that hybrid logic is the deductive setting most natural for Kripke semantics. We do so by investigating hybrid axiomatics for a variety of systems, ranging from the basic hybrid language (a decidable system with the same complexity as orthodox propositional modal logic) to the strong Priorean language (which offers full first-order expressivity).We show that hybrid logic offers a genuinely first-order perspective on Kripke semantics: it is possible to define base logics which extend automatically to a wide variety of frame classes and to prove completeness using the Henkin method. In the weaker languages, this requires the use of non-orthodox rules. We discuss these rules in detail and prove non-eliminability and eliminability results. We also show how another type of rule, which reflects the structure of the strong Priorean language, can be employed to give an even wider coverage of frame classes. We show that this deductive apparatus gets progressively simpler as we work our way up the expressivity hierarchy, and conclude the paper by showing that the approach transfers to first-order hybrid logic.A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the fifth conference on Advances in Modal Logic (AiML 2004) in Manchester. We would like to thank Maarten Marx for his comments on an early draft and Agnieszka Kisielewska for help with the proof reading.Special Issue Ways of Worlds II. On Possible Worlds and Related Notions Edited by Vincent F. Hendricks and Stig Andur Pedersen     

Bilingual toddlers’ comprehension of mixed sentences is asymmetrical across their two languages

In bilingual language environments, infants and toddlers listen to two separate languages during the same key years that monolingual children listen to just one and bilinguals rarely learn each of their two languages at the same rate. Learning to understand language requires them to cope with challenges not found in monolingual input, notably the use of two languages within the same utterance (e.g., Do you like the perro? or ¿Te gusta el doggy?). For bilinguals of all ages, switching between two languages can reduce the efficiency in real‐time language processing. But language switching is a dynamic phenomenon in bilingual environments, presenting the young learner with many junctures where comprehension can be derailed or even supported. In this study, we tested 20 Spanish–English bilingual toddlers (18‐ to 30‐months) who varied substantially in language dominance. Toddlers’ eye movements were monitored as they looked at familiar objects and listened to single‐language and mixed‐language sentences in both of their languages. We found asymmetrical switch costs when toddlers were tested in their dominant versus non‐dominant language, and critically, they benefited from hearing nouns produced in their dominant language, independent of switching. While bilingualism does present unique challenges, our results suggest a united picture of early monolingual and bilingual learning. Just like monolinguals, experience shapes bilingual toddlers’ word knowledge, and with more robust representations, toddlers are better able to recognize words in diverse sentences.     

Hegel,modal logic,and the social nature of mind

ABSTRACT

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit provides a fascinating picture of individual minds caught up in “recognitive” relations so as to constitute a realm—“spirit”—which, while necessarily embedded in nature, is not reducible to it. In this essay I suggest a contemporary path for developing Hegel's suggestive ideas in a way that broadly conforms to the demands of his own system, such that one moves from logic to a philosophy of mind. Hence I draw on Hegel's “subjective logic”, understood in the light of modern modal logic, in an attempt to model the way minds might be thought as connected by way of shared intentional contents. Here, we should not be surprised at some of the parallels that emerge between the approaches of Hegel and the modal logician Arthur Prior, as Prior had testified to the influence of his teacher, John N. Findlay, who himself had strong Hegelian leanings. In the final section, Robert Stalnaker's version of possible-world semantics is suggested as a framework within which Hegel's recognitive account of the mind might be understood.     

Social Work,Psychoanalysis, and Smoke-Filled Rooms

Abstract

This paper describes one social worker's journey from the first days of his social work education to his current experience as a psychoanalyst, and the subsequent transformation of his professional self. The complementary nature of the relationship between social work and psychoanalysis is considered. Through a personal vignette, the author hopes to remind current social work educators about the usefulness of psychoanalytic theory and practice within the context of casework values and principles.     

Speaking of grief and the grief of speaking: martyrs’ speech and the perils of translation

In Derrida’s Monolinguism of the Other, a theory about the universal and constitutive alienation of the speaking subject from language finds its exemplary grounding in Derrida’s own experience as an Algerian Jew, one whose relationship to the French language is both totalizing and exiled (‘I have only one language, it is not mine.’). He equates speaking not only with contingent citizenship and a divestment of what one never really had in the first place, but also with the extreme experiences of torture, threat and physical violence. He indeed uses the words ‘passion’ and ‘martyr’ to describe his experience. In this paper, I will read Derrida ‘backwards,’ and against the universalizing move Derrida and those following him make in order to suggest a way of reading some scenes of violent death as scenes about diasporic cultural divestment. I’ll specifically attend to martyrs’ speech, and do so reading them as archives of the perils and inescapable expenses of entering dominant cultural ‘languages.’     

