Syntax,Semantics, and Intentional Aspects

Abstract

It is widely assumed that the meaning of at least some types of expressions involves more than their reference to objects, and hence that there may be co-referential expressions which differ in meaning. It is also widely assumed that “syntax does not suffice for semantics”, i.e. that we cannot account for the fact that expressions have semantic properties in purely syntactical or computational terms. The main goal of the paper is to argue against a third related assumption, namely that what is responsible for a difference in meaning between co-referential expressions is the computational difference in the cognitive functioning of the expressions. “Intentional aspects” of expressions—those features which their meanings involve in addition to reference—cannot be syntacticized, since they are individuated not in terms of any cognitive feature, but rather in terms of those properties of the referents through which the expressions refer to them, and cognitive features cannot determine such properties in exactly the same sense as they cannot determine reference.     

Using Stories in Dynamically Oriented Clinical Social Work

Abstract

This paper uses concepts from discourse analysis to understand the meaning making functions of narrative in clinical treatment and to describe the interactive processes through which these functions are achieved. “Negotiative” and “heuristic” narrative processes are described as they occur in ordinary conversation. The relevance of these concepts to clinical practice is then explored using case material.     

Scriptural Reasoning as a “Classic”: The Aesthetics of Interreligious Politics

Seeking to find a new way of meeting between Abrahamic traditions, Scriptural Reasoning has established a unique dynamic. This unique dynamic centres on meetings that are based on friendship rather than consensus, wisdom rather than propositional knowledge or binary thinking. Such virtues are not without problems. This article considers one problem: how the results of Scriptural Reasoning, and the insights gleaned from the meetings, can be passed on to the Abrahamic communities and the wider public. Addressing this problematic, the article focuses on the aesthetics of Scriptural Reasoning and its performance. Whereas one method of extending its influence is to widen the practice into the civic sphere and draw more people into the meetings, this article proposes another approach that suggests that the meetings of scholars or “representatives” around their texts constitute a “classic”, which, through vicarious performance can affect the wider public. Further than this, the article outlines a kind of aesthetic politics of religions. Building upon the idea of aesthetic representation proposed in the political sphere by Frank Ankersmit, it is argued that interfaith movements such as Scriptural Reasoning might be presented as a form of political representation.     

Hermeneutics and historical consciousness: An appraisal of the contribution of Hans-Georg Gadamer

Abstract

In this introductory article to the volume of the South African Journal of Philosophy in tribute of Hans-Georg Gadamer, the author, first, makes a few remarks about the nature of hermeneutics and Gadamer’s views on the universality of the hermeneutical experience. This universality is, in particular, explained from the perspective of the “linguistic turn” in Gadamer’s thought. Secondly, there is a brief discussion of certain particular aspects of Gadamer’s contribution. Aspects of that contribution that are emphasized are: Gadamer’s reevaluation of prejudice, authority and tradition, his idea of “Wirkungsgeschichte”, his idea of meaning as a process rather than a given entity, his analogy between game-playing and the interpretation of art, and his dialogical conception of interpretation. The author concludes by developing his own estimate of the main thrust of Gadamer’s contribution. This contribution consists of the way in which Gadamer’s thought, on the one hand, represents a demonstration and embodiment of the kind of historical consciousness so typical of our times, but, on the other hand, also accomplishes this exemplification of historical consciousness while imaginatively avoiding the kind of relativistic historicism so typical of many other manifestations of the same trend.     

The landscape of time in literary reception: Character experience and narrative action

Abstract

This experiment examined responses to excerpted episodes from short stories that either focused on action or on the experiences of the characters. The effects of instructional sets to approach the texts from the viewpoint of subjective involvement or objective detachment were also studied. The two story types and two reading sets were factorially combined in a within-subjects design. Scale ratings of the story excerpts and reading times (syllables per second) were measured. A total of subjects (20 males and 20 females) read six segments from each of the episodes as quickly and accurately as possible. Pretest data were obtained for each segment indicating how much it “provided insight into the characters' experiences”, and its level of suspense and surprise. Segments which “provided in sight” were read more slowly, whereas surprising segments were read more quickly. Under the Subjective Set, subjects slowed the pace of reading if they judged the text to be “rich in meaning about life”. For the Objective Set, stories that were judged to have evoked “images” were read more slowly. Females were more responsive to the Subjective Set than were the males, finding the stories to be “richer in meaning” and more “personally relevant”. Females also slowed their reading pace for segments that they judged to be “rich in meaning about life”, while males slowed down if the stories evoked “images”.     

