Philosophy of Language Commons^™

Model-Theoretic Arguments In Philosophy, Peter Susanszky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is on model-theoretic arguments in philosophy, especially those of Quine, Davidson, and Putnam. In the first part, to ground the debate, I give a rigorous introduction to the salient parts of first-order model theory. I start the second part by giving an introduction to Quine's philosophy, and how the model-theoretic arguments fit into it. After considering how Donald Davidson adopted the Quinean lesson, I move on to Putnam's model-theoretic arguments. Putnam's spin on these model-theoretic considerations significantly departs from Quine and Davidson, while retaining many of the core ideas. Most importantly, I argue that the target of Putnam's …

A Philosophy Of Communication Response To Bullying In Corporate America, Chris A. Phillips Dr.

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This philosophy of communication response to bullying in corporate America follows the structure of posing research questions, synthesizing relevant literature, and offering advice to practitioners. It invites the reader to have hope in continuing the conversation through a constructive hermeneutic approach to the problem. By building on literature in oppression, silencing, bullying, incivility, and communication ethics, this dissertation reveals how (rhetoric) and why (philosophy) the problem occurs in corporate America today. This dissertation offers a new angle to an old problem, or, a rhetoric and philosophy of bullying. It responds to the following questions:

RQ 1: As a destructive communication …

The Illocutionary Constitution Of Second Nature: An Interpretive Reconstruction Of Hegel’S Philosophy Of Language, Roland William Carspecken

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation offers an interpretive reconstruction of Hegel’s philosophy of language. Rich reflections on the nature of language and its significance to human life can be found across Hegel’s works. Many of these reflections strongly suggest that language plays a vital role in Hegel’s philosophical project. Yet surprisingly, Hegel never set down a comprehensive account of his view of language. To this day, it remains a matter of dispute whether Hegel’s writings on language are consistent enough to amount to a single ‘philosophy of language’ and, if they are, what sort of philosophy of language they might offer. In the …

Understanding The Alternative Normative Concepts, Dewitt W. Spiller

Theses

Matti Eklund's challenge to normative realism in Choosing Normative Concepts (2017) turns on the possibility of "alternative normative concepts"—concepts that play the same normative role as ours but have different extensions. Eklund argues that the ardent realist cannot express what he calls “the further question” about which concepts to use without either trivializing the answer or changing the subject. I argue that this challenge rests on an unstated assumption about how normative concepts are differentiated. I call this the Fragility Assumption. What I seek to show is that this assumption is not obligatory; there are live views of normative concepts …

Navigating Radical Indeterminacy In The Struggle For A Global Collective Consciousness: The Question Of Eco-Justice And Law Or Universalize The Pluriverse: A Manifesto, More Or Less, Omar Auf

Theses and Dissertations

The processes of interpretation, communication, and re-interpretation leads to the emergence of an approximated collective consciousness, for which it may be struggled and contested by hegemonic. The dominant forces of this contest, capitalism and nationalism, lead to an interdivided world: one that possesses the tools to empathize with each other but is instead leading people to keep their heads down and focus on surviving their own contexts, perceived as existing within different historical times on the same timeline. This leads to legal and justice systems that fail their claim to universality and/or impartiality. Incorporating an ecological lens to justice within …

Emptiness Is Enlightenment: Two Interpretations Of Nāgārjuna's Middle Way As Buddhist Soteriology, Isabella R. Sullivan

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis investigates the soteriological implications of Nāgārjuna’s doctrine of emptiness (śūnyatā) as presented in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (MMK), or Root Verses of the Middle Way. While Nāgārjuna’s radical denial of intrinsic existence (svabhāva) is widely recognized as a masterful critique of metaphysics, modern scholarship remains divided on whether this "right view" can sufficiently ground the Buddhist Path to Liberation. This project centers on a comparative analysis of two prominent modern interpretations: Jay Garfield’s semantic anti-dualism and Giuseppe Ferraro’s anti-metaphysical realism.

