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38647 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1909 of 1933

  • Discourse on the Method

  • René Descartes
  • Edited by John Cottingham, University of Reading, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny
  • Book:
    Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    26 February 1988, pp 20-56

  • Summary

    of rightly conducting one's reason and seeking the truth in the sciences

    If this discourse seems too long to be read at a sitting you may divide it into six parts. In the first you will find various considerations regarding the sciences; in the second, the principal rules of the method which the author has sought; in the third, some of the moral rules he has derived from this method; in the fourth, the arguments by which he proves the existence of God and the human soul, which are the foundations of his metaphysics; in the fifth, the order of the questions in physics that he has investigated and, in particular, the explanation of the movement of the heart and of some other difficulties pertaining to medicine, and also the difference between our soul and that of the beasts; and in the last, the things he believes necessary in order to make further progress in the investigation of nature than he has made, and the reasons which made him write this discourse.

    PART ONE

    Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world: for everyone thinks himself so well endowed with it that even those who are the hardest to please in everything else do not usually desire more of it than they possess. In this it is unlikely that everyone is mistaken. It indicates rather that the power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false - which is what we properly call 'good sense' or 'reason' - is naturally equal in all men, and consequently that the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct our thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things.

  • General introduction

  • René Descartes
  • Edited by John Cottingham, University of Reading, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny
  • Book:
    Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    26 February 1988, pp vii-xi

  • Summary

    René Descartes is universally acknowledged as the father of modern Western philosophy. It is to the writings of Descartes, above all others, that we must turn if we wish to understand the great seventeenth-century revolution in which the old scholastic world view slowly lost its grip, and the foundations of modern philosophical and scientific thinking were laid. The range of Descartes' thought was enormous, and his published work includes writings on mathematics, physics, astronomy, meteorology, optics, physiology, psychology, metaphysics and ethics. No one volume can hope to do justice to such an oeuvre, but the present selection includes the most famous and widely studied texts, and a good bit more besides. We hope it will be a serviceable and reasonably representative anthology for those who wish to study for themselves one of the most important and fascinating philosophical systems ever produced.

    The first work included below (in extracts) is the Rules for the Direction of our Native Intelligence (Regulae ad directionem ingenii). This was the first major piece of philosophy that Descartes composed. It was written in Latin, probably in 1628 or a few years earlier, but was never completed, and was not published during Descartes' lifetime. A Dutch translation appeared in Holland in 1684, and the first Latin edition was published in Amsterdam in 1701. The Regulae (to use the title by which the work is generally known) reveals much about Descartes' early project for establishing a universal method for arriving at the truth, and it presents a conception of knowledge which is strongly influenced by mathematical standards of certainty.

  • The Passions of the Soul

  • René Descartes
  • Edited by John Cottingham, University of Reading, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny
  • Book:
    Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    26 February 1988, pp 218-238

  • Summary

    PART ONE

    The passions in general

    and incidentally the whole nature of man

    1. What is a passion with regard to one subject is always an action in some other regard

    The defects of the sciences we have from the ancients are nowhere more apparent than in their writings on the passions. This topic, about which knowledge has always been keenly sought, does not seem to be one of the more difficult to investigate since everyone feels passions in himself and so has no need to look elsewhere for observations to establish their nature. And yet the teachings of the ancients about the passions are so meagre and for the most part so implausible that I cannot hope to approach the truth except by departing from the paths they have followed. That is why I shall be obliged to write just as if I were considering a topic that no one had dealt with before me. In the first place, I note that whatever takes place or occurs is generally called by philosophers a ‘passion’ with regard to the subject to which it happens and an ‘action’ with regard to that which makes it happen. Thus, although an agent and patient are often quite different, an action and passion must always be a single thing which has these two names on account of the two different subjects to which it may be related.

  • Objections and Replies

  • René Descartes
  • Edited by John Cottingham, University of Reading, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, Anthony Kenny
  • Book:
    Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings
    Published online:
    05 May 2013
    Print publication:
    26 February 1988, pp 123-159

  • Summary

    [ON MEDITATION ONE]

    [The rejection of previous beliefs]

    Here I shall employ an everyday example to explain to my critic the rationale for my procedure, so as to prevent him misunderstanding it, or having the gall to pretend he does not understand it, in future. Suppose he had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take out the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others? In just the same way, those who have never philosophized correctly have various opinions in their minds which they have begun to store up since childhood, and which they therefore have reason to believe may in many cases be false. They then attempt to separate the false beliefs from the others, so as to prevent their contaminating the rest and making the whole lot uncertain. Now the best way they can accomplish this is to reject all their beliefs together in one go, as if they were all uncertain and false. They can then go over each belief in turn and re-adopt only those which they recognize to be true and indubitable.

  • 7 - Sociological implications

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 238-255

  • Summary

    We turn now to the application to sociological (including anthropological) concerns of the apparatus we have developed. In section 7.1 we consider the relevance of our theory to the traditional concerns of social anthropology; in 7.2 we turn to the analysis of significant patterns of interaction in particular social systems.

