Ethics and Aesthetics : Intersections in Iris Murdoch's Philosophy

The study addresses the question concerning the relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. The main argument is that Murdoch s philosophy cannot be accurately understood without an understanding of the relationship she sees between the aesthetic experience and morality. Reading Murdoch s philosophy with this relationship in mind shows that it must be considered as a relevant alternative to the main forms of aesthetic-ethical theories. The study consists of seven previously published articles and a summary. It shows that Murdoch belongs to a tradition of philosophers who seek to broaden the scope of ethics by reference to aesthetic value and aesthetic experience. She sees an attitude responsible for aesthetic experiences as relevant for morality. However, she does not collapse morality into aesthetic experience. The two meet on the level of the subject s attitude towards its object, but there is a distinction between the experiences that accompany the attitudes. Aesthetic experiences can function as a clue to morals in that they present in a pleasing manner moral truths which otherwise might be psychologically too difficult to face. Murdoch equates the aesthetic attitude with virtuous love characterized by unselfish attention to its object. The primary object of such love is in Murdoch s account another human individual in her particularity. She compares the recognition of the other person as a particular existence to the experience of the Kantian sublime and offers her own version of the true sublime which is the experience of awe in the face of the infinity of the task of understanding others. One of the most central claims in Murdoch s philosophy is that human consciousness is evaluatively structured. This claim challenges the distinction between facts and values which has had an immense influence on modern moral philosophy. One argument with which Murdoch supports her claim is the nature of great literature. According to her, the standard of greatness in literature is the authors awareness of the independent existence of individuals in the particularity of their evaluative consciousnesses. The analysis of the standard of greatness in literature is also Murdoch s only argument for the claim that the primary object of the loving unselfish attention is the other particular individual. She is convinced that great literature reveals a deep truth about the human condition with its capacity to capture the particular. Abstract philo¬sophical discourse cannot compete with this capacity but it should take truths revealed by literature seriously in its theorising. Recognising this as Murdoch s stand on the question of the relation between philosophy and literature as forms of human discourse settles whether she is part of what has been called philosophy s turn to literature. The answer is yes.

The Restless Love of Thinking : The Concept Liebe in Hegel's Philosophy

The German philosopher G.W.F.Hegel (1770–1831) is best known for his idealistic system philosophy, his concept of spirit [Geist] and for his dictum that the existing and the rational overlap. This thesis offers a new perspective: it examines the working of the concept ‘love’ in Hegel’s philosophy by looking at the contexts and function he puts it to, from his earliest writings to the very last lectures he gave. The starting point of the inquiry is that he applied the concept Liebe to different contexts for different purposes, but each time to provide an answer to a specific philosophical problem. His formulation, reformulation and use of ‘love’ give possible solutions to problems the solving of which was crucial to the development of his thought as a whole. The study is divided into three parts, each analysing the different problems and solutions to which Hegel applied the concept of love. The first part, "Love, morality and ethical life", examines these interconnected themes in Hegel’s early work. The main questions he addressed during this period concerned how to unite Kant’s philosophy and the Greek ideal of the good life. In this context, the concept ‘love’ did three things. First, it served to formulate his grounding idea of the relation between unity and difference, or the manifold. Secondly, it was the key to his attempt to base an ideal folk religion on Christianity interpreted as a religion of love. Finally, it provided the means to criticise Kant’s moral philosophy. The question of the moral value of love helped Hegel to break away from Kant’s thought and develop his own theory about love and ethical life. The second part of the study, "Love and the political realm", considers the way 'Liebe' functions in connection with questions concerning the community and political life in Hegel’s work. In addition to questioning the universal applicability of the concept of recognition as a key to his theory of social relations, the chapters focus on gender politics and the way he conceptualised the gender category ‘woman’ through the concept ‘love’. Another line of inquiry is the way the figure of Antigone was used to conceptualise the differentiated spheres of action for men and women, and the part ‘love’ played in Hegel’s description of Antigone’s motives. Thirdly, Hegel’s analogy of the family and the state and the way ‘love’ functions in an attempt to promote understanding of the relation between citizens and the state are examined. The third and final part of the study, "Love as absolute spirit", focuses on ‘love’ within Hegel’s systemic thought and the way he continued to characterise Geist through the language of Liebe up until and including his very last works. It is shown how Liebe functions in his hierarchical organisation of the domains of art, religion and philosophy, and how both art and religion end up in similar structural positions with regard to philosophy. One recurrent theme in the third part is Hegel’s complex relation to Romantic thought. Another line of investigation is how he reconstructed Christianity as a religion of love in his mature work. In striking contrast to his early thought, in his last works Hegel introduced a new concept of love that incorporated negativity, and that could also function as the root of political action.

