Constructive realism is a branch of philosophy , specifically the philosophy of science . It was developed in the late 1980s by Friedrich Wallner also Fritz Wallner in Vienna. In his paper abstract on constructive realism, Wallner describes it as follows Traditional convictions regarding science such as universalism, necessity and eternal validity are currently in doubt. Relativism seems to destroy scientific claims to rationality. This paper shows a way to keep the traditional convictions of scientific knowledge while acknowledging relativism. With reference to the practicing scientist, we replace descriptivism with constructivism we modify relative validity with the claim to understanding and, we offer methodological strategies for acquiring understanding. These strategies we call strangification, which means taking a scientific proposition system out of its context and putting it in another context. We can thus see the implicit presuppositions of the given proposition system by means of the problems arising out of the application of this procedure. Such a change in the understanding of science holds important consequences. External links http www.bu.edu wcp Papers Scie ScieWall.htm top A complete description of constructive realism http homepage.univie.ac.at friedrich.wallner Home page of Friedrich Wallner philosophy stub Category Constructivism Category Realism Category Metatheory of science de Konstruktiver Realismus fi Konstruktiivinen realismi ... more details
Notability biographies date April 2009 Keith Donnellan born 1931 is a contemporary philosopher and Professor Emeritus of the UCLA Department of Philosophy UCLA department of Philosophy . He has contributed to the philosophy of language , most notably to the analysis of proper names and definite descriptions . For instance, Donnellan criticized Bertrand Russell Bertrand Russell s theory of definite description s for overlooking the distinction between referential and attributive use of definite descriptions. ref Lycan, William G., Philosophy of Language a contemporary introduction 2000 , pp. 26 30 ref Proper names Historical context By 1970, analytic philosophers widely accepted a view regarding the reference relation that holds of proper names and that which they name which is known as descriptivism and attributed to Bertrand Russell . Descriptivism holds that ordinary proper names e.g., Socrates , Richard Feynman , and Madagascar may be paraphrased by definite descriptions e.g., Plato s favorite philosopher , the man who devised the theory of quantum electrodynamics , and the largest island off the southeastern coast of Africa . Saul Kripke gave a series of three lectures at Princeton University in 1970, later published as Naming and Necessity , ref name Kripke80 cite book last Kripke first Saul title Naming and Necessity year 1980 publisher Harvard University Press location Cambridge ref in which he argued against Descriptivism and sketched the Causal Historical View of Reference according to which each proper name necessarily designates a particular object and that the identity of the object so designated is determined by the history of the name s use. These lectures were highly influential and marked the decline of Descriptivism s popularity. ref name StanfordCumming cite web last Cumming first Sam title The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy url http plato.stanford.edu archives spr2009 entries names work Names ref Kripke s alternative view was, by his own acco ... more details
, Nebraska stands next to a table. etc ... A type of simple descriptivism was originally formulated ... the sentence. Notwithstanding these differences however, descriptivism and the descriptive theory ... descriptivism. Consider the name Aristotle and the descriptions the greatest student of Plato , the founder ... of language to abandon descriptive theories of proper names. Revival of descriptivism and two ... that all of this is false. Since, under traditional descriptivism, these descriptions are what .... But under Katz s version of descriptivism, the sense of Jonah contains no information derived from ... for this approach are rather different from those that inspired other forms of descriptivism, however ... more details
Refimprove date February 2012 Language Log is a collaborative language blog maintained by University of Pennsylvania phonetics phonetician Mark Liberman . The site is updated daily at the whims of the contributors, and most of the posts are on language use in the media and popular culture. Google search engine Google search results are frequently used as a Text corpus corpus to test hypotheses about language. Other popular topics are the linguistic descriptivism descriptivism linguistic prescriptivism prescriptivism debate and linguistics related news items. The site has also occasionally held contests in which visitors attempt to identify an obscure language. Language Log is now one of the most popular linguistics blogs. ref name Linguistics for everyone Language blog and eggcorns cite book first1 Kristin lastn 1 Denham first2 Anne lastn 2 Lobeck title Linguistics for Everyone An Introduction year 2009 publisher Cengage Learning isbn 9781413015898 page 13 ref As of 2011 6 , it receives an average of almost 21,000 visits per day. ref http www.sitemeter.com ?a stats&s sm7languagelog Language Log s Sitemeter stats ref In May 2006, a compilation of posts by Liberman and Geoffrey Pullum was published in book form under the title Far from the Madding Gerund and Other Dispatches from Language Log . Specialties Language Log was started on July 28, 2003 by Liberman and Pullum, a linguist then at the University of California, Santa Cruz Pullum has since moved to the University of Edinburgh . One early post about a woman who wrote egg corns instead of acorn s led to the coinage of the word eggcorn to refer to a type of sporadic or idiosyncratic re analysis. Another post about commonly recycled phrases in newspaper articles, e.g. If Eskimo s have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z , resulted in the coinage of the word snowclone . Both phenomena are common topics at the blog, as is linguification , or the use of metaphors that turn factual observations into claims ab ... more details