The inquiry evaluates these perspectives against the doctrinal frameworks of the Four Noble Truths, dependent …

Voice And Student Engagement With Writing: Integrating Perspective, Personality, And Style, Sara S. Martin

English Dissertations

The rise of generative AI has many teachers worried about the future of writing classes and students’ desire to learn. However, instructors can motivate students to write by valuing what AI can never replace: their voices. Previous definitions of voice took the concept for granted and left it either vague or reductive, unhelpful for structured lessons. I propose a new, more teachable definition of voice as perspective, personality, and style. Perspective takes priority because it belongs solely to the individual and the unrepeatable moment of composition. Personality infuses passages with emotion, forming a bond between author and reader. Style, the …

Models Of Emulation: Representations Of Foreign, Indigenous, And Accented Speech In Early American Literature, Elaina A. Frulla

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

“Models of Emulation: Representations of Foreign, Indigenous, and Accented Speech in Early American Literature” explores how American writers used depictions of “nonstandard” English and accented English language speech, traditionally described as “literary dialect,” as a way to negotiate identity, power, and political belonging in the formative years of nation building after the American Revolution. Beginning with Noah Webster’s mission to establish a standardized pronunciation of the English language that would simplify and purify spoken American-English and definitively differentiate it from what he saw as the corrupted, cosmopolitan British-English model, each of the three chapters examines literary representations of nonstandard emulated …

Human Evil (In The Weird), Lucas Ethridge

University Honors Theses

This paper examines a trending doom in speculative fiction: the post-human age. Many modern works have started to look past human civilization as humans surrender all hope and faith in a climate-doomed world. Honing in on core concepts in Weird fiction, this paper explores human merit through Old and New Weird. A good part spends time establishing the canon, looking at similar patterns across age, philosophy, war and genre. The chief question asks if humankind was ever worth saving.

The Substance Of Reality: Moral Perfectionism In Shakespeare's Hamlet., David Wright

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Through a selection of and close reading of key passages, I offer an interpretation of Hamlet that seeks to illuminate the play as an important work of moral philosophy, and to situate the play within a strand of moral philosophy named moral perfectionism by Stanley Cavell. Indeed, Hamlet is a masterpiece of Renaissance drama, but when read with attention to moral perfectionism, the play yields additional layers of meaning. Hamlet is a “philosophical drama” that navigates the “moral calling of philosophy”—a text that seems to, almost uncannily, elicit the audience to think reflectively, to ask fundamental human questions along …

How To Do Things With Little Talking Tubes: Nonideal Speech Acts In The Digital Age, Anthony Holdier

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In this work, I develop a view about what it means to share a social or conversational context with others, as well as what is normatively entailed by doing so. Working from a broadly Austinian perspective about the moral foundations of language use and how we use words to position ourselves within social space, as well as from a generally Stalnakerian social ontology (demarcating groups by dint of aligned or overlapping sets of commitments), I present three papers demonstrating how nonidealized, ordinary language philosophy can make sense of complex, real-world phenomena. Through analyses of heretical utterances, context collapse, and chatbot …

The Communal Lyric: Poetry In Devotional And Oppressed Communities, Michael N. Yacoub

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the interaction between lyric and community; it asks what a communal lyric is, how it functions, and to what ends. In Chapter One, I compare Jonathan Culler’s performative model of lyric with the theory of Takhyīl as expounded by Arab philosopher-critics al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, and al-Qartajanni to argue that a communal lyric is a form of audience-oriented public discourse distinguished by formal features that prompt the poem’s (re-)iteration and establish an interpersonal relationship with the audience in order to influence them and make shareable value claims about the world. In Chapters Two and Three I provide close-reading …

Stereotype Engineering, Ian Olasov

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I offer an account of a novel variety of conceptual engineering, which I call stereotype engineering. Someone engineers a stereotype when they work to change the typicality effects associated with a category or expression (performance on goodness-of-example tasks, feature listing tasks, and accuracy rates and response times in recognition and retrieval tasks), without necessarily changing the concept of that category or the semantic value of the expression. I offer a number of examples of stereotype engineering in popular discourse – from rape activism to expansive uses of “white supremacy” and “ethnic cleansing,” to the hashtags #BlackGirlMagic and #MyNYPD, to advocacy …

Nietzschean Expressivism, Cameron Jackson

Theses

What is Nietzsche’s metaethical stance? Does he even have one? We can, I argue, reconstruct an interesting metaethical view from his writings. Rather than focusing narrowly on his claims about moral judgement, I explore Nietzsche’s philosophical psychology broadly in order to argue that he is best interpreted as holding an emotivist type of expressivism. The function of moral judgement lies within its affective and action-guiding nature, and its communal role of coordinating our evaluative attitudes with one another.

