The Cultural Consciousness of John Updike: Rhetorical Spaces as Representations of Americana through the “Rabbit” Series

This thesis is a scholarly examination of John Updike’s first two novels of the Rabbit saga: Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux. The discussion is centered on the cultural artifacts and geographic spaces that populate the novels and how they are a reflection of popular cultural and contemporary sociological, economic, and political climates. These items are also closely considered with respect to their rhetorical significance and how Updike makes use of rhetorical spaces to influence his readers. What may seem like ordinary places are, through Updike’s writing, imbued with rhetorical significance that sheds light on his contemporary culture and that of his readers. Updike’s writing over the span of two decades readers provides readers an opportunity to experience culture of two important but seemingly antipodal decades: the 1950s and 60s. Furthermore, by choosing characters that reflect “Middle America” for the first novel and by then integrating characters from the fringes of society in the second novel, Updike shows that he is keenly aware of his changing society

A Disjunctive Conception of Acting for Reasons

A disjunctivist conception of acting for reasons is introduced by way of showing that a view of acting for reasons must give a place to knowledge. Two principal claims are made. 1. This conception has a role analogous to that of the disjunctive conception that John McDowell recommends in thinking about perception; and when the two disjunctivist conceptions are treated as counterparts, they can be shown to have work to do in combination. 2. This conception of acting for reasons safeguards the connection between considerations that move us to act in particular ways and considerations that favour our acting in particular ways.Articl

Gavagai again

Quine (1960, ch.2) claims that there are a variety of equally good schemes for translating or interpreting ordinary talk. ‘Rabbit’ might be taken to divide its reference over rabbits, over temporal slices of rabbits, or undetached parts of rabbits, without significantly affecting which sentences get classified as true and which as false. This is the basis of his famous ‘argument from below’ to the conclusion that there can be no fact of the matter as to how reference is to be divided. Putative counterexamples to Quine’s claim have been put forward in the past (see especially Evans, 1975; Fodor, 1993), and various patches have been suggested (e.g. Wright, 1997). One lacuna in this literature is that one does not find any detailed presentation of what exactly these interpretations are supposed to be. Drawing on contemporary literature on persistence, the present paper sets out detailed semantic treatments for fragments of English, whereby predicates such as ‘rabbit’ divide their reference over four-dimensional continuants (Quine’s rabbits), instantaneous temporal slices of those continuants (Quine’s rabbit-slices) and the simple elements which compose those slices (undetached rabbit parts) respectively. Once we have the systematic interpretations on the table, we can get to work evaluating them

A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF DYSLEXIA IN BACKWARDS: THE RIDDLE OF DYSLEXIA

This study is under a psycholinguistic umbrella. The aim of this study is to analyze linguistic phenomena of dyslexia suffered by Brian, the main character in Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia. This study has three objectives: (1) to identify and explain the types of linguistic errors experienced by the main character in Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia; (2) to examine the environmental factors which occur in the movie; and (3) to describe the kinds of teaching approaches used to recover the main character in the movie from dyslexia. This study employed a descriptive qualitative method since it emphasized on describing the phenomena of dyslexia in Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia. Moreover, the findings were presented in narrative or textual description. However, number was also used to support the analysis of the data. Some steps in analyzing the data were: identifying the raw data, classifying each datum into the categorization, analyzing each datum, interpreting each datum based on its contexts, reporting the findings, and drawing the conclusion. Finally, the data findings were triangulated by two linguistics students who were keen on psycholinguistics. This study reveals three findings. First, of eight types of miscues, only six types occur in Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia. They are substitution, hesitation, omission, non-response, addition, and self-corrections. Meanwhile, the absent types are repetition and reversal. Substitution is the most common error made by a dyslexic who has problems in extracting printed letters into sounds. Meanwhile, the other types have only small occurrences since they are not common errors made by a dyslexic. Second, all types of environmental factors occur in the movie, i.e. social interaction and communication, physical environment, cognitive modality preference, emotional motivation, and children’s behavior. Social interaction and communication as well as physical environment become the highest in rank because Brian works well with another and needs a suitable condition and situation to read. Finally, each type of environmental factors supports successful teaching approaches for a dyslexic. Third, types of teaching approaches which occur in the movie are language experience, teacher modeling, self-questioning, phonological approach, and engaging parents. Meanwhile, the absent types are creative writing and critical literacy. Those present types of teaching approaches have represented successful treatments for Brian to recover from dyslexia. Key words: psycholinguistics, dyslexia, Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexi

Does Phenomenology Ground Mental Content?

