Vagueness Markers in Italian

Moving from a broad socio-pragmatic perspective, this study analyses how speakers of different ages use a class of items and constructions that codify intentional vagueness in Italian. Items as un po’ ‘a bit’, tipo ‘kind’, diciamo ‘let us say’, così ‘so’, e cose del genere ‘and things like that’, or cosa ‘thing’ constitute a class of linguistically heterogeneous means that often function in conversation as vagueness markers, i.e. elements by which speakers signal that their knowledge or communication are somehow only tentative, approximate and vague. Their use does not depend on language systemic factors, but is the result of a, more or less conscious, choice of speakers to enhance conversation for different reasons, which include facilitating the flow of conversation, signifying a vague categorization, and, eventually, being polite. Operating at the pragmatic level, vagueness markers represent elements that are readily available to speakers’ choices and contribute to characterize individual and generational discourse styles. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins to a Milan radio station, this study investigates how vagueness markers are used by speakers of different ages in 1976 and in 2010, and how Italian discourse styles have evolved in the last forty years

Cognitive Architecture, Concepts, and Introspection: An Information-Theoretic Solution to the Problem of Phenomenal Consciousness

This essay is a sustained attempt to bring new light to some of the perennial problems in philosophy of mind surrounding phenomenal consciousness and introspection through developing an account of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Building on the information-theoretic framework of Dretske (1981), we present an informational psychosemantics as it applies to what we call sensory concepts, concepts that apply, roughly, to so-called secondary qualities of objects. We show that these concepts have a special informational character and semantic structure that closely tie them to the brain states realizing conscious qualitative experiences. We then develop an account of introspection which exploits this special nature of sensory concepts. The result is a new class of concepts, which, following recent terminology, we call phenomenal concepts: these concepts refer to phenomenal experience itself and are the vehicles used in introspection. On our account, the connection between sensory and phenomenal concepts is very tight: it consists in different semantic uses of the same cognitive structures underlying the sensory concepts, such as the concept of red. Contrary to widespread opinion, we show that information theory contains all the resources to satisfy internalist intuitions about phenomenal consciousness, while not offending externalist ones. A consequence of this account is that it explains and predicts the so-called conceivability arguments against physicalism on the basis of the special nature of sensory and phenomenal concepts. Thus we not only show why physicalism is not threatened by such arguments, but also demonstrate its strength in virtue of its ability to predict and explain away such arguments in a principled way. However, we take the main contribution of this work to be what it provides in addition to a response to those conceivability arguments, namely, a substantive account of the interface between sensory and conceptual systems and the mechanisms of introspection as based on the special nature of the information flow between them

Vagueness Markers in Italian

Moving from a broad socio-pragmatic perspective, this study analyses how speakers of different ages use a class of items and constructions that codify intentional vagueness in Italian. Items as un po’ ‘a bit’, tipo ‘kind’, diciamo ‘let us say’, così ‘so’, e cose del genere ‘and things like that’, or cosa ‘thing’ constitute a class of linguistically heterogeneous means that often function in conversation as vagueness markers, i.e. elements by which speakers signal that their knowledge or communication are somehow only tentative, approximate and vague. Their use does not depend on language systemic factors, but is the result of a, more or less conscious, choice of speakers to enhance conversation for different reasons, which include facilitating the flow of conversation, signifying a vague categorization, and, eventually, being polite. Operating at the pragmatic level, vagueness markers represent elements that are readily available to speakers’ choices and contribute to characterize individual and generational discourse styles. Through a corpus-based analysis of listeners’ phone-ins to a Milan radio station, this study investigates how vagueness markers are used by speakers of different ages in 1976 and in 2010, and how Italian discourse styles have evolved in the last forty years

Intentionality and Perception: A Study of John Searle’s Philosophy

My aim in this research is to study the philosophical problems of intentionality and perception by critically analyzing the relevant ideas from John Searle’s works, and also to attempt to give solutions to some of these problems. I try to elucidate Searle's theory of intentionality and his way of assimilating the problems of perception into this theory, and investigate the plausibility of his corresponding ideas in the context of ongoing debates

