The study proposes a new approach towards a social phenomenon called convention and submits a minimalistic definition of convention, which provides a promising basis for future analysis unburdened by contra-Lewisian objections. The definition itself, based on the insights of Ruth Millikan in the study Language Conventions Made Simple, represents a simple and efficient means of delimiting essential components of conventional behaviour (stripped of most of the controversial issues from previous debates on Lewis’s notion) solely by means of the role of precedent and its ability to reproduce. Yet, it is argued that a few additional conditions are required for a valid and distinct notion of conventionality: namely, the inclusion of a coordination aspect and an extension of the concept of precedent. The final version of the definition, thereafter, meets intuitive requirements of conventionality (e.g., arbitrariness) and has the generality to embrace different types of conventions.
This paper aims to assess current theoretical findings on the origin of coordination by salience and suggests a way to clarify the existing framework. The main concern is to reveal how different coordination mechanisms rely on specific epistemic aspects of reasoning. The paper highlights the fact that basic epistemic assumptions of theories diverge in a way that makes them essentially distinctive. Consequently, recommendations and predictions of the traditional views of coordination by salience are, in principle, based on the processes related to the agent’s presumptions regarding the cognitive abilities of a co-player. This finding implies that we should consider these theories as complementary, and not competitive, explanations of the same phenomenon.
It is widely known that the rigid two-term system of clause classes, coordinate and subordinate, though in many respects of fundamental importance, does not provide a reliable basis for examining all aspects of clause clustering in multi-clause (compound or complex) sentences and prevents the formulation of cross-linguistically valid statements in this syntactic domain. Notably, it fails to answer the cardinal question of what exactly belongs to any of these two classes with exclusion of the other. This failure is seemingly due to the lack of unambiguous formal criteria that would be able to account for the semantic (functional) side of this basic bipartition. The paper aims at drawing attention to some of the most outstanding problems obscuring the coordinate-subordinate distinction and to point out structural and semantic limits of what might be classified as sentential and phrasal coordination in Korean.
Embodied mind theories underline the role of the body in the act of knowing. According to the enactive approach, we learn to perceive and to know through our bodily interactions with the world (Varela, Thompson & Rosch, 1991). However, such an approach remains incomplete as long as sociality is not taken into account (Froese & Di Paolo, 2009). Indeed, learning mainly takes place in intersubjective contexts (e.g. by the effects of teaching). Recently, an inter-enactive approach has been proposed accordingly. Social interactions are seen as processes of coordinated sense-making that emerge from the dynamics of the inter-action process itself (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007). Teaching settings are a special case though: cognitive interactions are reciprocal but asymmetrically guided by the teacher. We first sketch the phenomenological and theoretical contours of embodied intersubjectivity~intersubjective embodiement. Then, we present an interactive pedagogical method for musical learning (free spontaneous four-hands improvisations in the context of the Kaddouch pedagogy) and discuss it through illustrative case studies. The role of the teacher appears to operate directly on the dynamics of the interaction process, a source of knowing and skill enaction for the learner.
This article show how communication through language can be expressed in terms of game theory. The general idea and the main line of argumentation is based on David Lewis’ book Convention (Lewis 1969) and more recent works on game theory that develop the concepts of cooperation and equilibrium. The term agreement, in the sense given to it by game theory, is used to show how to justify the thesis of the conventional nature of language. In the first part of the article some general notions of game theory are presented. Game theory is supposed to examine strategies chosen by rational agents in order to obtain preferred outcomes and is thus a good tool for describing and predicting human behaviour. It applies to situations when subjects operate reasonably, taking into account the behaviour of other rational subjects, and thus can also be used in situations of language communication. Sustaining conventionalism with game theory is possible primarily because it satisfies two basic conditions: it is both a description and a justification. Only within a complex system is it possible to explain the normative character of language, which, like utility, is only a simplified scheme. Through the analysis of coordination problems and the use of the principles of rationality and utility, it is possible to anticipate the behaviour of agents. In this context normativeness should be regarded as striving for balance, and even if another way of understanding is a deviation of the system, it still can be explored and explained within it.
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