In modal logic and the philosophy of language , a term is said to be a rigid designator or Kripkean soul when it designates picks out, denotes, refers to the same thing in all possible worlds in which that thing exists ref Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Revised Second Edition 2008, P318 ref and does not designate anything else in those possible worlds in which that thing does not exist. A designator is persistently rigid if it designates the same thing in every possible world in which that thing exists and designates nothing in all other possible worlds. A designator is obstinately rigid if it designates the same thing in every possible world, period, whether or not that thing exists in that world. Rigid designators are contrasted with non rigid or flaccid designator s , which may designate different things in different possible worlds. Proper Names and Definite Descriptions The notion of rigid designation was first introduced by Saul Kripke in the lectures that became Naming and Necessity , in the course of his argument against descriptivism descriptivist theories of reference, building on the work of Ruth Barcan Marcus . At the time of Kripke s lectures, the dominant theories of reference in Analytic philosophy associated with the theories of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell held that the meaning of sentences involving proper names could be given by substituting a contextually appropriate description for the name. Russell, for example, famously held ref Russell, Bertrand, Knowledge by Acquaintance and Knowledge by Description, The Problems of Philosophy , chapter 5 http www.ditext.com russell rus5.html online text . ref that someone who had never met Otto von Bismarck might know of him as the first Chancellor of the German Empire , and if so, his statement that say Bismarck was a ruthless politician should be understood to mean The first Chancellor of the German Empire was a ruthless politician which could in turn be analysed into a series of more basic statem ... more details
RAS syndrome short for redundant acronym syndrome syndrome sic , also known as PNS syndrome PIN number syndrome syndrome , which expands to personal identification number number syndrome syndrome or RAP phrases redundant acronym phrase phrases , refers to the use of one or more of the words that make up an acronym and initialism acronym or initialism in conjunction with the abbreviated form, thus in effect repeating one or more words. A person is humorously said to suffer from RAS syndrome when he or she redundantly uses one or more of the words that make up an acronym or initialism with the abbreviation itself. Usage commentators consider such redundant acronyms poor style and an error to be avoided in writing, though they are common in speech. ref name Garner Bryan A. Garner Garner, Bryan A . 2000 The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style. Oxford and New York Oxford University Press. ref The degree to which there is a need to avoid pleonasm s such as redundant acronyms depends on one s balance point of linguistic prescription prescriptivism ideas about how language should be used versus linguistic description descriptivism the realities of how natural language is used . For writing intended to persuade, impress, or avoid criticism, usage guides advise writers to avoid pleonasm as much as possible, even if not because such usage is always wrong , but rather because most of one s audience may believe that it is always wrong. The term RAS syndrome is itself intentionally redundant, ref Cite news last Clothier first Gary date 8 November 2006 title Ask Mr. Know It All newspaper The York Dispatch ref ref name Newman Cite news last Newman first Stanley date December 20, 2008 url http www2.canada.com windsorstar news readersatplay story.html?id ea936740 3787 49be 813d 937b3a63eb74 title Sushi by any other name newspaper Windsor Star page G4 ref and thus is an example of self referential humor . Origin The term RAS syndrome was coined in 2001 by New Scientist . ref ... more details
theory of names descriptivism advocated by Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell was the orthodoxy. Descriptivism suggests that a name is indeed an abbreviation of a description, which is a set of properties ... more details
in their rejection of descriptivism. But I was never an emotivist, though I have often been called one. But unlike most of their opponents I saw that it was their irrationalism, not their non descriptivism, which was mistaken. So my main task was to find a rationalist kind of non descriptivism, and this led ... more details
Press, p. 286 entry for Descriptivism and prescriptivism quotation Contrasting terms in linguistics ... pullum MLA2004.pdf Ideology, Power and Linguistic Theory pdf format a paper about descriptivism ... more details