Three-year-olds are sensitive to semantic prominence during online language comprehension

Recent evidence from adult pronoun comprehension suggests that semantic factors such as verb transitivity affect referent salience and thereby anap- hora resolution. We tested whether the same semantic factors influence pronoun comprehension in young children. In a visual world study, 3-year- olds heard stories that began with a sentence containing either a high or a low transitivity verb. Looking behaviour to pictures depicting the subject and object of this sentence was recorded as children listened to a subsequent sentence containing a pronoun. Children showed a stronger preference to look to the subject as opposed to the object antecedent in the low transitivity condition. In addition there were general preferences (1) to look to the subject in both conditions and (2) to look more at both potential antecedents in the high transitivity condition. This suggests that children, like adults, are affected by semantic factors, specifically semantic prominence, when interpreting anaphoric pronouns.

Language Influence in Services: Perceived Importance of Native Language Use in Service Encounters

A defining characteristic of most service encounters is that they are strongly influenced by interactions in which both the consumer and the service personnel are playing integral roles. Such is the importance of this interaction that it has even been argued that for the consumer, these encounters are in fact the service. Given this, it is not surprising that interactions involving communication and customer participation in the service encounters have received considerable attention within the field of services marketing. Much of the research on interactions and communication in services, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer and the service personnel by definition are perfectly able to interact and communicate effortlessly with each other. Such communication would require a common language, and in order to be able to take this for granted the market would need to be fairly homogenous. The homogenous country, however, and with it the homogenous market, would appear to be gone. It is estimated that more than half the consumers in the world are already speaking more than one language. For a company entering a new market, language can be a major barrier that firms may underestimate, and understanding language influence across different markets is important for international companies. The service literature has taken a common language between companies and consumers for granted but this is not matched by the realities on the ground in many markets. Owing to the communicational and interaction-oriented nature of services, the lack of a common language between the consumer and the service provider is a situation that could cause problems. A gap exists in the service theory, consisting of a lack of knowledge concerning how language influences consumers in service encounters. By addressing this gap, the thesis contributes to an increased understanding of service theory and provides a better practical understanding for service companies of the importance of native language use for consumers. The thesis consists of four essays. Essay one is conceptual and addresses how sociolinguistic research can be beneficial for understanding consumer language preferences. Essay two empirically shows how the influence of language varies depending on the nature of the service, essay three shows that there is a significant difference in language preferences between female and male consumers while essay four empirically compares consumer language preferences in Canada and Finland, finding strong similarities but also indications of difference in the motives for preferring native language use. The introduction of the thesis outlines the existence of a research gap within the service literature, a gap consisting of the lack of research into how native language use may influence consumers in service encounters. In addition, it is described why this gap is of importance to services and why its importance is growing. Building on this situation, the purpose of the thesis is to establish the existence of language influence in service encounters and to extend the knowledge of how language influences consumers on multilingual markets.

