Philosophy of Language Commons^™

Elgin's "Native Tongue": A "Me Too" Universe?, Amir Barati

Tête à Tête: Journal of Francophone Studies

Suzette Haden Elgin’s novel Native Tongue (1984) provides a fascinating critique of the ideologies inscribed into patriarchal language and evokes an extremely valuable linguistic and political awareness. This article will examine the liability of the ways the novel revolts against the patriarchal society via the introduction of a gynocentric linguistic intervention. I claim, Elgin’s novel showcases an invaluable instance of how it is possible for women to revolt against the pillars of patriarchy through manipulations at the gestalt and schematic level of language and most specifically, the bodily metaphoric quality of the English. This proposed transformation of the schematic and …

Candles, Stoners, Emotions, Oh My!, Ashley Gruca

Emerging Writers

This paper focuses on the topic of our language constantly changing while using the word “lit” to show this. Analysis of examples from personal experience like yearbook signings as well as lyrics from Travis Scott songs demonstrate how a word's meaning can shift depending on its generational context.

A Bad Time To Name Your Pet: Pet Names In The Age Of Witches, Evan Velez

Emerging Writers

In early America, there were many strange superstitions about witches. Colonists looked for all sorts of forms of witchcraft “evidence”. According to The Penguin Book of Witches, the nature of pet names may have served as an unconscious form of evidence (Howe 239). While the author thought of this suggestion as a form of social logic, this essay investigates it as a phenomenon of language. Pet names had a key role in influencing negative feelings towards animals labeled as “familiars.” This affected colonists’ perceptions of an animal, and resulted in the familiar eventually becoming a hated “pet.”

Heart Hurts From Higging, Nia Pettway

Emerging Writers

This essay examines an emotion that does not have a word and offers a neologism to apply. "Higgs," the neologism in question, defines a feeling of nostalgia for the present that blends itself with a fear of moving into the future. With the word having such a timeless, yet relevant application, this essay takes readers through its creation, examples in contemporary media, as well as how implementation of the word may help users better understand the emotion it describes.

Facultas Marginem: Assessing Disability Data And Public Aau Universities’ Affirmative Action Plans For Systemic Barriers Facing Faculty With Disabilities, Joseph Carlton Barry

Theses and Dissertations--Education Sciences

This dissertation contributes to education equity scholarship produced by academics seeking to develop understandings of disability, Persons with Disabilities (PWD), and how both are situated amongst faculty in institutions of higher education. As such, this dissertation centers on a study of public US universities belonging to the Association of American Universities (AAU). This study looks for institutional level associations between respective rates by which college and university faculty with disabilities (FWD) are employed, certain aspects of disability policy drawn from each institution’s 2020 Affirmative Action Plans (AAP), and various other instances of empirical disability data (EDD).

While this study contributes …

Parallels Of Quantum Mechanics And Mahāyāna Buddhist Philosophy: An Argument For Relational Quantum Mechanics, Axel I. Palapa

CMC Senior Theses

Western orthodoxy philosophy is based on the principle of noncontradiction and thus, the philosophy of science is as well. The most prominent interpretations of quantum mechanics, since its inception, have followed this principle. In this paper, two quantum phenomena, the Observer Problem (measurement problem) and quantum entanglement will be analyzed from a Mahayana Buddhism ontological perspective. I will analyze the mathematical and philosophical arguments proposed by Graham Priest and Jay Garfield, based on dialethism, pertaining to Nagarjuna and the Net of Indra. Demonstrating the parallels and adaptability of the arguments to further the philosophical groundwork for Carlo Reveille’s Relational Quantum …

Notas Para Una Teoría Glotopolítica, José Del Valle

Publications and Research

En este artículo se define la glotopolítica como perspectiva intelectual y se identifican sus posiciones teóricas en relación con el lenguaje. Esta definición, se afirma, supone una apuesta interdisciplinaria en la que la sociolingüística crítica busca activamente establecer relaciones dialógicas con disciplinas tales como la antropología, la filosofía, la historiografía o la sociología. En este sentido, el artículo aborda la visión del lenguaje del crítico literario y cultural galés Raymond Williams, y de las posibilidades metodológicas y teóricas que ofrece su concepto de palabras clave.

