This article aims to compare Gert Biesta’s, Hartmut Rosa’s and Thomas Kuhn’s perspectives on how transformative “events” emerge and become possible, and to relate their viewpoints to an educational context. The article shows how Biesta’s concept of subjectification, and Rosa’s idea of resonance, depend on viewing contemporary education as a state of status quo that is disrupted by a transformative event. Although their diagnoses of the contemporary and views on individual agency differ to some extent, Biesta and Rosa respectively place emphasis on the relationship between the subject and the world as the “space” where these events emerge. Subsequently, the article turns to Kuhn to propose another approach to understanding the dialectic of status quo and events. Through Kuhn, it is possible to introduce a more affirmative way of looking at how a state of status quo can underpin events, and how these events take place on a collective level, rather than in encounters between individual subjects and the world.
I am honored to respond to Paul Guyer’s elaboration on the role of examples of perfectionism in Cavell’s and Kant’s philosophies. Guyer’s appeal to Kant’s notion of freedom opens the way for suggestive readings of Cavell’s work on moral perfectionism but also, as I will show, for controversy.
There are salient aspects of both Kant’s and Cavell’s philosophy that are crucial to understanding perfectionism and, let me call it, perfectionist education, that I wish to emphasize in response to Guyer. In responding to Guyer’s text, I shall do three things. First, I shall explain why I think it is misleading to speak of Cavell’s view that moral perfectionism is involved in a struggle to make oneself intelligible to oneself and others in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions for moral perfection. Rather, I will suggest that the constant work on oneself that is at the core of Cavell’s moral perfectionism is a constant work for intelligibility. Second, I shall recall a feature of Cavell’s perfectionism that Guyer does not explicitly speak of: the idea that perfectionism is a theme, “outlook or dimension of thought embodied and developed in a set of texts.” Or, as Cavell goes on to say, “there is a place in mind where good books are in conversation. … [W]hat they often talk about … is how they can be, or sound, so much better than the people that compose them.” This involves what I would call a perfectionist conception of the history of philosophy and the kinds of texts we take to belong to such history. Third, I shall sketch out how the struggle for intelligibility and a perfectionist view of engagement with texts and philosophy can lead to a view of philosophy as a form of education in itself.
In concluding these three “criticisms,” I reach a position that I think is quite close to Guyer’s, but with a slightly shifted emphasis on what it means to read Kant and Cavell from a perfectionist point of view.
Education is often understood as a process whereby children come to conform to the norms teachers believe should govern our practices. This picture problematically presumes that educators know in advance what it means for children to go on the way that is expected of them. In this essay Viktor Johansson suggests a revision of education, through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, that can account for both the attunement in our practices and the possible dissonance that follows when the teacher and child do not go on together. There is an anxiety generated by the threat of disharmony in our educational undertakings that may drive teachers toward philosophy in educational contexts. Here Johansson offers a philosophical treatment of this intellectual anxiety that teachers may experience when they, upon meeting dissonant children, search for epistemic justifications of their practices—a treatment whereby dissonant children can support teachers in dissolving their intellectual frustrations.
What is it to learn something? This essay is an attempt to give a treatment of our expectations and wants from an answer to that question by placing Dewey’s pragmatism and Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy in conversation with each other. Both Dewey and Wittgenstein introduce philosophical visions and methods that are meant to avoid dogmatic responses to such questions. Dewey presents a vision of learning based on the view of the human organism transacting in its environment and in that way being involved with education without any other end than continual growth. By suggesting possible results of a Wittgensteinian investigation of our use of the word “learning ”, the essay also proposes a twist on Dewey’s theory of learning, which dissolves our need for a theory of learning as an answer to the question. This gives the child a voice in contexts where the word “learn” is used. An investigation of the use of “learn” becomes a method of releasing us from the dogmatic requirements that determine what learning is. Further, Dewey’s terminology comes to comprise examples of possible uses rather than being a statement as to what learning is.
This paper aims to show how Emerson provides a reworking of Kantian understandings of moral education in young children’s Bildung. The article begins and ends by thinking of Emersonian self-cultivation as a form of improvisatory or wild Bildung. It explores the role of Bildung and selfcultivation in preschools through a philosophy that accounts for children’s ‘Wild wisdom’ by letting Emerson speak to Kant. The paper argues that Kant’s vision of Bildung essentially involves reason’s turn upon itself andthat Emerson, particularly in how he is taken up by Cavell, shows that such a turn is already present in the processes of children inheriting, learning, and improvising with language. This improvisatory outlook on moral education is contrasted with common goals of moral education prescribed in early childhood education where the Swedish Curriculum for the Preschool Lpfö 98 is used as an example.