What is Literature? Revisited: Sartre on the Language of Literature

This article argues that Sartre's distinction in What Is Literature? between prose and poetry should be understood in the light of his earlier distinction in The Imaginary between two kinds of meaning. Sartre argues against the “Cartesian picture” of consciousness in The Imaginary, specifically concerning our experience of images. Not only is a mental image not an “inner object” mediating between consciousness and the world, even a picture drawn on paper should not be understood as an object standing between the viewer and what this picture represents. Our experience, Sartre argues, is that of seeing things in a picture rather than seeing through it, such that the meaning of pictures and images in general is embodied in them and cannot be separated from them. He then goes on to contrast this kind of embodied meaning (which he calls “sense”) with a kind of meaning that can be completely grasped independently of its expression (which he calls “signification”) and identify the two with painting and language respectively. It is for this reason, this article argues, that Sartre later sees poetry as a deviation from language's proper function. This rigid distinction is maintained by Sartre until the end of his career, and the change that some commentators found in him are its outcome rather than a revolt against it. In contrast, Merleau-Ponty has demonstrated more convincingly that sense and signification are both essential aspects of linguistic meaning, and their relation is much more dynamic and complimentary than Sartre would have allowed.     

It Is As It Does: Genital Form and Function in Sex Reassignment Surgery

Surgeons who perform sex reassignment surgeries (SRS) define their goals and evaluate their outcomes in terms of two kinds of results: aesthetic and functional. Since the neogenitals fashioned through sex reassignment surgeries do not enable reproductive function, surgeons must determine what the function of the genitals is or ought to be. A review of surgical literature demonstrates that questions of what constitute genital form and function, while putatively answered in the operating room, are not answerable in the discourses of clinical evaluation used to define them. When the genitals—the word itself derived from the Latin genitas meaning to beget—are not reproductive, the question of their function shifts away from the biological and into other registers: pleasure, intimacy, sociality. As condensed sites of meaning and meaning-making around which selves, affects, resources, anxieties and futures are organized, the genitals signify in excess of the categories of “aesthetic” and “function” that surgeons use to assess them. Not reducible to either aesthetics or function, but constitutive of them both, this excess appears in surgical texts in the form of imagined futures of social and sexual engagement and demonstrates a powerful means by which properly sexed bodies are created.     

Art’s False “Ease”: Form,Meaning and a Problematic Pedagogy

This paper argues that in foregoing the questions that emerge from the dialectical relationship between form and meaning, an intrinsic fallacy mistakes the relationship between the arts and education for a simplistic mechanism of signification—a false “ease”—where empty forms are supposedly given meaning by ethical and aesthetic givens as if the pedagogy of art were analogous to an empty room that was (or still needs to be) inhabited. Art’s false “ease” presents a tautology that presumes the relationship between the arts and learning on assumptions that force a false equivalence between (a) the perception of implicit causes that constitute a number of externalised artistic attributes (such as creative, critical, and intuitive forms of thinking and making) by which the arts are instrumentalised, and (b) a number of desired effects that are seen as being equal to the relative value that an arts subject (or discipline) commands in a perceived relationship with the world in terms of its use and therefore function. To counter this distortion this paper makes a case for a pedagogical aesthetics that would unlearn—and thereby exit—the educationalist tautology of art’s false ease. While politically this would mean that the arts are recognized in their ability to think and act outside the traditional notion of schooling as a walled polis, philosophically this represents a challenge to move arts education away from the “spatial” concepts by which dialectical narratives, such as those of form and content, have been hitherto assumed as constructivist signifiers.     

Prognosis in medicine: An analysis of its meaning and rôles

The medical concept of prognosis is analysed into its basic constituents: patient data, medical intervention, outcome, utilities and probabilities; and sources of utility and probability values are discussed. Prognosis cannot be divorced from contemplated medical action, nor from action to be taken by the patient in response to prognostication. Regrettably, the usual decision-theoretic approach ignores this latter aspect. Elicitation of utilities, decision contemplation and prognostic counselling interweave, diagnostics playing a subsidiary role in decision-oriented clinical practice. At times the doctor has grounds for withholding information. As this is known to the patient, prognostic counselling becomes a conflict-prone and rationality-thwarting activity. The meaning of standard phrases such as “prognosis of a disease”, “the prognosis of this patient”, “the prognosis is unknown”, is examined.     