This article discusses the theoretical underpinnings of glottopolitical studies, defined as an intellectual perspective. Such …

Black Codes Re-Envisioned: The Dred Scott Majority Opinion As An Antiblack Performative Speech Act., Tiffany Dillard-Knox

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation is a discursive analysis of the decision in the Dred Scott v Sandford, 1857 case written by Chief Justice Roger Taney. It begins with an overview of the literature on performative speech acts, focusing on the aspects of performatives that relate to Louis Miron and Jonathan Xavier Inda’s thesis that race is a performative speech act. Breaking from their use of race as the analytic, this analysis is situated within a black/nonblack paradigm. This provides a framework that focuses on the unique ways in which the discourse of the text enacts, accumulates and renders blackness fungible. The …

Troubles With Rey's Linguistic Eliminativism, Robert Stainton, Christopher Viger

Philosophy Publications

We focus on Folieism, Rey’s brand of Eliminativism about languages, according to which words, sentences, phonemes, and such, and consequently languages, do not exist; they are intentional inexistents, on par with unicorns, that speakers, under an ineluctable illusion, mistake as real. We present a simplified reconstruction of his argument, challenge what we take to be its presuppositions, and argue that its conclusion has unwanted social/ethical consequences and construes linguistics writ large in a strange light, as a kind of pretense, leading us to reject Folieism.

The Role Of The Reader Is To Fallow: Responding To The Negative Reception Of Paul Verhoeven’S Film Adaptation Of Starship Troopers, Julian Meyerstrom

Undergraduate Research Symposium

Robert A. Keinlein’s science fiction novel Starship Troopers (1959), and its film adaption of the same title directed by Paul Verhoeven (1997), received mixed critical reactions. Both pieces came across as supporting fascistic ideals to most critics upon release, despite the two creators opposing political and moral beliefs. Using Louise Rosenblatt's reader response theory as a framework for analyzing both the novel and film adaptation, this paper postulates the film adaptation fails to deliver an accurate critique of the novel by placing the burden of moral knowledge on the audience. Keinlein’s novel guides the reader into his moral sensibilities, whereas …

Essays On Communication, Shawn M. Simpson

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

One of the central issues of contemporary philosophy and biology is the nature of communication. Early accounts of communication tended to focus on just one side of the communicative divide – the speaker side or the receiver side – and took as their starting point the case of human language. Animal communication, historically, was largely treated as a special case. Now things are different. Now it appears we might have a model that makes sense of sign use in both the human and animal realms and brings together both sides of the signaling divide. It’s still to be seen, however, …

Some Notes On Birds: Language And Attention In The Age Of Social Media, Aimee Lamoureux

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Technology, social media, and its affiliated distractions are now an ever-present part of our daily lives. Attention is a commodity, one which tech companies value because it delivers them bigger and bigger profits. Their products are intentionally designed to be additive, to demand more and more of our time and attention throughout our day. However, attention is not simply a commodity, but the way in which we connect with the external world and attend to our everyday experience. The world that we create in the mind is the world that ends up forming the reality of our everyday lives. Complex …

Forms Of Life And Comprehension Analysis And Application Of Concepts From The Philosophical Investigations, Vincent Graziano

Philosophy ETDs

In this paper I have examined the notion of ‘forms of life’ against the concept of ‘comprehension’. Particular attention was given to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I first defend my view that comprehension is made possible by forms of life; or, that forms of life condition our comprehension. A comprehension-event is one which will always occur in a language-game, and is structured by grammar. After I defend my position, I apply this view to three canonical philosophical issues: conceptual universals or how we see one when there are many, the mind-body gap or the difficulty of unifying our ideas about the …

A Unifying Pluralist Account Of Truth And The Case Of Chinese Philosophy Examined From The Cross-Tradition Engaging Vantage Point: Reply To Chenyang Li, Bo Mou

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Truth In Chinese Philosophy: A Commentary On Bo Mou’S Semantic-Truth Approaches In Chinese Philosophy, Chenyang Li

Comparative Philosophy

No abstract provided.