I develop several new arguments against claims about "cognitive phenomenology" and its alleged role in grounding thought content. My arguments concern "absent cognitive qualia cases", "altered cognitive qualia cases", and "disembodied cognitive qualia cases". However, at the end, I sketch a positive theory of the role of phenomenology in grounding content, drawing on David Lewis's work on intentionality. I suggest that within Lewis's theory the subject's total evidence plays the central role in fixing mental content and ruling out deviant interpretations. However I point out a huge unnoticed problem, the problem of evidence: Lewis really has no theory of sensory content and hence no theory of what fixes evidence. I suggest a way of plugging this hole in Lewis's theory. On the resulting theory, which I call " phenomenal functionalism", there is a sense in which sensory phenomenology is the source of all determinate intentionality. Phenomenal functionalism has similarities to the theories of Chalmers and Schwitzgebe

The construction of a survey test in literature for grades four, five and six

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Nobody Wants to Eat Them Alive:” Ethical Dilemmas and Dual Media Narratives on Domestic Rabbits as Pets and Commodity

Using semiotic analysis, this study explores changes occurring in the societal perception of rabbits as farm animals as juxtaposed to their increasing popularity as domestic companions. This study is based on a preliminary hypothesis that rabbits are increasingly perceived and portrayed in media as domestic companion animals similar to cats and guinea pigs, which challenges a parallel narrative that views rabbits as commodities for their meat and fur. Operating within a theoretical framework that considers news media as both socially constructed reality and recorded history, the study examines the dynamics of change in numbers of coded news narratives drawn as a 1000-piece convenience sample from a database of news stories published worldwide between 1990 and 2011

Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books 47 (10) 1994

published or submitted for publicatio

The price of inscrutability

In our reasoning we depend on the stability of language, the fact that its signs do not arbitrarily change in meaning from moment to moment.(Campbell, 1994, p.82) Some philosophers offer arguments contending that ordinary names such as “London” are radically indeterminate in reference. The conclusion of such arguments is that there is no fact of the matter whether “London” refers to a city in the south of England, or whether instead it refers to Sydney, Australia. Some philosophers have even suggested that we accept the conclusion of these arguments. Such a position seems crazy to many; but what exactly goes wrong if one adopts such a view? This paper evaluates the theoretical costs incurred by one who endorses extreme inscrutability of reference (the ‘inscrutabilist’). I show that there is one particular implication of extreme inscrutability which pushes the price of inscrutabilism too high. An extension of the classic ‘permutation’ arguments for extreme inscrutability allow us to establish what I dub ‘extreme indexical inscrutability’. This result, I argue, unacceptably undermines the epistemology of inference. The first half of the paper develops the background of permutation arguments for extreme inscrutability of reference and evaluates some initial attempts to make trouble for the inscrutabilist. Sections 1 and 2 describe the setting of the original permutation arguments for extreme inscrutability. Sections 3 and 4 survey four potential objections to extreme inscrutability of reference, including some recently raised in Vann McGee’s excellent (2005a). Sections 5 sketches how the permutation arguments can be generalized to establish extreme indexical inscrutability; and shows how this contradicts a ‘stability principle’—that our words do not arbitrarily change their reference from one moment to the next—which I claim plays a vital role in the epistemology of inference. The second half of the paper develops in detail the case for thinking that language is stable in the relevant sense. In section 6, I use this distinction to call into question the epistemological relevance of validity of argument types; Kaplan’s treatment of indexical validity partially resolves this worry, but there is a residual problem. In section 7, I argue that stability is exactly what is needed to bridge this final gap, and so secure the relevance of validity to good inferential practice. Section 8 responds to objections to this claim. An appendix to the paper provides formal backing for the results cited in this paper, including a generalization of permutation arguments to the kind of rich setting required for a realistic semantics of natural language.1 Extreme indexical inscrutability results can be proved within this setting. The first half of the paper shows that the inscrutabilist is committed to extreme indexical inscrutability, which implies that language not determinately ‘stable’. The second half of the paper argues that good inference requires stability. The price of inscrutabilism, therefore, is to sever the connection between the validity of argument-forms and inferential practice: and this is too high a price to pay