Enhanced counselling for women undergoing BRCA1/2 testing: Impact on knowledge and psychological distress–results from a randomised clinical trial

This randomised controlled trial evaluated the impact of an enhanced counselling (EC) intervention on knowledge about the heritability of breast and ovarian cancer and distress, as a function of BRCA test result, among high-risk women. Before deciding about whether or not to undergo genetic testing, participants were randomly assigned to the EC intervention (N = 69), designed to promote cognitive and affective processing of cancer risk information (following the standard individualised counselling session), or to the control condition (N = 65), which involved standard individualised counselling followed by a general health information session to control for time and attention. Women in the EC group exhibited greater knowledge than women in the control group, 1 week after the intervention. Further, at the affective level, the intervention was found to be the most beneficial for women testing positive: specifically 1 week after test result disclosure, women in the intervention group who tested positive experienced lower levels of distress than women in the control group who tested positive. The findings suggest that the design of counselling aids should include a component that explicitly activates the individual's cognitive–affective processing system.     

A trainee psychotherapist’s heuristic exploration of losing a mother to suicide

ABSTRACT

Suicide bereavement is a newly developing field of research in the UK, yet over 6,600 people take their own lives here every year. This heuristic inquiry aims to explore the lived experiences of trainee psychotherapists bereaved by maternal suicide. It examines the lived experiences of the researcher and two participants, with data collected through interviews, dreams and journalling. The findings revealed five themes: 1) It’s not just about the suicide, 2) The pain continues – attachment, abandonment and fear, 3) Left with all the unprocessed feelings – “the shit”, 4) Trigger after trigger – complicated experiences of psychotherapy training, 5) A catastrophic loss that no one “gets”. Implications for the counselling and psychotherapy profession are discussed.     

Stressing the feedback: attention and cardiac vagal tone during a cognitive stress task

Objectives: The present study examined relationships among gaze behaviour and cardiac vagal tone using a novel stress-inducing task.

Methods: Participants’ (N?=?40) eye movements and heart rate variability (HRV) were measured during an unsolvable computer-based task randomly presenting feedback of “Right” and “Wrong” answers distinctly onscreen after each trial. Subgroups were created on the basis of more frequent eye movements to the right (“Correct”-Attenders; n?=?23) or wrong (“Incorrect”-Attenders; n?=?17) areas onscreen.

Results: Correct-Attenders maintained HRV from baseline to the stress task. In contrast, Incorrect-Attenders spent significantly more time viewing “Wrong” feedback, exhibited a reduction in HRV during the stress condition (p?Conclusions: Results demonstrate that pervasive attention to negative feedback (“Wrong”) elicits perseverative stress and negative self-evaluations among university students. This study highlights the potential for studying attentional biases and emotional distress through combined measures of gaze behaviour and cardiac vagal tone.     

THE DANTO-WOLLHEIM MEANING THEORY OF ART

Arthur Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Richard Wollheim in Painting as an Art have each advanced a certain meaning theory of art (MT), more specifically, a theory according to which something is a work of art just in case it expresses a proposition. The first part of this essay sets out that view in more detail, with textual support that Danto and Wollheim do in fact hold that theory. The second part offers reasons against accepting MT. (1) There seem to be persuasive counterexamples to MT: objects that are clearly works of art but which do not appear to exhibit any tendency towards propositionality. (2) Neither theorist provides an explanation as to why someone with something to say would choose to, as it were, hide his thought behind a painting. (3) MT will force a theory of the evaluation of art that parallels the evaluation of (say) scientific or philosophical thought. Artworks will be judged according to the profundity of the thoughts they express rather than by their aesthetic features – which would make Duchamp a greater artist than Monet!     