Critical Hermeneutics And The Counter Narrative Of Ledger Art, Katie Fuller

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

Too often historical artworks in schools, textbooks, cultural institutions, and public spaces share a narrative that bolsters white-centered histories, but when an historical artwork is studied as text it creates room for multiple perspectives (Newfield, 2011) expanding the narrative to include subjugated histories. Looking at art through the philosophy of hermeneutics opens up questions and conflicts that arise within texts based on interpretations of those texts (Leonardo, 2003). This paper will apply the philosophy of hermeneutics to critique historical memory, and it will present ledger art as a visual text and counter narrative to dominant white narratives. Ledger art emerged …

Fighting Words: Slurs, Semantics, And The Law, Richard Stillman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Oppressive slurs like the n-word are fighting words par excellence. Their power to incite conflict and inflict emotional injury is unmatched by that of other, more commonplace insults. But what is it that makes oppressive slurs such potent verbal weapons? A commonplace view among both philosophers and legal theorists is that slurs make such potent insults because their uses convey extremely offensive, bigoted attitudes. This dissertation argues that this view is mistaken, and that its falsity has important implications for hate speech jurisprudence. I argue that, to grasp what makes slurs such potent verbal weapons, we ought conceive …

Translation In And Of Philosophy, Hussein Barrada

Theses and Dissertations

Paul Ricoeur in his essay The Paradigm of Translation, presents an understanding of translation that is found between two positions that are irreconcilable. These two positions represent on the one hand, the difference that exists between languages and on the other hand, the common ground that languages must have for them to be translatable into one another. Following Ricoeur’s paradigm, the thesis will aim to unpack an understanding of translation as a tension that occurs between its theoretical impossibility and the reality of its everyday practice. The theoretical impossibility of translation lies in the fact that for one language …

Language As The Medium: A Literature Review. Harnessing The Prolific Power Of Dramatic Language As A Therapeutic Tool In Drama Therapy, Edward Freeman

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Language in and of the theatre, with its palate of variegated writing styles and playwrights from throughout time, has the potential to be harnessed, focused, and systematized for use as a therapeutic tool within drama therapy – the field’s artistic medium. Drama therapy could benefit from having a specific medium germane to its artform which has the potential to provide practitioners with a common resource and means of communication, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment planning, as well as align the field with other creative arts therapies. Language encompasses all forms of human communication – speaking, writing, signing, gesturing, expressing facially – …

The Feeling Of Foam & Other Essays, Ryan Erickson

Graduate School of Art Theses

I create conceptual drawings, collages, sculptures, and installations to humorously destabilize and ultimately question how human language, formal methodologies, and social institutions function. While seemingly embracing an aesthetic of rationality, I undermine it with absurdity. In my work, I take a fundamentally dialectical position by skewering the rational to the illogical as neither can exist without the other.

Approaches To Narrative Instruction For Second Language Learners, Mathew Peters

MA TESOL Collection

Narratives have reemerged as a dominant form of rhetoric over the last fifty years. This dominant use of narrative discourse has only increased with the rise of social media. Walther Fisher (1987) proposed the narrative paradigm as a unifying theory of human communication. His major claim is that people are inherently storytellers and that people use a narrative rationality and a logic of good reasons to inform their beliefs, values, and actions. This paper utilizes his theories, along with recent findings in neuroscience, to establish an argument for greater inclusion of narratives into second language teaching. Narratives can have a …

Rhetoric And Philosophy Of Communication In Jorge Luis Borges' Metaphysical Obsession With Time, Aurora M. Pinto

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project begins with the assumption that through storytelling we humans make sense of the world around us. Language and communication are powerful in defining who we are and allowing individuals to “become a self” (Taylor The Language 318). Drawing from Schrag, I argue that rhetoric is inextricably linked to discourse but is also situated beyond its classical persuasive function. Rhetoric evokes a response from the other, based on reflection and deliberation. Since that other might be a reader of texts of fiction, there is a rhetorical connection to interpretation that situates literature as an exemplar of communicative engagement.

