Supererogation and Intentions of the Agent

It has been claimed, by David Heyd, that in order for an act to count as supererogatory the agent performing the act must possess altruistic intentions (1982 p.115). This requirement, Heyd claims, allows us to make sense of the meritorious nature of acts of supererogation. In this paper I will investigate whether there is good reason to accept that this requirement is a necessary condition of supererogation. I will argue that such a reason can be found in cases where two people act in the same way but with only the person who acted with altruistic intent counting as having performed an act of supererogation. In such cases Heyd’s intention requirement plays an important role in ruling out acts that intuitively are not supererogatory. Despite this, I will argue that we should reject Heyd’s requirement and replace it with a moral intention requirement. I will then investigate how to formulate this requirement and respond to two objections that might be raised against it.     

From imitation to conversation: the first dialogues with human neonates

The functional maturity of the newborn infant's brain, the resemblances between neonatal imitation and imitation in adults and the possibly lateralized neonatal imitation suggest that the mirror neuron system may contribute to neonatal imitation. Newborn infants not only imitate but also initiate previously imitated gestures, and are able to participate in overlapping imitation–initiation communicative cycles. Additionally, these social responses in neonates are faster than previously thought, and may enable them to have long‐lasting intimate interactions much before language develops. Infants are equipped with a powerful, innate, reciprocal communicative ability already at birth. The earliest communication originates from imitation and this communicative ability presumably later evolves to language. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Why metaphors make good insults: perspectives,presupposition, and pragmatics

Metaphors are powerful communicative tools because they produce ‘framing effects’. These effects are especially palpable when the metaphor is an insult that denigrates the hearer or someone he cares about. In such cases, just comprehending the metaphor produces a kind of ‘complicity’ that cannot easily be undone by denying the speaker’s claim. Several theorists have taken this to show that metaphors are engaged in a different line of work from ordinary communication. Against this, I argue that metaphorical insults are rhetorically powerful because they combine perspectives, presupposition, and pragmatics in the service of speech acts with assertoric force.     

Language as an Instrument of Soteriological Transformation from the Madhyamaka Perspective

Buddhist teachings and practices can be viewed as a journey of soteriological transformation, where language, as a tool for the analysis of views, occupies a place of special significance and importance. This article examines how the concept of non-duality, from the Madhyamaka perspective, has served as a powerful rhetorical device with the explicit aim of fostering soteriological transformation. Among the various expressions representative of the Madhyamaka perspective, two are particularly explored in this article for their facilitation of soteriological transformation: the expression of ‘neither a dharma nor a not-dharma’ (na sa dharmo nâdharma?) and the teaching that ‘one should let go even of dharmas, still more so not-dharmas’ (dharmā? eva prahātavyā? prāg evâdharmā?). I argue that the Madhyamaka expression of ‘neither A nor not-A’ is hardly ever just about conforming to any linguistic conventions. It is about gaining liberation from linguistic conventions and unexamined remarks.     

Understanding reading as a form of language-use: A language game hypothesis

Reading research and research on conversation have followed different paths: While the research program for reading committed itself to a relatively static view of language, where objective text properties serve to elicit specific effects on cognition and behavior of a reader, research on conversation has embraced a language-use perspective, where language is primarily seen as a dynamic, context dependent process. In this essay I contrast these two perspectives, and argue that in order to reach a unified understanding of natural language – be it reading, talking, or conversing – one needs to adopt a language-use perspective. Furthermore, I describe how reading can be seen as a form of language-use, and how the current landscape of research on reading can be re-interpreted in terms of a dynamic, context-sensitive perspective on language. In particular, I propose that the concept of ‘language games’ serves as a good starting point to conceive reading as a form of language-use, describe how one can derive first concrete hypotheses by re-interpreting reading in terms of language games, and show how they can be readily operationalized using tools from dynamic systems analysis.     

