Agency and Human Rights

What grounds human rights? How do we determine that something is a human right? James Griffin has persuasively argued that the notion of agency should determine the content of human rights. However, Griffin's agency account faces the question of why agency should be the sole ground for human rights. For example, can Griffin's notion of agency by itself adequately explain such human rights as that against torture? Or, has Griffin offered a plausible explanation as to why one should not broaden the ground for human rights to include other elements of a good life such as freedom from great pain, understanding, deep personal relations, and so on? These concerns have been raised regarding Griffin's agency account, but in his new book, On Human Rights, Griffin has offered new arguments in support of his view that agency is the sole ground for human rights. In this paper, I examine these new arguments, and I argue that Griffin's arguments are ultimately unsuccessful.     

Inscrutability and its Discontents

That reference is inscrutable is demonstrated, it is argued, not only by W. V. Quine's arguments but by Peter Unger's “Problem of the Many.” Applied to our own language, this is a paradoxical result, since nothing could be more obvious to speakers of English than that, when they use the word “rabbit,” they are talking about rabbits. The solution to this paradox is to take a disquotational view of reference for one's own language, so that “When I use ‘rabbit,’ I refer to rabbits” is made true by the meaning of the word “refer.” The reference relation is extended to other languages by translation. The explanation for this peculiarly egocentric conception of semantics—questions of others’ meanings are settled by asking what I mean by words of my language—is to be found in our practice of predicting and explaining other people's behavior by empathetic identification. I understand other people's behavior by asking what I would do in their place.     

Knowledge of language in action

Knowledge of a language is a kind of knowledge, the possession of which enables a speaker to understand and perform a variety of linguistic actions in that language. In this paper, I pursue an agency-oriented approach to knowledge of language. I begin by examining two major agency-oriented models of knowledge of language: Michael Dummett's Implicit Knowledge Model and Jennifer Hornsby's Practical Knowledge Model. I argue that each of these models is inadequate for different reasons. I present an Acquaintance Knowledge Model, in which a speaker's knowledge of a language is a combination of the speaker's first-order linguistic ability and second-order acquaintance with his ability and actions.     

Responsive Parenting in the Second Year: Specific Influences on Children's Language and Play

In two longitudinal studies, relations between dimensions of maternal responsiveness at 13 months and children's language and play abilities at 13 and at 20 months were examined. We characterized mothers' responsive exchanges by assessing the targets of maternal responses (i.e. what child activities mothers respond to) and the verbal contents of maternal responses (i.e. what mothers said when they responded), and we asked whether subtypes of responsiveness would relate differentially to children's language and play abilities. In general, maternal responsiveness to children's vocalizations predicted children's language, and maternal responses to children's play predicted children's play. These findings suggest that maternal responsiveness can be profitably categorized into subtypes that relate to domains of child outcomes in specialized ways. The specific nature of mother–child associations in the domains of early language and play is discussed. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Does Conversation Need Shared Language? Davidson and Gadamer on Communicative Understanding

In a rare discussion of Gadamer's work, Davidson takes issue with Gadamer's claim that successful communication requires that interlocutors share a common language. While he is right to see a difference between his own views and Gadamer's on this point, Davidson appears to have misunderstood what motivates Gadamer's position, conflating it with that of his more familiar conventionalist interlocutors. This paper articulates Gadamer's view of the role of language in communicative understanding as an alternative to both Davidson's and that of the conventionalist writers Davidson critiques. It is argued, first, that Gadamer employs a conception of what individuates a language, and thus of what it means for two speakers to “share” a language, that Davidson never considers. By emphasizing the role of “application” in the historical development of languages, Gadamer develops a view in which languages are distinguished not by their particular semantic or syntactic rules, but by subtle differences between the concepts they express. Second, it is argued that the instances of “asymmetrical” communication—communication between interlocutors who have different sets of concepts at their disposal—that motivate Gadamer's position pose a challenge to Davidson's account of interpretative charity.     

Language‐Games and Relativism: On Cora Diamond's Reading of Peter Winch

We will look critically at three essays by Cora Diamond concerning Peter Winch's views on the possibility of communication and criticism between language‐games. We briefly present our understanding of Winch's approach to philosophy. Then, we argue that Diamond misidentifies Winch's views, taking them to imply language‐game relativism or linguistic idealism. When she does raise valid criticisms against language‐game relativism, her critical points mainly coincide with things that Winch has already stressed in his own work. That leaves us with the question what their real disagreement amounts to. Finally, we suggest that at the bottom of Diamond's objections lies her failure to appreciate Winch's insights about the place of logic in human intercourse.     

