Making Content Relevant (Or Not): Exploring the Outcomes of a Project-Based Curriculum in Post-Secondary Art Appreciation

Because college students often struggle to understand the relevance of isolated and abstract art content to their programs of study and daily lives, this study explores the potential to generate meaningful education through a project-based curriculum in a college Art Appreciation course. Informed by research from educational psychology and neuroscience, this curriculum design was intended to help students (all non-art majors) connect course content to their social, emotional and physical realities and offer the potential to improve them. In class, students explored forms of visual communication, various media, and the relationship between art and culture before applying their findings to the design of a public artwork for their nearly art-free campus. Based on a constructivist epistemology and a phenomenological methodology, this study utilized participant observation, student projects and illustrated reflections as data sources. The results suggest positive outcomes, such as demonstrable understanding and application of course content as well as shortcomings, specifically the potential to fortify and actualize these connections

Rethinking being Gricean: New challenges for metapragmatics

Arguably, forty years on, post-Gricean pragmatics is still the most successful and methodologically most rigorous approach to utterance meaning. However, and perhaps as a corollary of its extensive development, it has become necessary to ask what ‘being Gricean’ means for its current advocates. In this paper I address this question with respect to the current Anglo-American, truth-conditional paradigm, asking specifically how much, and on what identifiable dimensions, one can depart from his program and still remain ‘Gricean’. The label has generated very different challenges on several dimensions. First, (i) the role of inferential meanings has been questioned in that communication has since often been envisaged as mostly direct and non-inferential. In a similar spirit, (ii) the layered, also sometimes called ‘pipeline’ or ‘imbricated’ picture of meaning has been questioned within situation and game-theoretic semantics, and recently in their offshoot Equilibrium Semantics. Next, (iii) the explanatory role of intentions has often been denied in an attempt to reinstate the idea of multiple semantic ambiguities in lieu of meaning underdetermination, with the aim of aiding computational, formalizable accounts of discourse meaning. This reopened the question as to (iv) what kind of content, and how much of it, is attributable to grammar, following up on earlier proposals of the grammatical origin of some pragmatic meanings that were standardly classified as implicatures. Along yet another dimension, (v) the focus on cooperative interaction and proposition-based theorizing have been replaced with a focus on non-cooperative, such as strategic, communication and dialogue as the associated object of analysis. Finally, Grice’s project was a project in philosophy of language and as such in philosophical pragmatics. Theoretical, introspection-based methods employed without recourse to experimental or other empirical inquires are nowadays shunned in many pragmatics circles. So, the question arises regarding (vi) the place of philosophical pragmatics on a map of current research into meaning in communication. In this context, a metapragmatic question arises as to what qualitative and associated quantitative criteria current pragmatic theory has to fulfil in order to count as Gricean pragmatics. In this paper I address this question by discussing the identified areas (i)-(vi). Further, in doing so, using these indicators, I attempt to address the question ‘Quo vadis, pragmatics?’ with respect to the post-Gricean tradition. My metatheoretic inquiry begins by critically discussing the dimensions on which the Gricean program has been challenged and proceeds to arguing that none of the challenges constitutes a real threat to it. I develop two strands of argumentation showing how the approaches either (a) can be incorporated as its extensions or (b) are in pursuit of different goals and as such are not in competition with it. Argument (a) applies to automatic meaning assignment, the rejection of the ‘pipeline’ picture of meaning, emphasis on conventions, strategic conversation and generalized cognition. Argument (b) applies to the revival of semantic ambiguity and the grammatical foundation of implicatures. It is therefore concluded that the Gricean program can be relaxed on the dimensions covered by (a) and co-exist with the approaches subscribing to (b)

Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science

A collection of papers presented at the First International Summer Institute in Cognitive Science, University at Buffalo, July 1994, including the following papers: ** Topological Foundations of Cognitive Science, Barry Smith ** The Bounds of Axiomatisation, Graham White ** Rethinking Boundaries, Wojciech Zelaniec ** Sheaf Mereology and Space Cognition, Jean Petitot ** A Mereotopological Definition of 'Point', Carola Eschenbach ** Discreteness, Finiteness, and the Structure of Topological Spaces, Christopher Habel ** Mass Reference and the Geometry of Solids, Almerindo E. Ojeda ** Defining a 'Doughnut' Made Difficult, N .M. Gotts ** A Theory of Spatial Regions with Indeterminate Boundaries, A.G. Cohn and N.M. Gotts ** Mereotopological Construction of Time from Events, Fabio Pianesi and Achille C. Varzi ** Computational Mereology: A Study of Part-of Relations for Multi-media Indexing, Wlodek Zadrozny and Michelle Ki