The Messiah and Rabbi Jesus: Policing the Jewish–Christian border in Christian Zionism

For all their ostensible difference and separateness, Judaism and Christianity have a long history of mutual engagement and profound entanglement. I take Daniel Boyarin's assertion that ‘…the borders between Christianity and Judaism are as constructed and imposed, as artificial and political as any of the borders of the earth’ (2004, 1) as my starting point. But what Boyarin sees as an ongoing process of differentiation between Judaism and Christianity and distinct identity-building in late antiquity, I look for still today in Christian Zionism. The busy border crossing continues to separate people and ideas at the same time as it serves as the meeting place between them, the uncomfortable place where Judaism and Christianity rub up against each other. This paper examines some constructions of the Jewish–Christian border by way of two case studies of prominent religious leaders, each firmly at home in their respective communities, Jewish and Christian, who ventured out to the borderland of Christian Zionism. This is the story of what happened when they returned home to find themselves examined by those who monitor the Jewish–Christian border, and deemed to be over the limit with intoxicants brought over from the ‘other side’.     

Evil acts not evil people: their characteristics and contexts

Abstract: The problem of evil has vexed philosophers and theologians for centuries and anthropologists, sociologists, psychoanalysts and analytical psychologists in more recent times. Numerous theories have been proposed but there is still little agreement on such basic questions as the nature of evil, what constitutes and motivates an evil act, and how we resolve conflicts between individuals and groups in which evil acts are being committed. I am proposing that evil should be used as an adjective, and not as a noun. As such it should be employed to qualify acts of persons rather than their character. This change would enable us to eschew foundational explanations of evil and, therefore, to examine evil acts in their contexts and so better discern their nature and motivation. I will contend that evil acts begin when an individual makes, or members of a group make, assertions about the ‘naturalness’ of their own acts and, correspondingly, the ‘unnaturalness’ of the acts of others. I will suggest that this results from the anxiety that ensues when they cannot adequately signify their experience of these acts. When this occurs, those so treated are dispossessed of their ‘personhood’, allowing members of the ‘natural’ group to violate their ‘boundaries' with impunity. These violations can range from the relatively innocuous such as being ignored to the extreme such as genocide. I am asserting that all these acts should be termed evil as they derive from the same semiotic process of ‘naturalizaton’. I will discuss ways of preventing individuals or groups from embarking on the process of ‘naturalization’ and describe the types of contexts that might reduce or eliminate the commission of evil acts by those already engaged in their perpetration. To demonstrate these ideas I will use examples from my personal experience, from analytic theory and from the ‘troubles' in Northern Ireland.     

Microblogging and the Value of Undirected Communication

Online social networks have become extremely popular, but what drives sharing through these channels? We demonstrate that one of the most popular features of online social networks, microblogging (e.g., tweeting or sharing Facebook status updates), is driven in part by its undirected nature. Microblogging allows people to simultaneously express themselves to a large number of potential communication partners without having to address anyone in particular. As a result, this communication channel is particularly valued when people feel socially apprehensive; it allows them to reach out without having to impose communication and potentially bother anyone in particular. These findings shed light on one reason why people use online social networks and provide insight into the value of undirected communication.     

Semantic minimalism and the “miracle of communication”

According to semantic minimalism, context-invariant minimal semantic propositions play an essential role in linguistic communication. This claim is key to minimalists’ argument against semantic contextualism: if there were no such minimal semantic propositions, and semantic content varied widely with shifts in context, then it would be “miraculous” if communication were ever to occur. This paper offers a critical examination of the minimalist account of communication, focusing on a series of examples where communication occurs without a minimal semantic proposition shared between speaker and hearer. The only way for minimalists to respond to these examples is by restricting the scope of their account to intra-lingual communication. It can then be shown (1) that the minimalist’s notion of a language shrinks to a point, such that practically no instances of communication will fall under that account, and (2) that the retreat to intra-lingual communication is in any case self-defeating, since the only way for minimalists to account for the individuation of languages is by resort to precisely the kinds of contextual considerations they abjured in the first place. In short, if, as minimalists allege, contextualism founders because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a context, it can now be seen that minimalism faces a parallel problem because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a language. I end by arguing that the possibility of communication cannot, as minimalists assume, be grounded in shared semantic conventions; rather, successful communication must precede the establishment of any particular set of semantic conventions.     

Wittgenstein and the Animal Origins of Linguistic Communication

Wittgenstein's notorious sample of a ‘complete primitive language’ (viz. the builders’ game of the Philosophical Investigations) is often thought to be closer in kind to animal forms of communication than human language. Indeed, it has been criticised on precisely these grounds. But such debates make little sense if we take seriously Wittgenstein's idea that language is a family resemblance concept. So, rather than argue that the builders’ game ‘really is a language’ (or not), I propose to turn the debate on its head and welcome the comparison. By changing our perspective in this way, I suggest that we can see that the learning of language is crucially dependent on forms of communication that are animal in nature. I then discuss how these lessons might shed light on empirical research into both the ontogenetic and phylogenetic origins of linguistic communication.     