On modeling the creativity and the concept of Chef-D’oeuvre

The problem of modeling the creativity is shown to be entirely connected with another mysterious challenge — the “Explanatory Gap” between the concepts of “Brain” and “Mind”. We use the Natural Constructive Cognitive Architecture, with its important feature being the combination of two subsystems, for generation of new information and for its conservation. “Brain” is considered as records of the raw images of real objects (individual objective information), while “Mind” refers to individual subjective information created inside the cognitive system (symbols). We argued that creativity can be treated as “an effort to bring a piece of personal “Brain” into the “Mind” and World”. Specific thinking mode (intellectual panic or throes of creativity) is shown to enhance the creative work resulting in over-mobilization and even enriching personal deep inside (“Brain”) experience. It is simulated by chaotic jumps of the noise amplitude around abnormally high value. The nature of Aesthetic Emotions and the concept of Chef-D’oeuvre are analyzed. It is shown that they are caused by the “recognition paradox”: an object seems both, familiar but unusual. This occurs if the “Brain” does see its subtle features, while the “Mind” does not realize. Bright aesthetic emotions (goosebumps) are caused by irregular excitation of implicit associations provided by weak (“gray”) connections of the halo neurons (simulating the subconsciousness). General formula for Chef-D’oeuvre in science and art could be expressed as “condensed capacity to see the invisible, to combine the incompatible”.     

MICHAEL POLANYI ON ART AND RELIGION: SOME CRITICAL REFLECTIONS ON MEANING

This paper is a critique of the theory of meaning in art and religion that Michael Polanyi developed in his last work entitled Meaning. After giving a brief summary of Polanyi's theory of art, I raise two serious difficulties, not with the theory itself, but with the claims Polanyi makes about the relation of meaning in art to science and religion. Regarding the first difficulty, I argue that Polanyi betrays an earlier insight when in Meaning he attempts to dissociate meaning in art from meaning in science; instead I argue that both science and art are aesthetic enterprises. Regarding the second, I argue that Polanyi's account of religion is an aesthetic reduction, that meaning in religion, at least in the Western tradition, is not so much an aesthetic as it is an existential matter.     

The Symbiosis between a Mother and Her Schizophrenic Son in a Group Therapeutic Process

Abstract

In psychoanalytical practice important, but less studied, transformative functions are performed by verbal comments which do not correspond to the classic model of mutative interpretations proposed by Strachey. The Authors describe some characteristics of such clinical situations, without coming into the better known categories of variations in technique. Such enunciations seem not to have a “strong”, (already clearly defined) meaning in the mind of the analyst, but contain rather a “weak” semantic potential, which can only develop with the active cooperation of the patient. In the light of these experiences, the Authors reconsider the general nature of psychoanalytical interpretation and emphasize the intersubjective and dialogical nature of the interpretive work carried out in analysis.     

The phenomenological ontology of literature

Literary ontology is essentially a phenomenological issue rather than one of epistemology, sociology, or psychology. It is a theory of the phenomenological essence intuited from a sense of beauty, based on the phenomenological ontology of beauty, which puts into “brackets” the sociohistorical premises and material conditions of aesthetic phenomena. Beauty is the “objectified” emotion. This is the phenomenological definition of the essence of beauty, which manifests itself on three levels, namely “emotion qua selfconsciousness,” “sense of beauty qua emotion,” and “sentiment qua sense of beauty.” Art on the other hand is the “objectification of emotion” whose most general and closest manner to “humanity” is literature and poetry. Poetry is the origin of language and the linguistic essence is a metaphor. Language as “the house of being” is both “thinking” and “poetry.” Literature expresses the essence of art in the most direct way and, in traditional Chinese aesthetic terminology, literature is the “language of emotion” conveyed by the writer based on his own emotion towards the “language of scene.”     

The “BIG BIRD” of the “YELLOW YOUNG” man: Do nontarget properties cascade?

This study investigated whether in speech production object properties flow in a cascaded manner or whether cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants saw pictured objects and had to state either their size (GRAND or PETIT—meaning big and small) or their name. The size of the objects varied as a function of the way they were presented on the computer screen (Experiment 1) or their real size in the world (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, faces of young and old men were coloured in yellow or in green. The task was to name either the colour (JAUNE or VERT, meaning yellow and green, respectively) or the age (JEUNE or VIEUX, meaning young and old, respectively) of the face. In Experiments 1 and 2, no reliable effects of phonological relatedness (“GORILLE–grand”—a big gorilla) were found on the object-naming latencies. However, size-naming latencies were shorter when the adjective shared the initial phoneme of the picture name (i.e., “GRAND–gorille”) than when it did not (i.e., “GRAND–dinosaure”—saying “big” in response to a big dinosaur). In Experiment 3, phonological overlap did not affect colour naming latencies, or age naming latencies. Overall, these findings strongly suggest that cascaded processing is restricted to the object's identity in conceptually driven naming tasks.