Context-Dependence, Perspective and Relativity

This volume brings together original papers by linguists and philosophers on the role of context and perspective in language and thought. Several contributions are concerned with the contextualism/relativism debate, which has loomed large in recent philosophical discussions. In a substantial introduction, the editors survey the field and map out the relevant issues and positions

Discursive constructions of sociolinguistic differences: A rhetorical analysis

This study offers a new approach to language attitudes and ideologies which applies argumentation theory in a discourse-based analysis of the processes of sociolinguistic indexicality. This method is presented in the context of the previously-used discourse-based approaches to language attitudes which are reviewed here in terms of their contributions to the understanding of the creation of socio-indexical meanings in discourse. The review proposes a five-level typology which includes topic-oriented, linguistic, cognitive, interactional, and rhetorical levels of analysis.This study explores the potential of the New Rhetoric theory developed by Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969) to serve as an overarching framework which can help cohere multidisciplinary perspectives on language use and social relations in the analysis of folk-linguistic discourse. This approach allows for an analysis of the rhetorical connectedness of discursive acts that contribute to semiotic construals of folk-linguistic beliefs at different levels of discourse organization.This dissertation proposes that a sociolinguistic study may use as a starting point of analysis a specific locally-salient folk-concept and shows that this type of analytic focus may be productive in exploring the metapragmatic functioning of folk-concepts in the context-specific activations of the fluid fields of sociolinguistic indexical relations. As a result of applying the proposed rhetorically-oriented method, this study provides new perspectives on how language users argumentatively construct conceptual associations between language-related and social representations in everyday discourse. It discusses the ways in which propositional processes of sociolinguistic indexicality engage experiential, affective, performative, perceptual, and identity-related processes: participants demonstrate these interrelated engagements in everyday metalinguistic discourse when they rationalize, justify, valorize, and illustrate their individual experiences with linguistic variability. The metapragmatic aspects of such constructions include discursive processes of objectivation, essentialization, and reification of sociolinguistic distinctiveness, as well as constructions of the clustering of linguistic and social typifications that create indexical profiles of speaking styles and index symbolic boundaries between social groups. These processes reveal how speakers appropriate the meaning potential of linguistic variables and conceptualize it in discursive constructions of linguistic distinctiveness

Ontic Structural Realism and Natural Necessity

J. Ladyman (1998-2009), Ladyman and Ross (2007) refine J. Worral's (1998) structural realism (SR), by developing an ontic structural realism (OSR) which they argue is a consistently naturalistic means of characterizing the ontology of fundamental physics. I argue that particular elements of M. Lange (2009) and M. Eklund (2006) strengthen and refine their project of characterizing fundamental physics via OSR and by extension, their presentation of information-theoretic structural realism (ITSR). I demonstrate this point by situating M. Lange’s (2009) discussion of nomological modality and natural necessity within Ladyman and Ross’s discussion of ITSR. The logical hierarchy evinced in Lange’s (2009) notion of ‘nomic stability’ further refines Ladyman and Ross’s claims through the addition of nuanced modal distinctions in a systematic framework. Moreover, I argue that what Lange considers are the ‘lawmakers’ (viz. subjunctive facts) serve as a de dicto rendition of some of Ladyman & Ross’s fundamental de re extensions and refinements of ‘real patterns’ (Dennett, 2001)

The Semantics and Pragmatics of the Term ‘God’

This thesis explores the semantics and pragmatics of the term ‘God’. The purpose is to build a linguistic framework in which to place existing philosophical work in The Philosophy of Religion. The thesis argues that the dominant methodological approaches for defining ‘God’ before argumentation fail to capture the nature of religious beliefs. A range of proposals are considered, including Perfect Being Semantics, Causal Theories of Reference, Hybrid Theories, and Descriptivism. It is argued that ‘God’ should be modelled as a title term. The consequences of such a view are considered for topics in Philosophy of Religion such as religious diversity, religious disagreement, and religious debate