Deconstruction and Pragmatism

Continental Philosophy Review -     

解构与本体论——记德里达在上海社科院的讲演

J.德里达,当今世界上最负盛名的哲学家之一,于2001年9月14日下午访问了上海社会科学院哲学研究所,进行了学术交流.他先作了简短而精练的讲演,题为"解构与本体论",然后,又在讨论中回答了提问.本文系根据德里达的讲演以及他对与本题有关问题的回答的记录整理而成.     

Deconstruction and Reconstruction

The authors present and elaborate their thesis that psychoanalysis is a hermeneutic science concerned with the causal nature of meaning. They contend that psychoanalysis is concerned primarily with uncovering the meaning of experience as unconsciously determined, that is, caused, by fantasy and as revealed by symptomatic effects. The cause-and-effect interrelationship that exists among fantasy, meaning, and symptom derives from certain abnormal experiences of self relative to selfobject that occur during early development. The authors draw upon their clinical studies of patients diagnosed with panic disorder, OCD, and OCPD and present two clinical vignettes for illustrative purposes. Using a combined method of "analytic deconstruction" and reconstruction, the authors demonstrate how various psychopathological states are reflective of failures to transform archaic narcissistic fantasies that unconsciously determine the meaning of the symptoms suffered by those diagnosed with these specific self-disorders.     

A metaphilosophical dialogue

Three philosophical attitudes in dialogue are suggested in answering the question posed by the Journal. An inviting, First Inner Voice undeerstands philosophy as a shareable theoretical task that can be explained and understood even across distant philosophical paradigms. A Second Inner Voice, sometimes termed in the dialogue as sceptic, distrusts any metaphilosophical definition of what philosophy is and what it should do, but would, nevertheless, aspire to retain a certain universalistic understanding of its own work, though it cannot be strongly and conceptualy rendered. A Third Inner Voice, regarded in the text as somewhat Hegelian, insists in the unavoidability of strong philosophical definitions both in historical and in conceptual terms. No proposal or conclusion is forwarded regarding what should be done in contemporary philosophy, though an analysis of harm experiences is taken as an example of philosophical work     

The judicial dialogue

A variety of theoretical positions are emerging to explain the judicial process from such perspectives as hermeneutics, semiotics, critical theory and argumentation/rhetoric. They ask such questions as these: What is the source of judicial authority? How do judges arrive at their decisions? By what logic are decisions to be tested? In this essay I argue that a focus on decisions and their justifications alone masks the broader process in which judges, along with all the other relevant groups, engage in a continuing and evolving dialogue to structure their normative universe through the complementary processes of dialectic and rhetoric. Contemporary concepts of argumentation can serve to analyze this process critically.     

Four dialogue systems

The paper describes four dialogue systems, developed in the tradition of Charles Hamblin. The first system provides an answer for Achilles in Lewis Carroll's parable, the second an analysis of the fallacy of begging the question, the third a non-psychologistic account of conversational implicature, and the fourth an analysis of equivocation and of objections to it. Each avoids combinatorial explosions, and is intended for real-time operation.     

Logic for dialogue games

The purpose of this paper is to work toward an explicit logic and semantics for a game theoretically inspired theory of action. The purpose of the logic is to explicate the conceptual machinery implicit in the dialogue-game model of rational discourse developed in Carlson (1983).A variety of ideas and techniques of modal and philosophical logic are used to define a model structure that generalizes the game theoretical notion of a game in extensive form (von Neumann and Morgenstern, 1944). Relative to this model structure, semantic characterizations are given to the action-theoretic notions oftime, possibility, belief, preference, ability, intention, action, andrationality. The unification of these characterizations under the game-theoretical paradigm leads to insights about the logical interdependences between these concepts.The resulting theory of rational interaction is applied to the explication of rational dialogue. The main benefit of the enterprise for a theory of rational dialogue is that concepts and results of game theory become accessible to the explication of dialogue. In particular, the task of proving the logical coherence of a discourse is reduced to the task of showing the rationality of strategy choices made in an associated dialogue game.     

佛教哲学与德里达解构主义

针对有的学者把德里达解构主义看作当今“新乘”佛教的状况及学界对德里达思想误读的现象,提出以佛家思想为参照系,对两者在世界“有”“无”关系的本体论问题、世界存在方式问题及语言观等方面进行比较,并强调两者的不同之处是占主流的。此外,对德里达逝世之后的解构主义前景作了展望。     

Group discussion as interactive dialogue or as serial monologue: the influence of group size

Current models draw a broad distinction between communication as dialogue and communication as monologue. The two kinds of models have different implications for who influences whom in a group discussion. If the discussion is like interactive dialogue, group members should be influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion; if it is like serial monologue, they should be influenced most by the dominant speaker. The experiments reported here show that in small, 5-person groups, the communication is like dialogue and members are influenced most by those with whom they interact in the discussion. However, in large, 10-person groups, the communication is like monologue and members are influenced most by the dominant speaker. The difference in mode of communication is explained in terms of how speakers in the two sizes of groups design their utterances for different audiences.     

Computer dialogue system (CDS): A system for capturing computer-mediated dialogue

In the process of studying human tutoring sessions as a basis for building an intelligent tutoring system, we developed a computer dialogue system (CDS) that allows two PC users to communicate with each other over a telephone line by typing at a computer keyboard. CDS records the content of dialogue on a disk in a specified, well-formatted way. It also makes available a way to mimic some of the characteristics of face-to-face dialogue such as repair. It was developed in the Smartcom III (Hayes Communication package) environment. Thus, it is fast, portable, and easy to use. In addition, to help us study the recorded dialogues, we have also written a numbering program to label each turn and each sentence within each turn. Although CDS was originally designed for the study of tutorial dialogues between students and teachers, it can be used to conduct and record dialogues of any kind.