Must we measure what we mean?

This paper excavates a debate concerning the claims of ordinary language philosophers that took place during the middle of the last century. The debate centers on the status of statements about ‘what we say’. On one side of the debate, critics of ordinary language philosophy argued that statements about ‘what we say’ should be evaluated as empirical observations about how people do in fact speak, on a par with claims made in the language sciences. By that standard, ordinary language philosophers were not entitled to the claims that they made about what we would say about various topics. On the other side of the debate, defenders of the methods of ordinary language philosophy sought to explain how philosophers can be entitled to statements about what we would say without engaging in extensive observations of how people do in fact use language. In this paper, I defend the idea that entitlement to claims about what we say can be had in a way that doesn’t require empirical observation, and I argue that ordinary language philosophers are (at least sometimes) engaged in a different project than linguists or empirically minded philosophers of language, which is subject to different conditions of success.     

From monkey-like action recognition to human language: an evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics

The article analyzes the neural and functional grounding of language skills as well as their emergence in hominid evolution, hypothesizing stages leading from abilities known to exist in monkeys and apes and presumed to exist in our hominid ancestors right through to modern spoken and signed languages. The starting point is the observation that both premotor area F5 in monkeys and Broca's area in humans contain a "mirror system" active for both execution and observation of manual actions, and that F5 and Broca's area are homologous brain regions. This grounded the mirror system hypothesis of Rizzolatti and Arbib (1998) which offers the mirror system for grasping as a key neural "missing link" between the abilities of our nonhuman ancestors of 20 million years ago and modern human language, with manual gestures rather than a system for vocal communication providing the initial seed for this evolutionary process. The present article, however, goes "beyond the mirror" to offer hypotheses on evolutionary changes within and outside the mirror systems which may have occurred to equip Homo sapiens with a language-ready brain. Crucial to the early stages of this progression is the mirror system for grasping and its extension to permit imitation. Imitation is seen as evolving via a so-called simple system such as that found in chimpanzees (which allows imitation of complex "object-oriented" sequences but only as the result of extensive practice) to a so-called complex system found in humans (which allows rapid imitation even of complex sequences, under appropriate conditions) which supports pantomime. This is hypothesized to have provided the substrate for the development of protosign, a combinatorially open repertoire of manual gestures, which then provides the scaffolding for the emergence of protospeech (which thus owes little to nonhuman vocalizations), with protosign and protospeech then developing in an expanding spiral. It is argued that these stages involve biological evolution of both brain and body. By contrast, it is argued that the progression from protosign and protospeech to languages with full-blown syntax and compositional semantics was a historical phenomenon in the development of Homo sapiens, involving few if any further biological changes.     

Surfacing the depths: thoughts on imitation,resonance and growth

This paper examines some of the research on imitation that shows it to be much more than simply a behavioural or reflex response, but rather an aspect of the growth of genuine social and psychological interaction and part of an intersubjective process that includes the representation of object relationships. Differentiations between mind, behaviour and emotion may no longer stand up in the light of much of the new neuroscientific and other research of recent years, and the fact that thoughts and feelings have physiological and neuronal correlates. I will look at some of research about ‘mirror neurons’ as a way of trying to bridge such gaps. I will try to integrate some of these thoughts in an extended clinical example of a 4-year-old girl with some autistic features who was seen for intensive psychotherapy. In this I will examine the role of affect attunement, imitation, mirroring and the need to amplify emotional states as part emotional development.     

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.’     

Spontaneous imitation in the social interactions of young people with developmental delay and their adult carers

This paper examines the presence of spontaneous imitation within the social interactions of young people with developmental delay and their adult carers. There have been only a handful of observational studies examining imitation in this population, despite the relevance of such work to contemporary theoretical debates about imitation and the potential that imitation holds as an intervention for promoting communicative skills. The play of eight young people and 13 adult carers over 10 sessions at an after‐school club was videotaped and analysed for the presence and impact of spontaneous imitative bouts. Results showed that, in the majority of cases, it was adults who initiated imitative bouts and that the young people generally did not reciprocate such acts. However, even such brief instances of adult imitation were sufficient to increase the children's subsequent smiles and speech vocalizations, as well as the adults' own use of smiling, eye contact, and speech vocalizations. These findings confirm that these young people are sensitive to imitation. The implications for designing interventions that promote communicative exchanges in young people with developmental delay are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘Alawi Muslims in Argentina: religious and political identity in the diaspora

