10,453 research outputs found

    Group assertion and group silencing

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    Jennifer Lackey (2018) has developed an account of the primary form of group assertion, according to which groups assert when a suitably authorized spokesperson speaks for the group. In this paper I pose a challenge for Lackey's account, arguing that her account obscures the phenomenon of group silencing. This is because, in contrast to alternative approaches that view assertions (and speech acts generally) as social acts, Lackey's account implies that speakers can successfully assert regardless of how their utterances are taken up by their audiences. What reflection on group silencing shows us, I argue, is that an adequate account of group assertion needs to find a place for audience uptake

    Popular Constitutionalism and the Rule of Recognition: Whose Practices Ground U.S. Law?

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    The law within each legal system is a function of the practices of some social group. In short, law is a kind of socially grounded norm. H.L.A Hart famously developed this view in his book, The Concept of Law, by arguing that law derives from a social rule, the so-called “rule of recognition.” But the proposition that social facts play a foundational role in producing law is a point of consensus for all modern jurisprudents in the Anglo-American tradition: not just Hart and his followers in the positivist school, most prominently Joseph Raz and Jules Coleman, but also the anti-positivist Ronald Dworkin, who argues that law necessarily synthesizes moral considerations with social facts. But which group’s practices ground each legal system? In particular, which group’s practices undergird U.S. law? Positivists since Hart have universally pointed to either officials or judges as the “recognitional community” (my term): the group such that its rules, conventions, cooperative activities, or practices in some other sense are the social facts from which the law of a given legal system derives. So Hart and all other positivists would identify either U.S. officials or U.S. judges as the recognitional community for U.S. law. This Article grapples with the tension between the positivist’s official- or judge-centered account of the recognitional community and the “popular constitutionalism” now so widely defended by constitutional scholars such as Larry Kramer, Robert Post, Reva Siegel, Mark Tushnet, Jeremy Waldron, and many others. Surely the popular constitutionalist would want to claim that U.S. citizens, not judges or officials, are the recognitional community for U.S. law. I term this position “deep popular constitutionalism.” Indeed, it turns out that Dworkin’s account of law, in its ambition to generate associative moral obligations for the citizenry as a whole, implies deep popular constitutionalism. Here there is a disagreement, hitherto unnoticed, between Dworkin and the positivists. My solution to this disagreement – to the debate between deep popular constitutionalists and deep official or judicial supremacists -- is to dissolve it by providing a group-relative account of law. Social norms, such as norms of dress or eating, are clearly group-relative. A particular dressing or eating behavior may be socially appropriate relative to one group’s norms, yet socially inappropriate relative to another’s. This Article extends the group-relative view from social norms to law itself, with a particular focus on U.S. law and constitutionalism. Part I surveys the jurisprudential literature. It shows how Hart and successor positivists identify the rule of recognition as a social practice engaged in by officials or some subset of officials (judges), rather than citizens generally, and argues that Dworkin by contrast sees the citizenry as a whole as his recognitional community. Parts II and III defend a group-relative account of law. Part II argues, with reference to the U.S. experience, that multiple groups can simultaneously instantiate the kind of social fact that undergirds law, be it a convention, a social norm, a “shared cooperative activity” (SCA), or something else. At many points in U.S. constitutional history, multiple official or citizen groups, defined along departmental, partisan, regional, state-federal, religious, or other lines, have accepted competing rules of recognition for U.S. law. Part III argues that “law” functions, primarily, as either an explanatory or a normative construct, and that insisting on a single recognitional community for each legal system would be arbitrary, both for explanatory purposes and for normative purposes. Part IV considers the many implications of the group-relative account for U.S. constitutional theory – in particular, for popular constitutionalism

    Conversational functions of ‘I know’, ‘you know’ and ‘we know’ in collaborative writing of primary school children

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    This paper discusses how primary school students, who are writing together in the context of inquiry learning, explicitly orient to knowing of oneself and others within the peer group. Using Conversation Analysis, we disclose the conversational functions of assertions holding ‘I know’, ‘you know’ and ‘we know’. First, students position themselves as knowledgeable, to (i) express a preannouncement of a proposal, (ii) respond to a request for information and (iii) reinforce an assertion with use of an evidential. Second, students claim equal epistemic access, as a response to an action that conveys epistemic authority of a peer. Third, students indicate shared knowledge with other participants, to (i) pursue agreement, (ii) check the epistemic status of a co-participant, (iii) reject a proposal for grounds of relevance and (iv) mark shared, newfound knowledge. The different practices are discussed in terms of epistemics in conversation and dialogic writing