Despairing Justice and the Ethics of Legal Interpretation

This study discusses legal interpretation. The question is how legal texts, for instance laws, statutes and regulations, can and do have meaning. Language makes interpretation difficult as it holds no definite meanings. When the theoretical connection between semantics and legal meaning is loosened and we realise that language cannot be a means of justifying legal decisions, the responsibility inherent in legal interpretation can be seen in full. We are thus compelled to search for ways to analyse this responsibility. The main argument of the book is that the responsibility of legal interpretation contains a responsibility towards the text that is interpreted (and through the mediation of the text also towards the legal system), but not only this. It is not simply a responsibility to read and read well, but it transcends on a broader scale. It includes responsibility for the effects of the interpretation in a particular situation and with regard to the people whose case is decided. Ultimately, it is a responsibility to do justice. These two aspects of responsibility are conceptualised here as the two dimensions of the ethics of legal interpretation: the textual and the situational. The basic conception of language presented here is provided by Ludwig Wittgenstein s later philosophy, but the argument is not committed to only one philosophical tradition. Wittgenstein can be counterpointed in interesting ways by Jacques Derrida s ideas on language and meaning. Derrida s work also functions as a contrast to hermeneutic theories. It is argued that the seed to an answer to the question of meaning lies in the inter-personal and situated activity of interpretation and communication, an idea that can be discerned in different ways in the works of Wittgenstein, Derrida and Hans-Georg Gadamer. This way the question of meaning naturally leads us to think about ethics, which is approached here through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. His thinking, focusing on topics such as otherness, friendship and hospitality, provides possibilities for answering some of the questions posed in this book. However, at the same time we move inside a normativity where ethics and politics come together in many ways. The responsibility of legal interpretation is connected to the political and this has to be acknowledged lest we forget that law always implies force. But it is argued here that the political can be explored in positive terms as it does not have to mean only power or violence.

Archaeology and authenticity

In this master s thesis, I have discussed the question of authenticity in postprocessual archaeology. Modern archaeology is a product of the modern world, and postprocessual archaeology in turn is strongly influenced by postmodernism. The way authenticity has been understood in processual archaeology is largely dictated by the modern condition. The understanding of authenticity in postprocessual archaeology, however, rests on notions of simulation and metaphor. It has been argued by postprocessual archaeologists that the past can be experienced by metaphor, and that the relationship between now and then is of a metaphorical kind. In postprocessual archaeology, authenticity has been said to be contextual. This view has been based on a contextualist understanding of the meanings of language and metaphor. I argue that, besides being based on metaphor, authenticity is a conventional attribute based on habits of acting, which in turn have their basis in the material world and the materiality of objects. Authenticity is material meaning, and that meaning can be found out by studying the objects as signs in a chain of signification called semiosis. Authenticity therefore is semiosis.

Unsupervised training for mandarin broadcast news and conversation transcription

A significant cost in obtaining acoustic training data is the generation of accurate transcriptions. For some sources close-caption data is available. This allows the use of lightly-supervised training techniques. However, for some sources and languages close-caption is not available. In these cases unsupervised training techniques must be used. This paper examines the use of unsupervised techniques for discriminative training. In unsupervised training automatic transcriptions from a recognition system are used for training. As these transcriptions may be errorful data selection may be useful. Two forms of selection are described, one to remove non-target language shows, the other to remove segments with low confidence. Experiments were carried out on a Mandarin transcriptions task. Two types of test data were considered, Broadcast News (BN) and Broadcast Conversations (BC). Results show that the gains from unsupervised discriminative training are highly dependent on the accuracy of the automatic transcriptions. © 2007 IEEE.

Internationalisation, multilingualism and English-medium instruction: the teacher's perspective

[EN]In the newEuropean higher education space, Universities in Europe are exhorted to cultivate and develop multilingualism. The European Commission’s 2004–2006 action plan for promoting language learning and diversity speaks of the need to build an environment which is favourable to languages. Yet reality indicates that it is English which reigns supreme and has become the main foreign language used as means of instruction at European universities. Internationalisation has played a key role in this process, becoming one of the main drivers of the linguistic hegemony exerted by English. In this paper we examine the opinions of teaching staff involved in English-medium instruction, from pedagogical ecologyof-language and personal viewpoints. Data were gathered using group discussion. The study was conducted at a multilingual Spanish university where majority (Spanish), minority (Basque) and foreign (English) languages coexist, resulting in some unavoidable linguistic strains. The implications for English-medium instruction are discussed at the end of this paper.