The Hands of Egon Schiele

Through an exploration of Egon Schiele's life and enigmatic ?mannerisms?, which recall those of autistic children and schizophrenic patients, the author explores the impact his outstanding and disturbing paintings can have. The approach is biographical, revealing Schiele the artist as an already gifted though disturbed child. Some material refers to Schiele's way of expressing painful yet creative fantasies, in which different parts of his body (in particular his hands), projected into his paintings, form part of an intimate, creative, disturbed language. From childhood to his early death, Schiele used a coherent figurative language which was both realistic and oneiric; the author develops some ideas on art and psychoanalysis, particularly as to the creative process within a complex and disturbed personality. Working as he did between the psychotic and non-psychotic elements of his personality (Bion), Schiele is an appropriate artist for our time. His drama, his feelings of disintegration and ?dismemberment? are nourished by the creative, sane parts of his personality. The true psychotic artist is not entirely psychotic, for creation requires aesthetic taste and harmony.     

Talking about emotions: Semantics,culture, and cognition

Abstract

The author argues that the so-called “basic emotions”, such as happiness, fear or anger, are in fact cultural artifacts of the English language, just as the Ilongot concept of liget, or the Ifaluk concept of song, are the cultural artifacts of Ilongot and Ifaluk. It is therefore as inappropriate to talk about human emotions in general in terms of happiness, fear, or anger as it would be to talk about them in terms of liget or song. However, this does not mean that we cannot penetrate into the emotional world of speakers of languages other than our own. Nor does it mean that there cannot be any universal human emotions. Universality of emotions is an open issue which requires further investigation. For this further investigation to be fully productive, it has to be undertaken from a universal, language and culture-independent perspective; and it has to be carried out in a universalist framework that is language and culture-independent. The author proposes for this purpose the “natural semantic metalanguage” based on universal (or near-universal) semantic primitives (or near-primitives), developed over two decades by herself and colleagues, and she argues that the use of this metalanguage facilitates such a perspective and offers such a framework.     

Axiomatizing Jaśkowski’s Discussive Logic $$\mathbf {D_2}$$

We outline the rather complicated history of attempts at axiomatizing Ja?kowski’s discussive logic \(\mathbf {D_2}\) and show that some clarity can be had by paying close attention to the language we work with. We then examine the problem of axiomatizing \(\mathbf {D_2}\) in languages involving discussive conjunctions. Specifically, we show that recent attempts by Ciuciura are mistaken. Finally, we present an axiomatization of \(\mathbf {D_2}\) in the language Ja?kowski suggested in his second paper on discussive logic, by following a remark of da Costa and Dubikajtis. We also deal with an interesting variant of \(\mathbf {D_2}\), introduced by Ciuciura, in which negation is also taken to be discussive.     

Balancing Effort and Information Transmission During Language Acquisition: Evidence From Word Order and Case Marking

Across languages of the world, some grammatical patterns have been argued to be more common than expected by chance. These are sometimes referred to as (statistical) language universals. One such universal is the correlation between constituent order freedom and the presence of a case system in a language. Here, we explore whether this correlation can be explained by a bias to balance production effort and informativity of cues to grammatical function. Two groups of learners were presented with miniature artificial languages containing optional case marking and either flexible or fixed constituent order. Learners of the flexible order language used case marking significantly more often. This result parallels the typological correlation between constituent order flexibility and the presence of case marking in a language and provides a possible explanation for the historical development of Old English to Modern English, from flexible constituent order with case marking to relatively fixed order without case marking. In addition, learners of the flexible order language conditioned case marking on constituent order, using more case marking with the cross‐linguistically less frequent order, again mirroring typological data. These results suggest that some cross‐linguistic generalizations originate in functionally motivated biases operating during language learning.     

Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of Manner and Path: a comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions.     

The Logic and Meaning of Plurals. Part II

In this sequel to “The logic and meaning of plurals. Part I”, I continue to present an account of logic and language that acknowledges limitations of singular constructions of natural languages and recognizes plural constructions as their peers. To this end, I present a non-reductive account of plural constructions that results from the conception of plurals as devices for talking about the many. In this paper, I give an informal semantics of plurals, formulate a formal characterization of truth for the regimented languages that results from augmenting elementary languages with refinements of basic plural constructions of natural languages, and account for the logic of plural constructions by characterizing the logic of those regimented languages.

Habermas,Religion, and Public Life

Abstract

Although many scholars view Jürgen Habermas as the most important philosopher and social theorist since Weber, his account of religion has been relatively neglected. This may be a reflection of the fact that he appears to offer quite distinct views of religion, but it may also reflect the strong secularist assumptions of his early work. In this paper, Habermas’s early and later views of religion are outlined and the change in his understanding of religion is mapped—from being one of the sources of modernity’s inner problems to being a principal source of the passions and motivations underpinning cultural life today. I argue that the relative neglect of Habermas’s work on religion is unfortunate, as it offers a creative and important attempt to move beyond the secular assumptions that have characterised much modern study of religion, providing it with a central role in the mediation of the costs and benefits of modernity.     