Philosophers of language and theoretical linguists disagree about whether the meaning of an utterance is determined by the speaker’s more or less constrained communicative intention or by public features available to the hearer such as conventional linguistic meaning and diverse contextual cues. In this paper I question the common presupposition that there is such a thing as the correct interpretation of an utterance. I set out to show that, from the viewpoint of the three options at stake in the interpretive interaction between the speaker and the hearer, the notion of correct interpretation is dispensable. If the hearer takes an interest in the speaker’s intended meaning, as she most frequently does, she has no reason to be concerned with the actual meaning of the utterance. If the hearer wants to hold the speaker responsible for the normative consequences of the utterance, what is at issue is whether the hearer had the best reasons to take the utterance the way she did, i.e. the hearer opts for the most reasonable interpretation of the utterance, irrespective of the speaker’s intention and also of the objective meaning of the utterance. Finally, the hearer may opt for a merely imagined meaning of the utterance, which accounts for the remaining purposes a hearer can have with respect to an utterance, e.g. merriment. If there is no use for the notion of the correct interpretation of an utterance in interpretive practice, it seems that there are good reasons to dispense with this notion also in the theory about language and communication.
The function of anaphoric epithets, i.e. definite descriptions that appear in a referential chain, in texts is examined. First, we hope to establish that definite descriptions of this sort are referential expressions, they contribute a particular individual to the proposition and do not stipulate conditions to be satisfied by whoever happens to satisfy them. It is argued that it is the cohesion of the text that prescribes the referential function of anaphoric epithets. Second, a comparison between anaphoric epithets and Donnellan’s referential use is made. It will appear that anaphoric epithets are not exclusively referential devices, but the sense of the description enters into what is expressed by them. Anaphoric epithets are an instance of saturated linguistic expressions that nevertheless must be related to other expressions in order to be properly interpreted.
In this paper I question the lying/misleading distinction from three different angles.I argue, first, that if speakers are responsible for what they explicitly say only andhearers for what they infer that speakers implicitly convey, it is practically impossibleto enforce speaker responsibility. An implication of this view is that the lying/misleading distinction is untenable. Other attempts at questioning the distinctionhave been countered by empirical evidence of the robustness of the distinction.However, there is also contrasting empirical evidence that people do think that it ispossible to lie by implicit means. I argue, second, that empirical evidence is irrelevantto the question which ought to be at issue, namely whether there are goodreasons to make the distinction. Third, I argue that to the extent that the notion ofmisleading is in the service of inducing false beliefs by the statement of truths, thedistinction does not seem to be morally well-founded. In short, I sketch an argumentto the effect that there are no conceptual, empirical or moral reasons for makingthe lying/misleading distinction.
Frege’s extension of his distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung to predicate terms is widely considered to beproblematic. Interpreters generally assume that the notion of Bedeutung comprises the name/bearer relation as aprototype and that the extension is justified only in so far as the relation of predicate terms to their alleged referents isanalogous to the relation of names to their bearers. However, interpreters have generally paid insufficient attentionto Frege’s own dealing with the issue. By examining the relevant passages in Frege’s writings, I show that thestandard ways of talking about Frege’s ascription of Bedeutung to predicates as optional, less evident than theascription of Sinn, and in need of justification are not in accord with Frege’s own conception of predicate reference.There is no textual evidence that the extension takes place for analogical reasons and, in particular, no evidencefor the claim that the name/bearer relation is used as a prototype. Frege is visibly not concerned with the relationbetween predicate terms and their referents, but applies the notion of Bedeutung for reasons of principle. There isindeed the invocation of an analogy, but if we consider the argument in which it occurs it appears that it does notplay the justificatory role interpreters attribute to it. In sum, Frege’s ascription of Bedeutung to predicates does notimply any mysterious or dubious referentiality of predicate terms.