Interpretações de linguagens artísticas em Gerd Bornheim

Este estudo propõe uma leitura histórico-cultural das interpretações de Gerd Bornheim (1929-2002), destacando a temática da linguagem, sobretudo das linguagens artísticas. A partir dessas expressões, as colocações críticas de Bornheim a respeito da estética e filosofia da arte apresentam um panorama dos questionamentos. Nesse sentido, são notáveis em seus trabalhos as reflexões sobre o teatro e a música. A linguagem teatral permite o acesso às outras atividades artísticas (poesia, música, artes plásticas, cinema) de forma livre e aberta. A linguagem musical, em consonância com a teatral, corrobora a pesquisa de Bornheim, que observou o processo criativo, a comunicação, o papel da interpretação (advento da crítica) e as rupturas nas poéticas contemporâneas. Tal itinerário sublinha a pesquisa que Bornheim realizou na França nas décadas de 1950 e 1960-70. O estímulo dessa atmosfera, marcada pelo diálogo entre filosofia, ciências sociais, psicologia, psicanálise, história, antropologia, linguística, comunicação, teatro e música foi decisivo para ele. Esses pontos são importantes para a apreensão do tema da linguagem e sua ambiência histórica, na qual Bornheim revela outras perspectivas de pesquisa. O pano de fundo é a crise da metafísica e os novos parâmetros para se pensar a dialética, a teoria e a prática. O diagnóstico de tal crise estende-se também à estética. Por conseguinte, o entendimento das ideias de Bornheim conduz aos temas da diferença e alteridade na contemporaneidade. Com isso, persegue-se um percurso temático que aborda: a linguagem e o problema da comunicação a partir da ligação das interpretações de Bornheim com as de Sartre e Merleau-Ponty. Além disso, o surgimento da crítica e os questionamentos da normatividade ética e estética levam à discussão das motivações coincidentes entre artes e ciências. Por fim, a linguagem musical enfatiza ainda o processo de transformação da subjetividade, que propicia uma percepção mais ampla das expressões artísticas e culturais.

The role of syllables in sign language production

The aim of the present study was to investigate the functional role of syllables in sign language and how the different phonological combinations influence sign production. Moreover, the influence of age of acquisition was evaluated. Deaf signers (native and non-native) of Catalan Signed Language (LSC) were asked in a picture-sign interference task to sign picture names while ignoring distractor-signs with which they shared two phonological parameters (out of three of the main sign parameters: Location, Movement, and Handshape). The results revealed a different impact of the three phonological combinations. While no effect was observed for the phonological combination Handshape-Location, the combination Handshape-Movement slowed down signing latencies, but only in the non-native group. A facilitatory effect was observed for both groups when pictures and distractors shared Location-Movement. Importantly, linguistic models have considered this phonological combination to be a privileged unit in the composition of signs, as syllables are in spoken languages. Thus, our results support the functional role of syllable units during phonological articulation in sign language production.