This …

On Narrative Approaches To Conspiracy Theory, John Hydrisko

Honors Theses

This thesis handles narrative approaches to conspiracy theory. It provides an overview of conspiracy theory and narrative before affirming a relationship between the two. It then introduces Fenster’s work on conspiracy narrative before engaging with the considerations therein. After discussing the tradition of visualizing narrative structure, it applies these practices to conspiracy narrative. This application allows for a discussion of recent innovations within conspiracy narrative. By using the QAnon as a case study, the paper investigates the emergence of protagonism and non-narrativism within the genre. Ultimately, this investigation suggests that contemporary conspiracy narrative is both better suited to the modern …

Folklore, Reflecting And Influencing Culture, Sumlin Pate

Classical Conversations

Folklore is a unique form of storytelling that is culturally specific. This thesis argues that folklore has a dual role as it reflects a given culture and also actively shapes culture. To support this argument, opinions of various writers and fol klorists are considered as well as folk ideas from various societies. Two folktales are taken from two different countries Saudi Arabia and Estonia. In these folktales three things are considered: the qualities of the characters, the overall themes, and the morals of the folktale. This is then compared to the modern society of each culture, to see if these …

Quasi-Dogwhistles: A Case Study Of Creating Meaning, Clyde Lemoine

Senior Theses

In 2017, a group of users on the website 4chan attempted to establish a new meaning of the common “OK” hand gesture. Claiming the sign meant “white power” the intention of this act was to trick left-leaning internet users and the media that an innocuous sign was racist, hence turning everyone unaware against them. A common narrative surrounding the situation was that the new meaning for the gesture as established by this group was a “hoax”. This situation serves as an interesting case study into understanding how we mean things by the use of signs. I will argue that the …

The Surreal Voice In Milan's Itinerant Poetics: Delio Tessa To Franco Loi, Jason Collins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Over the course of Italy’s linguistic history, dialect literature has evolved a s a genre unto itself. The scope of research presented in this study examines the question of dialect literature as a valid genre which bears lines of demarcation that would assign it the distinction of genre. Research reveals that in fact the simple election of a language, or dialect, does not itself constitute a genre; moreover, most dialect literature bears characteristics that would neatly place it in another genre.

To examine this verity, this research compares two dialect poets who employ Milanese as a means of transmission …

Disappearing Chairs And Related Matters: A Visual Essay For Wittgenstein’S Philosophical Investigations (Section 80), Michael R. Hill

Department of Sociology: Faculty Publications

Are there rules capturing the meaning of all possible uses (now, past, and future) of the word “chair”? Ludwig Wittgenstein raised this issue in Section 80 of the Philosophical Investigations where he stated: “I say, ‘There is a chair over there’”. Does “chair” in his utterance mean anything? For myself, this question can be approached autobiographically and chronologically. As a youngster, my earliest understanding of “chair” is reflected in the graphic illustration from a Dick and Jane reader (Figure 1) with re-imagined dialog: “This is a chair”. I understood a chair to be a human-made object — usually constructed from …

Critical Notice Of Words And Contents, Robert Stainton, Arthur Sullivan

Philosophy Publications

Full review of Richard Vallee's 2018 book Words and Thoughts. The article focuses on the explication and critique of John Perry's "pluri-propositional" or "reflexive referential" view, which Vallee applies to a range of context sensitive expressions.

Linguistic Prescriptivism, Alex Barber, Robert Stainton

Philosophy Publications

No abstract provided.

Depicting Absence: Thematic And Stylistic Paradoxes Of Representation In Visual And Literary Imagery, Alexandra Irimia

Languages and Cultures Publications

The article draws up an inventory of, and compares strategies for, the theoretical and critical treatment of the absence–presence interplay at stake in the literary and visual representations of absence. This brings to our attention a multiplicity of heterogeneous and, to a greater or lesser degree, marginal signify-ing phenomena that have in common patterns of disrupting and deviating from the standard conventions of creating and conveying meaning through figures of absence. Lacking a name for these disparate yet similar instances where meaning is created from empty signifiers, we have chosen to call them figural voids. This attempt to produce a …