Confusion of Horizons: Gadamer and the Christian logos

This paper argues for Gadamer's indebtedness to logs Christology. Gadamer's language philosophy and hermeneutic experience both depend on theological insights gleaned mainly from St. Augustine and German Pietism. In Truth and Method , Gadamer uses Augustine's rewriting of Platonism to establish his language philosophy and employs the Pietist formula of application to describe the hermeneutical experience as word event. Gadamer's silence about these influences in his later works leave his interpreters and critics (such as Jürgen Habermas) puzzled about his seeming naïve trust in philosophical hermeneutics as a means to improve human interaction. This article tries to contribute to an understanding of Gadamer's hermeneutics by arguing that Gadamer's optimism in language and reason make sense when seen in the theological context from which crucial elements of his philosophy are derived.     

Precursors of language ability and academic performance: an inter‐generational,longitudinal study of at‐risk children

The current investigation examined whether inter‐generational transfer of risk could be revealed through mothers' and preschool‐aged children's expressive language, and whether continuity of risk persisted in these children's academic abilities, 3 years later. Participating families were drawn from the Concordia Longitudinal Risk Project, a prospective, longitudinal investigation of French‐speaking families from low‐SES Montreal neighbourhoods. At Time 1, mothers' history of childhood social withdrawal was shown to predict mothers' child‐directed language. Mothers' language complexity was also shown to be predictive of preschoolers' expressive language and was found to mediate the relationship between maternal social withdrawal and child language. At Time 2, children's language‐related academic abilities were predicted by their expressive language at preschool age. The findings support an inter‐generational continuity of risk operating through language complexity and extending to children's performance in language‐related academic abilities at school age. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Marco Conci interviews Marco Bacciagaluppi

Abstract

Following both Bion's and Aulagnier's thought, this paper seeks to examine two functions of psychotic syntax within the nonpsychotic personality. The first function is the creation of a split between voice and meaning in the mother–infant relationship, a split whose aim is to disengage contact with contents that cannot be metabolized and that are associated with the mother's denied death wish toward her infant. The second function pertains to the use of psychotic syntax as a way of denying separateness and annihilating the “speaking I.” Both functions will be exemplified by clinical case studies. In conclusion, psychotic language will be discussed as a “hybrid language” generated by an incestuous relationship between the mother's and the infant's language.     

Monolingual and bilingual children's social preferences for monolingual and bilingual speakers

Past research has shown that young monolingual children exhibit language‐based social biases: they prefer native language to foreign language speakers. The current research investigated how children's language preferences are influenced by their own bilingualism and by a speaker's bilingualism. Monolingual and bilingual 4‐ to 6‐year‐olds heard pairs of adults (a monolingual and a bilingual, or two monolinguals) and chose the person with whom they wanted to be friends. Whether they were from a largely monolingual or a largely bilingual community, monolingual children preferred monolingual to bilingual speakers, and native language to foreign language speakers. In contrast, bilingual children showed similar affiliation with monolingual and bilingual speakers, as well as for monolingual speakers using their dominant versus non‐dominant language. Exploratory analyses showed that individual bilinguals displayed idiosyncratic patterns of preference. These results reveal that language‐based preferences emerge from a complex interaction of factors, including preference for in‐group members, avoidance of out‐group members, and characteristics of the child as they relate to the status of the languages within the community. Moreover, these results have implications for bilingual children's social acceptance by their peers.     

Longitudinal Relations Between Theory of Mind and Metacognition and the Impact of Language

This study investigated the longitudinal relation between children's theory of mind and their metacognitive knowledge with a special focus on the impact of language on this relation. Measures of theory-of-mind understanding and metamemory knowledge were assessed in 133 3-year-old children at 4 measurement points separated by half-year intervals. Results revealed a somewhat more pronounced effect of children's early theory of mind on the change in metamemory knowledge than vice versa. This effect was almost independent of the time period under investigation as well as of earlier language and nonverbal competencies and socioeconomic status. Early language competencies had a direct impact on theory-of-mind and metamemory development and moreover indirectly affected metamemory development through children's theory of mind. The results of the study suggest that children's abilities to metarepresent together with their early language competencies are important in the acquisition of metamemory knowledge.     

