Siobhan Chapman

Russell: Analyzing Language

src1 — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:09:35 +0000

Independent film makers Simply Charly have produced ‘Russell: Analyzing Language‘, which is well worth watching. The two-part film features Stephen Neale talking about Russell’s 1905 paper ‘On Denoting’ and its philosophical implications. The discussion is wide-ranging, and has much to say about developments in analytic philosophy over the last century. I particularly enjoyed the anecdote about Grice, who apparently commented that Strawson’s 1950 response to Russell, ‘On Referring’, was ‘a wonderful paper marred only by a completely unnecessary discussion of Russell’s theory of descriptions’. Neale even includes some tips on how to teach Russell’s theory humanely.

‘In Our Time’

src1 — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 09:52:35 +0000

It’s always nice when philosophical issues get a public airing. I enjoyed Melvyn Bragg’s ‘In Our Time’ discussion programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday, which was concerned with the nature of the distinction between Continental and Analytic philosophy. Poor Melvyn sounded increasingly despairing as the programme went on of pinning his guests down on the questions of the intellectual, chronological or geographical circumstances of the divide between the two fields, but managed nevertheless to chair a very interesting discussion. The programme is available here.

Susan Stebbing on the control of the media

src1 — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:23:59 +0000

Rereading Susan Stebbing’s Thinking to Some Purpose I have come across these comments on the control of the media. Stebbing was writing in 1938 and her book was published in 1939, yet this passage has a depressingly up-to-date feel to it. In what precedes it she has commented on how the owners of newspapers have an almost unlimited power over the opinions of their readers:

‘Almost,’ but not quite, for the owners are themselves to some extent controlled by the big advertisers who are relied upon to provide the main revenue of the newspapers. The advertisers would not advertise in a newspaper that tended to undermine ‘the confidence of the public.’ The advertisers want the readers to be ready to spend their money; the newspapers want the advertisers to spend large sums in advertising their goods.

That the Press should be thus controlled constitutes a serious obstacle to our obtaining the information we require in order that we should think to some purpose about public transactions. I have used the word “controlled” because, in the ordinary sense of the word “free,” our Press is remarkably free, notwithstanding the laws of sedition, blasphemy and libel. These laws affect the Press neither nor more less than they affect the private citizen. Books, pamphlets, journals, supplements to newspapers, can be and are in fact published which criticize and condemn the Government of the day in a manner that would not be tolerated in many countries. This we all know, and are apt to congratulate ourselves thereon. But here lies a peculiar danger for the majority of readers. We tend to believe that we have a ‘free’ Press because we know it to be legally free. But the Press is in fact controlled by a comparatively small number of persons. The danger lies in the fact that the majority of people are not aware of the ownership. Consequently, when they see different newspapers providing the same news and expressing very similar opinions they are not aware that the news, and the evaluation of the news, are alike determined by a single group of persons, perhaps mainly by one man – a Press Lord. Accordingly, the readers mistakenly believe that they have been provided with independent testimony whereas they have been provided only with repetitions.

Pragmatics

src1 — Wed, 25 May 2011 22:09:46 +0000

My book on Pragmatics is now available, published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Modern Linguistics series in May 2011.

L. Susan Stebbing

src1 — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 13:44:31 +0000

I have just signed a contract with Palgrave Macmillan to write a book based on my current research project on the British analytic philosopher Susan Stebbing. Here is a very brief account of why I am interested in Stebbing.

Juliet Floyd on the History of Early Analytic Philosophy

src1 — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 12:29:42 +0000

In her article ‘Recent themes in the history of early analytic philosophy’ in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Juliet Floyd argues persuasively that an understanding of developments in analytic philosophy from the early part of the twentieth century is an important part of the intellectual history of a variety of present day disciplines, including linguistics. She also suggests that this understanding can be assisted in part by the construction of narratives around some of the major figures in the field. In her conclusion Floyd claims that the study of early analytic philosophy ‘is likely to stretch itself to include assessment of less well-known figures who were interested in the logical or conceptual analysis of meaning’ (p. 198). This strikes me as a particularly exciting prospect for future research.

Miriam Urgelles-Coll’s ‘The Syntax and Semantics of Discourse Markers’

src1 — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:38:00 +0000

I am very pleased to have received a copy of Miriam Urgelles-Coll’s new monograph The Syntax and Semantics of Discourse Markers, which has just been published in the series Continuum Studies in Theoretical Linguistics, of which I am general editor. This is the second book to be published in the series, following Michael Fortescue’s A Neural Network Model of Lexical Organisation. Gerard O’Grady’s Grammar of Spoken English Discourse is due to be published later this year.

Arne Naess Memorial Seminar

src1 — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 10:27:11 +0000

Last week I was in Oslo for the Arne Naess Memorial Seminar, an event organised by the Centre for Development and the Environment at the University of Oslo. It was great to hear talks on various aspects of Naess’s work, and to have the chance to talk to a number of people who knew and worked with Naess at different stages in his career. I will be back in Oslo next year for a seminar focussing on Naess’s work in semantics and its relation to logical positivism, run by the Seminar in Science Studies at the University.

Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language

src1 — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:44:57 +0000

Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language, which I have co-edited with Christopher Routledge, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2009.

Arne Naess died 12th January 2009

src1 — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 10:02:53 +0000

The Norwegian philosopher and environmentalist Arne Naess died on Monday, two weeks short of his 97th birthday. The Associated Press announcement, along with most of the tributes now being paid to Naess, focus on his ecological work and appropriately so; the ‘Deep Ecology’ movement, which he founded in 1970, is his greatest intellectual legacy. But Naess is also a significant figure in the history of analytic philosophy. He was the last surviving philosopher to have attended meetings of the Vienna Circle in the 1930s, and during the 1950s and 60s he was a sparrring partner for his near contemporaries such as A. J. Ayer and J. L. Austin. Perhaps most significantly, his dissatisfaction with logical positivism led him to pioneer methods of language study that prefigured developments in branches of linguistics such as sociolinguistics and corpus linguistics by some thirty years. He was a major intellectual figure of the twentieth century.