    Vientos de guerra: Control epistémico y efectivo en el discurso político

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    This paper explores two key domains of speaker’s stance in discourse: epistemic and effective stance (MarĂ­n-Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021). The framework draws on Langacker’s (2009, 2013) distinction between the effective and the epistemic level in the grammar, and the systematic opposition thereof between striving for control of relations at the level of reality and control of conceptions of reality. Epistemic strategies pertain to the epistemic legitimisation of assertions, by providing epistemic support and epistemic justification for the proposition (Boye 2012). Effective control is aimed at the legitimisation of actions and plans of action. The joint deployment of epistemic and effective stance acts effects a strategy of combined control over hearers/readers’ acceptance of conceptions of reality and of plans of action. This paper studies the strategic use of these resources in the discourse of war and presents a case study on their use by two politicians, President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair, in political speeches and statements during the build-up to the second Iraq war. Results indicate significant qualitative and quantitative differences in the preferred stance strategies in the discourse of the two politicians.Este artĂ­culo explora dos dominios clave del posicionamiento del hablante en el discurso: posicionamiento epistĂ©mico y efectivo (MarĂ­n-Arrese 2011, 2015, 2021). Las estrategias epistĂ©micas conciernen la legitimaciĂłn epistĂ©mica de las aserciones, al contribuir soporte epistĂ©mico y justificaciĂłn epistĂ©mica para la proposiciĂłn (Boye 2012). el control efectivo se dirige a la legitimaciĂłn de acciones y planes de acciĂłn. El despliegue estratĂ©gico conjunto de actos de posicionamiento epistĂ©mico y efectivo realiza una estrategia combinada de control sobre la aceptaciĂłn por parte de oyente/lector de concepciones de la realidad y de planes de acciĂłn. Este artĂ­culo estudia el uso estratĂ©gico de estos recursos en el discurso de la Guerra, y presenta un estudio de caso sobre su uso por dos politicos, el Presidente George Bush y el Primer Ministro Tony Blair, en discursos politicos e intervenciones durante los preparativos para la segunda Guerra de Irak. Los resultados indican diferencias cualitativas y cuantitativas en las estrategĂ­as de posicionamiento preferidas por los dos politicos

    Collaborative and collective! Reflexive coordination and the dynamics of open innovation in clusters

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    Economic geography increasingly conceptualises "innovation as a collective action" (Storper, 1996). However, cluster literature often reduces the collective dimension to the circulation of knowledge between local-regional organisations based on various forms of (market, organisational, social, institutional or cognitive) coordination. This paper departs from this grass-roots perspective by discussing the role of collective actions in clusters, i.e. actions developed by a large number of cluster members acting as a group. Empirical evidence drawing on a study of three digital clusters in the Paris region shows that the cluster as a collective entity holds agency and - thanks to reflexive coordination - can contribute to open innovation - including innovation-seeking partnerships in the early stages of cluster lifecycles.open innovation; reflexive coordination; collaborative / collective actions; territory

    Speech Acts: The Contemporary Theoretical Landscape

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    What makes it the case that an utterance constitutes an illocutionary act of a given kind? This is the central question of speech-act theory. Answers to it—i.e., theories of speech acts—have proliferated. Our main goal in this chapter is to clarify the logical space into which these different theories fit. We begin, in Section 1, by dividing theories of speech acts into five families, each distinguished from the others by its account of the key ingredients in illocutionary acts. Are speech acts fundamentally a matter of convention or intention? Or should we instead think of them in terms of the psychological states they express, in terms of the effects that it is their function to produce, or in terms of the norms that govern them? In Section 2, we take up the highly influential idea that speech acts can be understood in terms of their effects on a conversation’s context or “score”. Part of why this idea has been so useful is that it allows speech-act theorists from the five families to engage at a level of abstraction that elides their foundational disagreements. In Section 3, we investigate some of the motivations for the traditional distinction between propositional content and illocutionary force, and some of the ways in which this distinction has been undermined by recent work. In Section 4, we survey some of the ways in which speech-act theory has been applied to issues outside semantics and pragmatics, narrowly construed

    Interactional practices to manage epistemic stances in online searches during a computer-mediated conversation-for-learning

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    Despite rising interests in the manifestations of second language (L2) interactional competence (IC) in online language learning activities (e.g., Balaman & Sert, 2017a, 2017b; GonzĂĄlez-Lloret, 2016), the intersection between epistemic and affective stancetaking in the online space remains largely unexplored. This paper examines how an intermediate-level learner jointly managed epistemics and affect with a tutor in a teleconference session designed as a conversation-for-learning. The analysis focuses on web search sequences occasioned by emergent asymmetries in the ongoing talk, and how the participants leveraged resources to negotiate knowledge positions and index emotions during online searches. Findings reveal that epistemic and affective stance management actions are a prominent aspect of online search sequences. For example, during an online search, the tutee demonstrates his L2 IC by citing and attributing responsibility to the source in response to epistemic primacy challenges. In the process, he also utilised affective resources such as laughter and a term of endearment to delicately manage disagreements. By focusing on the management of epistemic and affective stances, this study informs pedagogical decisions about the use of online searches in L2 learning activities
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