Feeling at home in language

What do we learn about language from reading Wittgenstein'sPhilosophical Investigations? This question gains urgency from Wittgenstein's alleged animus against philosophical theorizing and his indirectness. Section 1 argues that Wittgenstein's goal is to prevent philosophical questioning about the foundations of language from the beginning. This conception of his aim is not in tension with Wittgenstein's use of the notion of community; “community interpretations” of his views betray a misguided commitment to the coherence of the idea that language might need grounding. Wittgenstein's goal is not to enjoin us not to step “outside of language-games”, but to show that we have insufficiently clear grasp of the terms we try to use to express the limits of intelligibility. Section 2 suggests that appreciating Wittgenstein's moral concerning the relation between language and philosophizing about it involves allowing him to teach us how to read his book. What makes readingPhilosophical Investigations possible is openness to learning how not to forget our lives in language.     

Meaning and object in Freud's theory of language

This article sets out to challenge the interpretation of Freud's views on the origins of the meaning of language according to which meaning always originates from an act of naming. In Freud's terms, word‐presentations would originally denote object‐ or thing‐presentations and gain meaning through this reference. This interpretation claims that this view was already expressed in Freud's On Aphasia (1891) and influenced all his later theory of language. To oppose this claim, three conceptions proposed by Freud are discussed that strongly suggest the participation of language in the construction of the field of objects: a metapsychological hypothesis (the concepts of word‐, thing‐, and object‐presentation), the explanation of a psychopathological phenomenon (the genesis of a fetishistic object‐choice), and a concept concerning the foundations of the psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation (secondary elaboration). As a conclusion, it is argued that Freud's early views in On Aphasia (1891) can be alternatively understood such as to allow for a different view of language and its relationship with objects.     

Working Together to Make Sense of the Past: Mothers' and Children's Use of Internal States Language in Conversations about Traumatic and Nontraumatic Events

Mother-child conversations about a devastating tornado and about 2 nontraumatic events were examined to determine whether there were (a) differences in use of internal states language when talking about traumatic and nontraumatic events and (b) similarities in mothers' and children's use of internal states language. At Session 1, which took place 4 months after the tornado, with conversational length controlled, there was no evidence of differential use of internal states language as a function of event for mothers or children. At Session 2, which took place 6 months later (10 months after the tornado), older children's narratives about the tornado were more saturated with internal states language, relative to their narratives about nontornado events. For both the traumatic and the nontraumatic events, there were cross-lagged correlations between maternal use of emotion language at Session 1 and children's use of emotion language at Session 2. The pattern of findings is consistent with the suggestion that mother-child conversations are one context for the socialization of language about emotional experiences.     

More than Just the Breadwinner: The Effects of Fathers' Parenting Stress on Children's Language and Cognitive Development

Despite numerous studies on parenting stress suggesting negative influences on parent–child interactions and children's development, the majority of these studies focus on mothers' parenting stress with little or no acknowledgement of fathers. Using data from the National Early Head Start Research and Evaluation Project, this study examined (i) the effects of fathers' parenting stress during toddlerhood on children's language and cognitive outcomes when children are 3 years old (ii) whether the effects of fathers' parenting stress on children's language and cognitive development vary by child gender? Results from mixed linear models showed fathers' parenting stress predicted children's lower cognitive scores, but there were no gender differences in the effects of fathers' parenting stress on children's cognitive outcomes. In the language domain, boys, not girls, were found to be more susceptible to the effects of fathers' parenting stress. These findings indicated that fathers, in addition to mothers, should be included in early parenting research and interventions. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Developmental course of the temporal relationship between gaze direction and vocal production in typical and Down's syndrome infants

This study was aimed at examining the temporal relationship between gaze and vocal production behaviour among typically developing infants, infants with Down's syndrome, and their mothers. If gaze–voice timing behaviour is an organizing principle of communicative interaction in typical population, then studying it should provide insight into how children with Down's syndrome and their mothers use this temporal relationship to structure their exchanges. Forty-four mother–infant dyads (22 dyads with a Down's syndrome child and 22 with a typical child) were observed. The developmental course of timing pattern was not different between DS and typically developing infants from 4 to 19 months (DA). Insofar as the timing patterns differed between DS and typical infants at 20 months, this could be explained by their differing level of language acquisition. With the use of language, the timing patterns will reappear equal in the both populations. Results suggest that (i) the children's behaviours could be partially explained by the behaviours of their mothers. The mother–child dyad would be the mould that shapes the child's future sociolinguistic skills, and (ii) for the two populations, the timing-pattern changes could be explained by the emergence of language.     