    Social theory and the study of interaction

    We have explored some systematic and universal properties of language use addressed to face redress. But what bearing has all this on sociological or anthropological theory or research? What is universal and pan-cultural cannot, at first glance, be of cultural significance. That which organizes such low-level orders of events can hardly, it might seem, have any bearing on the mainstream sociological concern with social structure. Indeed the study of interactional systematics has been impugned by Giddens (1973:15) on charges of being ‘a resurgence of crude voluntarism, linked to what I would call a retreat from institutional analysis’. Moreover, he continues, the views ‘that the most vital aspects of social existence are those relating to the triviata of “everyday life” … easily rationalise a withdrawal from basic issues involved in the study of macro-structural social forms and social processes’ (ibid.).

    One suspects that many social theorists, including some anthropologists, share these views. Nevertheless, in actual fact in social anthropology there has been a persistent if rather thin strand of interest in the way in which social relations of various kinds are realized in interaction. And this interest follows from the sorts of theoretical orientation that have been most influential.

  • 5 - Realizations of politeness strategies in language

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 91-227

  • Summary

    Introduction

    We have claimed that a face-bearing rational agent will tend to utilize the FTA-minimizing strategies according to a rational assessment of the face risk to participants. He would behave thus by virtue of practical reasoning, the inference of the best means to satisfy stated ends.

    We now claim that what links these strategies to their verbal expressions is exactly the same kind of means-ends reasoning. For example, suppose our Model Person has chosen the strategy of negative politeness: recall that negative politeness consists in doing the FTA on record, with redressive action directed to the addressee's perennial want to not be imposed upon. Then our MP must unambiguously express the FTA, and choose between a set of appropriate ways that would partially satisfy that negative-face want of the addressee's; that is, he must do so if he intends to rationally satisfy his desire to achieve the end we have labelled negative politeness. He may choose more than one such means of redressive action, as long as those chosen are consistent, and the effort expended not out of proportion to the face risk attending the FTA.

    Such redressive action need not of course be verbal. In order to partially satisfy your want to have your wants desired, I may indicate my understanding of them by bringing you a gift appropriate to them.

  • 9 - Conclusions

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 283-284

  • Summary

    Empirical research may have ramifications in multiple directions. Here we bring together those that we foresee and make some assessment of their relative importance.

    Let us first summarize what we set out to do in this paper. We wished in the first place to account for the pan-cultural interpretability of politeness phenomena, broadly defined. We argued that this interpretability derives from the universal mutual-knowledge assumptions of interacting individuals: that humans are ‘rational’ and that they have ‘face’. On these lines we constructed an overall theory of politeness, integrating notions of polite friendliness and polite formality in a single scheme. From abstract ends, our two ‘face wants’, repeated application of rational means-ends reasoning will bring us down to the choice of linguistic and kinesic detail, to the minutiae of message construction. Only at the most abstract level, then, do we need to resort to concepts like ‘ethological primitives’, ‘innate dispositions’, and so on — concepts that notoriously block inquiry. Nor, interestingly, do norms play a central role in the analysis.

    This is the core of the investigation, which is to be read against a set of sociological goals. The essential idea is this: interactional systematics are based largely on universal principles. But the application of the principles differs systematically across cultures, and within cultures across subcultures, categories and groups. Moreover, categories of egos distribute these universally based strategies across different categories of alters. From an interactional point of view, then, principles like those here described are some of the dimensions, the building blocks, out of which diverse and distinct social relations are constructed.

  • Introduction to the reissue

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 1-50

  • Summary

    Preface

    The human personality is a sacred thing; one dare not violate it nor infringe its bounds, while at the same time the greatest good is in communion with others.

    (Durkheim 1915:299)

    The reissue of ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’ over a decade after it was written, perhaps calls for some explanation, especially as, for economy of production, we have have had to minimize revisions to a new introduction and bibliography. One reason is that we believe the issues addressed there (and originally, or at least most influentially, by Goff man 1967, 1971) have a perennial importance, for they raise questions about the foundations of human social life and interaction. For example, in the original introduction to this work, Goody (1978a: 12) notes how the phenomena we review below seem to require an enormously complex kind of reflexive reasoning about other agents' desires, and she suggests that this reasoning, with its roots in interpersonal ritual, ‘may be fundamental in an evolutionary sense to social life and human intelligence’. She goes on to suggest (1978a: 15), in the context of a discussion of ‘joking relations’, that it is the essence of these that they carry the ‘presumption of non-threatening intention’. From a gross ethological perspective, perhaps we can generalize somewhat: the problem for any social group is to control its internal aggression while retaining the potential for aggression both in internal social control and, especially, in external competitive relations with other groups (Maynard-Smith, in press).