This article examines contemporary aspects of the identity construction of the ‘Alawi diaspora in Argentina. In the local context, the preservation of ‘Alawi singularity has so far been a key element in the group’s identity. The strategies for integration as legitimate Muslims in the wider Islam and the closeness to Shi’ism are relatively independent of how these processes took place in the homeland. I first describe the geography of the diaspora in Argentina, comprising the spaces and institutions where descendants settled all over the country. I analyze the factors that helped keep the nodes connected and I will demonstrate that these constitute a center/periphery logic for communities concerning the alleged degrees of preservation of the culture of origin they symbolize. I will try to show that ‘Alawis integrated into the diversity of Islam in Argentina while preserving their sectarian borders and, at the same time, stressing an “Arab” identity. I argue that these strategies should be understood in the local arena of an intra-Islamic pluralism that constitutes Muslim presence in Argentina, where the dynamics of sectarianisms assume idiosyncratic characteristics. Finally, I will show institutional closeness to Shi’ism as a recent development, promoted by the common political stance of both groups on the conflict in Syria. We will see that this closeness does not imply the dissolution of doctrinal boundaries between Shi’is and ‘Alawis and that it involves a redefinition of the diaspora in terms of increasingly claiming a Syrian national origin.     

What is it to Depsychologize Psychology?

In this essay, I distinguish two ways of depsychologizing psychology: ‘anti‐psychologism’ and ‘non‐psychologism’. Both positions are responses to the Fregean sharp distinction between the logical and the psychological. But where anti‐psychologism, which I find in John McDowell, attempts to overcome the sharp distinction by arguing that psychological states and their expressions are apt to be articulated into judgments, Stanley Cavell's non‐psychologism, a powerful and neglected alternative, wants to overcome the sharp distinction by abandoning judgment as the paradigm expression of thought and communication.     

Convergence of calls as animals form social bonds, active compensation for noisy communication channels, and the evolution of vocal learning in mammals

The classic evidence for vocal production learning involves imitation of novel, often anthropogenic sounds. Among mammals, this has been reported for dolphins, elephants, harbor seals, and humans. A broader taxonomic distribution has been reported for vocal convergence, where the acoustic properties of calls from different individuals converge when they are housed together in captivity or form social bonds in the wild. Vocal convergence has been demonstrated for animals as diverse as songbirds, parakeets, hummingbirds, bats, elephants, cetaceans, and primates. For most species, call convergence is thought to reflect a group-distinctive identifier, with shared calls reflecting and strengthening social bonds. A ubiquitous function for vocal production learning that is starting to receive attention involves modifying signals to improve communication in a noisy channel. Pooling data on vocal imitation, vocal convergence, and compensation for noise suggests a wider taxonomic distribution of vocal production learning among mammals than has been generally appreciated. The wide taxonomic distribution of this evidence for vocal production learning suggests that perhaps more of the neural underpinnings for vocal production learning are in place in mammals than is usually recognized.     

Theoretical perspectives on language and communication problems in mental retardation and developmental disabilities

We argue that researchers interested in language and communication problems in mental retardation or any other developmental disorder should view such problems as emerging within the broader context of the behavioral profile, or phenotype, associated with a particular genetic condition. This will require understanding the direct and indirect effects of genes on the development of language and communication and thereby an understanding of the complex relations that exist between language and other dimensions of psychological and behavioral functioning as well as an understanding of the environments in which the developing person acts and is acted upon. We believe that the dominant model for understanding language and communication problems--the nativist approach, which emphasizes the child's innate capacity for acquiring language and characterizes language as consisting of a set of context-free deterministic rules that operate on abstract representations--is inconsistent with an emphasis on indirect genetic effects. We review recent evidence that undermines the nativist approach--evidence concerning the initial state of the language-learning child, the role of environmental input, the competence-performance distinction, and modularity. In place of nativism, we argue for Emergentism, which is a model in which language is seen to emerge from the interaction between the child's biological abilities to map statistical properties of the language input into a distributed representation and the characteristics of the language learning environment and for the purpose of engaging in real-time, meaningful language use.