Most English language English words ending in us, particularly those derived from Latin language Latin , replace the us suffix with i to form plurals. This is irregular, however some words that end in us do not pluralize with i. Sometimes this is because they are not Latin words, and sometimes due to habit e.g. campus , plural campuses , anus , plural anuses , are both Latin words that do not pluralize with i . Conversely, some non Latin words ending in us or Latin words that would not have pluralized with i in Latin are given an i ending in English. Sometimes this plural becomes widely accepted e.g. Botanical Latin cactus , ubiquitously pluralized as cacti , and in other instances would sound unambiguously incorrect to a native speaker e.g. ani versus anuses . In between these two extremes are words that, despite not supporting a Latin plural on etymological grounds, are nonetheless widely pluralized with i and as such are not immediately heard as incorrect by a substantial number of native speakers e.g. octopi as a plural for Octopus octopus . The question of whether or not these alternative plural forms can be considered incorrect or not touches on the on going Linguistic prescription prescriptivism vs Linguistic description descriptivism debate in linguistics and language education . History The us singular form with an i plural comes from Latin. However, the morphology of Latin nouns is complex and not every Latin word ending in us pluralized in i. The ones that did largely were from the Latin declension Second declension o second declension grammatical gender masculine . Briefly, a declension is the way a noun changes to reflect facts about the object to which it refers e.g., its gender or number or the relationship that the noun has to other words in the sentence. Remnants of the Old English declension system can be seen in words like I , me , we , and us in modern English, as well as more distantly in the s enclitic . In Latin, just as in many languages spok ... more details
translation Translation studies is an interdiscipline containing elements of social science and the humanities , dealing with the systematic study of the theory, the description and the application of translation , interpreting or both these activities. Translation studies can be normative prescribing rules for the application of these activities or descriptive a translation scholar that insisted upon this latter approach was Antoine Berman . As an interdisciplinary discipline, translation studies borrows much from the different fields of study that support translation. These include comparative literature , computer science , history , linguistics , philology , philosophy , semiotics , terminology , and so forth. Note that occasionally in English, writers will use the term translatology to refer to translation studies . However, the term translation studies has become implanted in English, whereas in French, it is la traductologie that is used. Cultural translation This is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. Cultural translation is a concept used in cultural studies to denote the process of transformation, linguistic or otherwise, in a given culture . The concept uses linguistic translation as a tool or metaphor in analysing the nature of transformation in cultures. For example, ethnography is considered a translated narrative of an abstract living culture. Ethics In the last decade, the interest among theorists and practitioners in the issue of ethics has grown remarkably due to several reasons. As Anthony Pym, professor of translation and intercultural studies, points out, a shift within the field from descriptivism towards tendencies of globalisation can be observed that draw the attention to questions of cross cultural communication . ref Pym, Anthony 2001 The Return to Ethics in Translation Studies. In The Translator. Vol. 7, No. 2. ref In the course of the cultural changes due to 9 11 the consciousness of the problem of conflicting wor ... more details
On Denoting is an essay by Bertrand Russell . One of the most significant and influential philosophy philosophical essays of the 20th century, it was published in the philosophy journal Mind journal Mind in 1905 then reprinted, in both a special 2005 anniversary issue of the same journal and in Russell s Logic and Knowledge , 1956. In it, Russell introduces definite and indefinite descriptions, formulates descriptivist theory of names descriptivism with regard to proper names, and characterizes proper names as disguised or abbreviated definite descriptions . In the 1920s, Frank P. Ramsey referred to the essay as that paradigm of philosophy. ref citation title The foundations of mathematics and other logical essays author Frank Plumpton Ramsey, Richard Bevan Braithwaite editor Richard Bevan Braithwaite publisher Routledge year 2001 isbn 9780415225465 page 263 accessdate 2010 08 28 url http books.google.co.uk books?id 1st 3kYOEPQC&pg PA263&dq 22that paradigm of philosophy 22 ramsey&hl en&ei 82R4TOCcMsySswa88rCyDQ&sa X&oi book result&ct result&resnum 1&ved 0CCcQ6AEwAA v onepage&q&f false ref ref Citation title Talking philosophy a wordbook author A. W. Sparkes publisher Taylor & Francis year 1991 isbn 9780415042239 page 199 accessdate 2010 08 28 url http books.google.co.uk books?id 2NkOAAAAQAAJ&pg PA119&dq 22that paradigm of philosophy 22 ramsey&hl en&ei 82R4TOCcMsySswa88rCyDQ&sa X&oi book result&ct result&resnum 3&ved 0CDUQ6AEwAg v onepage&q 22that 20paradigm 20of 20philosophy 22 20ramsey&f false ref More recently, a contributor to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy singled it out as the paradigm of philosophy , and called it a work of tremendous insight that has provoked discussion and debate among philosophers of language and linguists for over a century. ref Ludlow, Peter, Descriptions , The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Summer 2005 Edition , Edward N. Zalta ed. , URL http plato.stanford.edu archives sum2005 entries descriptions ref The denoting phrase R ... more details
uniquely satisfies. Kripke rejects both these kinds of descriptivism. He gives several examples purporting to render Descriptivist theory of names descriptivism implausible as a theory of how names ... more details
lumped together as Descriptivist theory of names descriptivists about proper names. Such descriptivism ... descriptivism. ref name SK Mind and language Innateness and learning Some of the major issues at the intersection ... more details
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