Literacy programs efficacy for developing children’s early reading skills in familiar language in Zambia

This study investigated the comparative efficacy of a phonics-based reading program and a language experience approach based literacy program to develop reading skills among Zambian early childhood school learners. The learners (n = 1 986; Grade 2 level; females = 50.1%) took either the phonics-based reading program (n = 1 593) or the alternative language experience approach based program (n = 393). They were all assessed for reading skills utilising the Early Grade Reading Assessment test (EGRA) in four languages (Cinyanja, Icibemba, Kiikaonde, and Silozi). Results suggest that learners in phonics-based literacy program were significantly better in letter-sound knowledge in all the four languages. Additionally, they were significantly better in reading skills (non-word reading, oral passage reading, and reading comprehension), yet only in Icibemba and Silozi, as compared to those who took the alternative program. Results reveal that children in the Primary Literacy Program (PLP) had significantly better performance in most reading skills than in the Primary Reading Program (PRP). However, the effect sizes were small or medium. The high floor effect in all reading-related measures is an indication that by following either PRP or the recently implemented PLP, most children do not acquire basic reading skill of the transparently written language they are familiar with. Instruction of the sounds of letters requires special attention where digital training tools (such as GraphoGame) may provide the most effective help to both teachers and children.     

Can Compositionality Solve the Thought-or-Language Problem?

Abstract

Jerry Fodor has claimed to have a solution to the traditional problem of what comes first, thought or language. Compositionality, he says, will give us the answer, for at least one must be compositional, and if only one of them is, that is the one that has underived semantic content. He argues that natural languages are not compositional, and therefore that the content of language is derived from the content of thought. I will argue that the idea that language is not compositional conflicts with his productivity and systematicity arguments for the existence of a language of thought. I will also show that Fodor’s solution to the problem fails, as his main argument is circular. Finally, I suggest that Fodor’s argument against the compositionality of language is not decisive, and that we can still attribute at least some degree of compositionality to language.     

Musa Posseliana: Johannes Posselius the Elder (1528-91) and the Lutheran Greek Program

Abstract

In this article I examine one outcome of the programme for teaching Greek in Lutheran schools during the second half of the sixteenth century. Luther had insisted upon the teaching of Latin and Greek as a means to help ensure orthodoxy. Melanchthon had developed a curriculum in which the ancient languages formed the basis of Humanist education in the liberal arts. Johannes Posselius was a member of the first generation to study under this new curriculum. An examination of the texts he composed for the classroom shows his commitment to the active use of Greek. He presented Greek as a language suited to conversation and original composition, and modelled these uses in his own work. In his Greek poetic compositions, Posselius wrote for an elite audience, again demonstrating how Greek could contribute to contemporary literature.     

Languages for the Analytic Tradition

Abstract

In this paper I propose a series of arguments in order to show that it is preferable for analytic philosophy to be practiced in different languages. In the first section, I show that the analytic tradition includes people developing their philosophical work in different natural languages. In the second section, I will address the question of the role of language in thought, and more specifically in philosophical thought, concluding that it is preferable to allow for the use of different languages as a vehicle for philosophical ideas. Finally, I make some suggestions regarding changes that could be made in academic practices to better allow a plurality of languages and voices within the analytic tradition.     

Understanding the Controversy over Gender Language in Bible Translation

Abstract

This article attempts to explain the language issues behind the current controversy over gender inclusive translations of the Bible. Specifically, it focuses on changes in modern English whereby “a growing segment of the population [i.e., women] no longer can sense being addressed by a text that uses supposedly 'generic' masculine language to refer to them.” The reason, according to this author, is that in English “the masculine grammatical gender has largely shifted into a function that exclusively designates males.” Since the Christian Church believes that the Bible, as the Word of God, is the word through which God addresses his people, a translation that employs generic masculine language no longer satisfies the needs of all believers “to feel addressed by God's voice in the text” that is read and heard.     

The Tense Logic for Master Argument in Prior’s Reconstruction

In this paper we examine Prior’s reconstruction of Master Argument [4] in some modal-tense logic. This logic consists of a purely tense part and Diodorean definitions of modal alethic operators. Next we study this tense logic in the pure tense language. It is the logic K _t 4 plus a new axiom (P): ‘p Λ G p ⊃ P G p’. This formula was used by Prior in his original analysis of Master Argument. (P) is usually added as an extra axiom to an axiomatization of the logic of linear time. In that case the set of moments is a total order and must be left-discrete without the least moment. However, the logic of Master Argument does not require linear time. We show what properties of the set of moments are exactly forced by (P) in the reconstruction of Prior. We make also some philosophical remarks on the analyzed reconstruction. Presented by Jacek Malinowski     

The topics in medieval logic

The topics is a theory of argumentation based upon topoi or in Latin loci. The medieval logicians used works by Aristotle and Boethius as their sources for this doctrine, but they developed it in a rather original way. The topics became a higher-level analysis of arguments which are non-valid from a purely formal point of view, but where it is none the less legitimate to infer the conclusion from the premiss(es). In this connection the topics give rise to a number of discussions about the form and the matter of arguments. Further the topic contribute to the elaboration of the important doctrine of the second intentions, i.e. higher-level concepts of the particular things. In some respects the topics may be said to form a link between formal and informal logic. The topics vanished as a part of logic at the end of the Middle Ages, perhaps because the medieval logicians never got rid of Boethius' claim to have compiled a complete list of the loci, which was an unlucky one. The topics does not have an exact parallel in modern formal logic, but some reflections on non-formal argumentation by recent authors contain certain resemblances to it.