Johann Georg Hamann And The Liberal Project, Jesse D. Ansley

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation examines the political thought of Johann Georg Hamann, his relationship to liberalism, and the importance to modern concerns for consensus formation and intercultural dialogue. This contributes to the line of literature sparked by Isaiah Berlin debating the political legacy of Hamann and its relation to the development of modern politics. Berlin labels Hamann an anti-rationalist whose current developed into the ideology of the Nazi party. My work supports the countervailing arguments that Hamann’s work is importantly different from the Romantics he inspired and even more so from the Nazis. By examining two complete works and a number of …

Victim/Perpetrator, David D. Moy

Theses and Dissertations

Throughout this text, David Moy will discuss the inner working of his investigation on image overload and materialization. Through tactics of blurring, erasure, and layering he achieves obfuscation in his printed media. In doing so, he questions the compounding nature of image/text that negate themselves in the larger context of time in the digital age.

In Praise Of Dust, Hasler Gomez-Perez

Theses and Dissertations

A desire path is a physical manifestation of where a system has failed, but also where it has been refused, where a new path has been made. The wake exists in the post, it is not a singular, untethered event, but a subtle double entendre that lives in the post-death, but also in the pre-life—not a liminal limbo, but a superposition of dying and waking.

This collection was assembled and composed over the course of two years as I navigated my practice, myself, and others. Present here are my thoughts, my experiences, and in many ways my beliefs. IN PRAISE …

Ideals And Idealization: Responding To Rawls And His Critics, Clayton J. Houdeshell

Theses and Dissertations--Philosophy

In A Theory of Justice, John Rawls argues that any participant taking on the role as impartial spectator in his original position thought experiment would select “justice as fairness” as the most reasonable theory of justice to reorganize a basic structure’s system of institutions and public rules. In this dissertation it is my aim to outline seven criticisms of the Rawlsian account related to his method of ideal theory, the rationality and values of the impartial spectator, the instilment of a particular conception of the good and an aversion to non-liberal theories, and argue that each of them fail to …

On The Readership Of Spinoza’S Writing & A Poetics For Thought, Tam Pham

Honors Thesis

This paper invites attention to textual facts and other intricacies in the readership of Spinoza’s writing, which bring to the fore his thinking qua thinking under language, a consideration that seems at least underappreciated, if not misappreciated, by the very readership in question. In so doing, the paper reflects on the possibility—and perhaps necessity—of a poetological purview into a philosophical corpus, in terms of its being written under a sense of Latin as well as of other tongues, generated by and for a thinker to be the linguisticity within which he thinks. To put in differently: if Spinoza were to …

Singing Petrarch In The Cinquecento: Embodied Reading And The Italian Madrigal, Thomas A. Hedrick Iii

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines how composers of sixteenth-century Italian madrigals highlighted poetic line rhythm, repeated vowel sounds (or assonance), and word repetition in figures of speech—all elements of the verse that have been previously overlooked by scholars, who have traditionally focused on musical depictions of the text’s semantics. The analysis in chapters 2, 3, and 4 shows that composers used a consistent set of techniques from the madrigals of Arcadelt to those of Monteverdi, and musical examples draw from large collection of madrigals on Petrarch sonnets. The analytical methodology is built on the premise that Cinquecento encounters with poetry can be …

Liberal Attitude Reports, Tomasz Zyglewicz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Attitude reports are sentences such as “Tomasz thinks the Earth is flat” or “Susan wantsvice cream.” It is commonly assumed that the main reason people use them is to make sense of the reportee’s behavior: to explain their past actions, or predict future ones. To play this role effectively, attitude reports have to accurately describe what is going on in the reportee’s head. Let’s call attitue reports that do not meet this condition “Liberal attitude reports.” For example: Alice is a vegan doctor who thinks that every vegan should take a B12 supplements. It is felicitous to say to your …

Aesthetic Cognitivism : Acquiring Propositional Knowledge From Fiction, Nanyun Shen

Lingnan Theses (MPhil & PhD)

This thesis focuses on aesthetic cognitivism, especially the cognitive value of fiction. I mainly discuss two topics. One is whether we can learn from art, and the other is what the learning conditions are under different circumstances. I focus on acquiring propositional knowledge from fiction. My goal is to establish that the cognitive value of fiction is to a certain extent unsafe, although there might be strategies we can take to reduce such unsafeness. Yet, we should not blindly hold an optimistic attitude towards the cognitive value of fiction until more empirical evidence gives us reasons to. I distinguish between …