Teoria geral da gramaticalização: introdução ao jogo e a suas regras

Esta tese de doutorado parte da perspectiva inicial de que a gramaticalização se restringe a tratado sobre itens lexicais ou discursivos que se tornam itens gramaticais (o que a enquadraria dentro da Teoria da Variação, inserta esta dentro da Pesquisa Sociolinguística), mas segue em direção a um salto epistemológico que remodele aquela perspectiva, ampliando-a a patamar do qual ela pode ser observada como teoria autônoma, investigativa de fenômenos limítrofes e nem sempre discretos entre linguagem e língua, discurso e texto, descrição e prescrição, oralidade e escrita, léxico e gramática. Desse modo, propugna-se pela visão epistemológica do tema, conduzido, até aqui, de modo puramente ontológico, circunscrito a um (e apenas um) dos muitos espectros que se podem alcançar com a aludida ampliação àquele que vem sendo perquirido como tratado, porém que, segundo se pretende demonstrar, pode e deve ser expandido à malha de uma teoria geral, qual seja a Teoria Geral da Gramaticalização: trata-se, aqui, de seu objetivo geral. Para esse propósito, vale-se a tese de filósofos da linguagem que atuaram sobre essa faculdade ou capacidade humana de forma direta ou indireta desde os seus primórdios ocidentais (como Sócrates, Platão e Aristóteles), passando pelos pensadores mais incisivamente preocupados com os aspectos cognitivos e interativos da linguagem e da língua (como Hegel, Husserl, Saussure, Sapir, Bloomfield, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Chomsky, Labov, Charaudeau, Maingueneau, Ducrot, Coseriu), além de ser necessária a incursão à Gramaticografia mais estrita (como a empreendida por Dionísio da Trácia, Varrão, Arnault e Lancelot, Nebrija, Jerônimo Soares Barbosa, Eduardo Carlos Pereira, Said Ali, Bechara), e, naturalmente, a contribuição filosófica dos pesquisadores sobre a gramaticalização (como Meillet, Vendryès, Bréal, Kurilowicz, Traugott, Heine, Hopper, Lehmann). Uma vez que se tenha mostrado ser verossímil aceitar-se a gramaticalização como teoria autônoma, esta tese pretende legar-lhe o papel instrumental de metodologia auxiliar a muitas entre as que ora se empreendem quando se trata de pesquisas em campos cuja ocupação é a linguagem e a língua: trata-se, aqui, de seu objetivo específico. Para essa duplicidade de metas ou objetivos, será necessário compreender conceitos, categorias e protótipos oriundos da Filosofia da Ciência (Epistemologia), do contraste entre ciências da linguagem e outros ramos do saber, da imersão em Gramaticologia e Gramaticografia (e, em alguns aspectos, em Gramatização e Gramatologia) referentes à Língua Portuguesa, da defesa, enfim, de que o ensino da Gramática Formal (ou Normativa) do idioma privilegia a acepção reflexiva e ativa (plena) dos usos ou atos a que a linguagem só pode chegar por meio do domínio da língua em toda a sua tessitura epistemológica, que gera comunicação e expressividade, raciocínio e emotividade, indo da concretude do discurso ou da oralidade à abstração da entidade pouco ou nada material, que, por sua vez, é mais nitidamente representada pela escrita, seu estágio por assim dizer de forma ainda mais pura, conquanto não excludente da substancialidade com que dialoga de modo incessante no seu constante e dialético passado-futuro ou diversidade-homogeneidade (tese e antítese) de onde emerge o seu presente ou a sua unidade (síntese)

Phone-level pronunciation scoring and assessment for interactive language learning

This paper investigates a method of automatic pronunciation scoring for use in computer-assisted language learning (CALL) systems. The method utilizes a likelihood-based `Goodness of Pronunciation' (GOP) measure which is extended to include individual thresholds for each phone based on both averaged native confidence scores and on rejection statistics provided by human judges. Further improvements are obtained by incorporating models of the subject's native language and by augmenting the recognition networks to include expected pronunciation errors. The various GOP measures are assessed using a specially recorded database of non-native speakers which has been annotated to mark phone-level pronunciation errors. Since pronunciation assessment is highly subjective, a set of four performance measures has been designed, each of them measuring different aspects of how well computer-derived phone-level scores agree with human scores. These performance measures are used to cross-validate the reference annotations and to assess the basic GOP algorithm and its refinements. The experimental results suggest that a likelihood-based pronunciation scoring metric can achieve usable performance, especially after applying the various enhancements.