Against Matricide: Rethinking Subjectivity and the Maternal Body

In this article I critically re‐examine Julia Kristeva's view that becoming a speaking subject requires psychical matricide: violent separation from the maternal body. I propose an alternative, non‐matricidal conception of subjectivity, in part by drawing out anti‐matricidal strands in Kristeva's own thought, including her view that early mother–child relations are triangular. Whereas she understands this triangle in terms of a first imaginary father, I re‐interpret this triangle using Donald Winnicott's idea of potential space and Jessica Benjamin's idea of an intersubjective space of thirdness. I argue that this space provides a maternal third term: a relation of connection and difference between two, a relation that inherits the affective, mobile, generative qualities of the maternal body as the infant (according to Kristeva) imagines it. This connecting space allows both mothers and children to emerge as subjects in their own right. I then suggest that potential‐maternal space expands into language, so that language intrinsically allows the possibility of a speaking position of connection with the mother. Entrance into language need not entail separation or matricide: the problem is not language as such but the particular way that speech and logos have been defined historically.     

Wittgenstein's Private Language Investigation

In this paper, I first review previous interpretations of Wittgenstein's remarks on private language, revealing their inadequacies, and then present my own interpretation. Basing mainly on Wittgenstein's notes for lectures on private sensations, I establish the following points: (i) ‘remembering the connection right’ means ‘reidentifying sensation‐types’; (ii) the reason for ‘no criterion of correctness’ is that nothing, especially no inner mechanisms nor external devices, can be utilised by the private speaker to tell whether some sensations are of one type or different types; and (iii) private names are not really names, private language is not really a language, therefore, private language is a grammatical illusion. My interpretation has the advantage of being able to reconcile Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, which is to dissolve philosophical problems by rearranging grammatical facts, with his actual philosophical practice, at least in the case of private language.     

II. Testing the cement: An examination of Mackie on causation∗

The theme of these notes is the relation between verificationism and Quine's approach to philosophy of language. The main thesis is that a tenable theory of meaning along verificationist lines must distinguish between canonical and indirect verification and that this distinction is related to observable features of language use. It is argued that a theory of meaning along such lines is not vulnerable to Quine's arguments against verificationism, and suggested that, on the whole, a verificationism of this kind is compatible with Quine's basic approach to philosophy of language.     

Forms of Our Life: Wittgenstein and the Later Heidegger

The paper argues that an internal debate within Wittgensteinian philosophy leads to issues associated rather with the later philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Rush Rhees's identification of the limitations of the notion of a “language game” to illuminate the relation between language and reality leads to his discussion of what is involved in the “reality” of language: “anything that is said has sense‐if living has sense, not otherwise.” But what is it for living to have sense? Peter Winch provides an interpretation and application of Rhees's argument in his discussion of the “reality” of Zande witchcraft and magic in “Understanding a Primitive Society”. There he argues that such sense is provided by a language game concerned with the ineradicable contingency of human life, such as (he claims) Zande witchcraft to be. I argue, however, that Winch's account fails to answer the question why Zande witchcraft can find no application within our lives. I suggest that answering this requires us to raise the question of why Zande witchcraft “fits” with their other practices but cannot with ours, a question of “sense” which cannot be answered by reference to another language game. I use Joseph Epes Brown's account of Native American cultures (in Epes Brown 2001) as an exemplification of a form of coherence that constitutes what we may call a “world”. I then discuss what is involved in this, relating this coherence to a relation to the temporal, which provides an internal connection between the senses of the “real” embodied in the different linguistic practices of these cultures. I relate this to the later Heidegger's account of the “History of Being”, of the historical worlds of Western culture and increasingly of the planet. I conclude with an indication of concerns and issues this approach raises, ones characteristic of “Continental” rather than Wittgensteinian philosophy.