  • 4 - On the nature of the model

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 84-91

  • Summary

    Remarks on alternative models

    One way of thinking about our enterprise is this: we are attempting a description, in a very limited area, of the principles that lie behind the construction of social behaviour. There can be no doubt that one reason that social theory has never come to ground level is the notable lack of a satisfactory theory of action. The major social theorists (for instance Durkheim, Parsons, Weber), and indeed analytical philosophers, have only made crude attempts at the analysis of the single act. Only cognitive anthropologists (inspired initially by Miller, Galanter and Pribram 1960), cognitive psychologists, and workers in artificial intelligence (e.g. in Schank and Colby 1973) have looked at actions in the context of hierarchical plans which may specify sequences of actions. But how does one generate plans? How does one mentally check their validity? What kinds of reasoning lie behind them? These are questions which, compared to the study devoted to deductive reasoning, have received scant attention since Aristotle (but see for instance Körner 1974). Above all, a satisfactory account of action in an interactional setting has been grossly neglected, despite evidence that very special properties of coordination arise in such settings (Grice 1971, 1975; Lewis 1969; Schelling 1960). Indeed, here our own analysis must be found wanting, dominated às it is by the act-by-act analysis of contemporary philosophy and linguistics; we try to make amends in section 6.3.

  • 1 - Introduction

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 55-59

  • Summary

    Prologue

    This paper has a broad sweep, and a diversity of motives. It will help here at the beginning to extract and formulate pur major aims. The foremost aim is simply to describe and account for what is in the light of current theory a most remarkable phenomenon. This is the extraordinary parallelism in the linguistic minutiae of the utterances with which persons choose to express themselves in quite unrelated languages and cultures. The convergence is remarkable because, on the face of it, the usages are irrational: the convergence is in the particular divergences from some highly rational maximally efficient mode of communication (as, for example, outlined by Grice 1967, 1975). We isolate a motive — politeness, very broadly and specially defined — and then claim, paradoxically enough, that the only satisfactory explanatory scheme will include a heavy dash of rationalism. The bulk of the paper provides evidence of the parallelisms, and demonstrates their rational sources.

    But why concern ourselves with this? Is this not a problem for ethology or psychology? We confess to underlying motives of a different sort. We believe that patterns of message construction, or ‘ways of putting things’, or simply language usage, are part of the very stuff that social relationships are made of (or, as some would prefer, crucial parts of the expressions of social relations). Discovering the principles of language usage may be largely coincident with discovering the principles out of which social relationships, in their interactional aspect, are constructed: dimensions by which individuals manage to relate to others in particular ways.

  • 6 - Derivative hypotheses

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 228-238

  • Summary

    Exploitations of strategies

    Our model would predict a number of possible exploitations of the politeness strategies. We consider these briefly here.

    Trying to re-rank R, P, or D. We mentioned in section 3.4.2, in our discussion of the nature of the sociological variables that go into assessing the seriousness of an FTA, that a speaker may exploit the fundamental ambiguity that derives from the compounding of the factors D, P, and R into a single index of risk, and attempt to redefine one of the variables. That is, any FTA utterance will encode the estimated danger of the FTA, but it does not necessarily display which of the social variables is primarily responsible for the assessed weight of Wx . S and H will both have some estimate of these variables, and S may choose to try to re-rank the expectable weighting of one of the variables at the expense of the others.

    In trying to re-rank R, S may take advantage of mutual-knowledge assumptions between S and H of their respective social distance D and social power P, and S may choose to act as though R x is smaller than he in fact knows (and knows that H knows) it really is. He can do this by saying, for example, ‘Hey, Harry, how about lending me your new car!’ and hoping that the positive-politeness optimism will convince Harry that it is not a very big or unreasonable request. This is risky, as Harry may decide that it is D or P that the addressee is manipulating, rather than R, and take offence.

  • 3 - The argument: Intuitive bases and derivative definitions

  • Penelope Brown, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands, Stephen C. Levinson, Max-Planck-Institut für Psycholinguistik, The Netherlands
  • Foreword by John J. Gumperz
  • Book:
    Politeness
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 February 1987, pp 61-84

  • Summary

    Assumptions: Properties of interactants

    We make the following assumptions: that all competent adult members of a society have (and know each other to have)

  • (i) ‘face’, the public self-image that every member wants to claim for himself, consisting in two related aspects:

  • (a) negative face: the basic claim to territories, personal preserves, rights to non-distraction — i.e. to freedom of action and freedom from imposition

  • (b) positive face: the positive consistent self-image or ‘personality’ (crucially including the desire that this self-image be appreciated and approved of) claimed by interactants

  • (ii) certain rational capacities, in particular consistent modes of reasoning from ends to the means that will achieve those ends.

    • Face. Our notion of ‘face’ is derived from that of Goffman (1967) and from the English folk term, which ties face up with notions of being embarrassed or humiliated, or ‘losing face’. Thus face is something that is emotionally invested, and that can be lost, maintained, or enhanced, and must be constantly attended to in interaction. In general, people cooperate (and assume each other's cooperation) in maintaining face in interaction, such cooperation being based on the mutual vulnerability of face. That is, normally everyone's face depends on everyone else's being maintained, and since people can be expected to defend their faces if threatened, and in defending their own to threaten others' faces, it is in general in every participant's best interest to maintain each others' face, that is to act in ways that assure the other participants that the agent is heedful of the assumptions concerning face given under (i) above.

Page 1909 of 1933