This thesis is dedicated to two distinct but convergent issues: the possibility of paraphrase and an account of context sensitivity on the basis of textual cohesion (or coherence). The possibility of explaining contextual specifications of meaning as a side effect of establishing textual cohesion is explored through an investigation into the nature of texts. Taking off from existing theories of text structure, an ideal concept of cohesion is elaborated which accounts for textual connection by the interpreter’s assignment of rhetorical relations (or discourse relations). In addition to connecting the elements of a text together, rhetorical relations have implications for the content of terms and sentences composing a text. The contextual meaning of terms and sentences are thus explained by the fact that the terms and sentences are parts of a text. Enriching the domain of context sensitivity, special emphasis is placed on the implications of rhetorical relations for predicate terms. Through an analysis of authentic literary examples, a certain conception of predicate reference is vindicated which is labelled rhetorical adjustment. The approach contrasts with several contextualist theories in linguistics and philosophy of language which prefer to account for the generation of meaning transcending the linguistic meaning of terms and sentences as specified by syntax and lexicon by means of external parameters such as the speaker’s intentions and communicative aims. In this way the thesis is a contribution to the debate concerning the interface between semantics and pragmatics. Such a contextualism based on the notion of cohesion has implications for a certain conception of paraphrase. It is often emphasized that it is not possible to say the same thing in different words. It is argued that taking contextualism and cohesion into account justifies a conception of paraphrase according to which it is not opposed to, but contributes to the constitution of the original meaning. Such a paraphrase is undemanding in that it does not aim to capture all the aspects of the original wording, yet it is neither trivial, since it is unpredictable from a lexical point of view nor irrelevant, since it is a constitutive feature of the original expression in so far as it is part of a text.
Actual practice is underdetermined with respect to whether accusations of racism are based on the speaker’s attitude, communicative intention or the meaning of the utterance and whether in the latter case the racist meaning can be implicit or must be explicit. A common problem of these grounds for qualifying an utterance as racist is that they refer the question to the speaker’s own authority. The interactional model of utterance interpretation which forms the theoretical background of the present project permits us to elaborate a novel and robust conception of speaker responsibility. The speaker’s responsibility depends on the hearer’s most reasonable interpretation of the utterance in such a way that the speaker’s actual attitude or intention is irrelevant and also whether the meaning was explicitly or only implicitly conveyed.
In the debate on demonstrative reference it is taken for granted that there is such a thing as the semantic instance of determinacy for demonstratives. I argue that the interpretive interaction between the speaker and the hearer suggests that the notion of objective semantic reference in the case of demonstratives is dispensable. Either the speaker and the hearer do not have recourse to any such notion or, at least, there are no reasons for them to have recourse to any such notion. Looking at reactions and interactions does not of course settle the issue whether there is objective demonstrative reference. But it strongly suggests that the issue rather be dismissed.
It is often claimed that, in at least some areas of language use, the relation between form and content is such that any attempt at reformulation or paraphrase amounts to a distortion of the significance of the original wording. In this article, I set out to vindicate an undemanding yet nontrivial conception of paraphrase. According to the rhetorical relations account of textual cohesion proposed, the meaning specifications required by a collection of sentences in order to constitute a text pave the way for a kind of reformulation which is in solidarity with the possibility of paraphrase. I substantiate my approach with prosaic and poetic examples from Woolf and Dickinson, respectively.
It is commonly taken for granted that an important task of a theory of meaning is to tell what determines the meaning of an utterance. The two basic positions are intentionalism and anti-intentionalism, the former situating the instance of determinacy in the speaker S’s intention and the latter in features accessible to the hearer H. In this paper I argue that the interpretive practice of S and H lends support to neither intentionalism nor anti-intentionalism, but rather suggests that the notion of utterance meaning is dispensable. I outline what I take to be the three options at stake in utterance interpretation and show that none of them presupposes recourse to the objectively correct interpretation of the utterance.
The contribution of cohesion to determining what statement is madeby an utterance is considered in this paper. Two kinds of cohesion areexplored, the first grounded on a rather formal relationship, the secondof a more interactional character. The superiority of cohesion over thesituation or the speaker’s intention as a contextual criterion is claimed.
In most accounts of metaphor, similarities play a prominent role. When e.g. Romeo says ‘Juliet is the sun’, he is commonly taken to extend an invitation to the hearer to explore Juliet’s sun-like features; her being warm, bright, sustaining, etc. are thought to be highlighted by the metaphor. A problem about this kind of interpretation is that it is often difficult to find support for its content as well as its form in the actual context of the metaphor. I will put forward a different approach to metaphor according to which the speaker of a metaphorical ‘S is P’ sentence casts the subject as the predicate in her discursive and imaginative play. The function of the metaphor is not to suggest unstated similarities between the subject and the predicate, but essentially to permit the speaker to make further utterances about the subject in terms of the predicate, either in order to represent features and actions of the subject or to make the subject appear in a certain way.
It has been thought that sportspersons, through their participation in sport, acquire moral attitudes and behavior that make them good moral role models. These moral attitudes and behavior can be called the ethos of sport, and consist of the principles of fair play and courage, justice, and honesty. In this article, it is argued that this belief is mistaken. Through four very common examples of sporting practice, it is shown that sport, contrary to providing a good basis for proper moral behavior, promotes what otherwise would be called non-moral attitudes and behavior. As a conclusion, it is pointed out that sportspersons might very well be good moral role models, but that they would be moral role models in spite of the fact that they are involved in sporting activities.