The Riddle Of Religious Language, Luke Hillman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The following project analyzes religious life through the lens of religious language. Motivated by ideas of Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinians, religious language is shown to be nonsensical, and yet significant. Wittgenstein connects how we understand language with how we understand life, and this connection extends to religious life. This project offers an answer to how religious language is unique by comparing religious language to riddles and the process of answering riddles. In addition, religious language becomes understandable with imagination, a relationship with the transcendent, and an understanding of the kinds of language present in religious discourse. These ideas are solidified with …

Language, Legitimacy, And The Law: The Social Roots Of Legal Obligation, Joshua Keton

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a recent turn, both legal scholarship and judicial practice in the United States have converged on the idea that the content of the law is grounded on moral facts—especially facts about democracy. Leveraging insights from the philosophy of language, especially the underdetermination of meaning by syntax and semantics, I argue that textualism can only be reconstructed as a small part of a complete theory of legal interpretation. I then consider a more serious claim to the necessity of moral facts in metaphysically grounding the content of the law. As Mark Greenberg’s anti-positivist theory would have it, the content of …

Consciousness And Physicalism, Brian Mcgowan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Physicalism is a philosophy of mind which attempts to explain consciousness as resulting from physical causes. The lack of a complete and consistent mathematical theory to explain physical causation has led other philosophers of mind to propose that consciousness is a nonphysical essence, property, or substance. However, the idea that physics can be defined atomically and/or deterministically leads to explanatory problems for consciousness, as well as for the dualisms which explain consciousness under these assumptions. This thesis advances a position called “continuous physicalism” which takes all material to result from deformations in the physical medium of space, and any changes …

Cinema's Poetic Function: Creating An Amorous Distance, William Yonts

Film and Media Studies (MA) Theses

The aim of this thesis is to examine how cinema can embrace its poetic function to avoid its assimilation into preexisting hermeneutic structures, which would leave it vulnerable to myth as defined by Roland Barthes, and instead be a generative force, encouraging its viewer to engage with the full potential of the text. This mode of spectatorship is termed the “amorous distance,” which Barthes describes as his simultaneous fascination with the film and that which exceeds it. The amorous distance finds further articulation through the work of Roman Jakobson and Julia Kristeva. Jakobson’s schema of six language functions describes the …

Incorporating Institutions And Ideology: Why Covid Didn't Change Anything, Cullen Kendrick

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

In this paper, I investigate the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic through an economic and philosophical lens to try and understand why government aid was removed. Looking at the problem as solely a structural issue, with Jurgen Habermas’ Between Facts and Norms and Douglas North’s Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance guiding my understanding, provides useful insights. Namely, how the informal and formal structures of society interact, and their cyclical nature. However, that perspective does not provide a complete picture. And so, I developed an understanding of ideology to investigate the origins of informal societal structures. To do this I …

The Normativity Of Social Role Concepts, Robert Laurent Iii

Theses

This paper argues that social role concepts are both descriptive and normative. A "social role concept" is any concept that describes a person’s station in life from the point of view of society as a whole. Social roles are usually positions into which one is born and which are difficult if not impossible to renounce from within the conceptual system. Social roles are therefore not mere jobs or descriptions. They place certain obligations upon a person that are meant to apply absolutely. This paper first discusses the normativity of rule-governed practices and the rules involved in concept use. The paper …

Dispelling Delusion And Seeing Nature: A Comparative Analysis Of Lucretius’ _De Rerum Natura_ And Hui-Neng’S _Platform Sutra_, Isaac Raymond

Honors Theses

Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and Hui-neng’s Platform Sutra have never been compared in a scholarly context; as such, this paper builds a new bridge between Western and Eastern philosophical literature, examining language, narrative, ethics, teleology, theology, and departures from orthodox philosophies in order to synthesize a clear and complete view of the two works in dialogue. De Rerum Natura, or On the Nature of Things, is a first-century BC epic poem composed in Latin by Titus Lucretius Carus which explains Epicurean philosophy in great detail through verse. The Platform Sutra is an eighth-century AD Chinese Zen (Ch’an) Buddhist sermon, …

Accounting For The Gift: Theology And Ethics In Accounting, Daniel Sebastian

Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations

Accounting is often assumed to be a neutral presentation of the facts of economic activities and actions. Its double-entry system means that it is always in balance and comports to the rigor of mathematical formulas, and it is taken to be a matter of empirical counting that lends it certainty as well. The dissertation argues that this description of accounting is inadequate. Accounting is better seen as a political tool and technology for producing trust that can help resolve social conflicts. As such, accounting is not value-neutral but carries within it a particular sociality that has moral implications. These moral …