Search Results (6)

This study investigates how religious rhetoric and popular mobilisation contributed to the preservation and propagation of Daoist traditions at the mountain Maoshan 茅山 from late Qing to Republican China (1864–1937), focusing particularly on the corpus of religious texts related to Maoshan and its tutelary gods, the Three Mao Lords 三茅真君. Through a detailed analysis of primary sources, including editions of the Maoshan Gazetteer, liturgical manuals such as the scripture (jing 經), litany (chan 懺), and performative texts such as the precious scroll (baojuan 寶卷) of the Three Mao Lords, this study identifies six key rhetoric strategies employed by Maoshan Daoists, using the acronym IMPACT: (1) Incorporation: Appending miracle tales (lingyan ji 靈驗記) and divine medicine (xianfang 仙方) to address immediate and practical needs of contemporary society; (2) Memory: Preserving doctrinal continuity while invoking cultural nostalgia to reinforce connections to traditional values and heritage; (3) Performance: Collaborating with professional storytellers to disseminate vernacularized texts through oral performances, thereby reaching broader audiences including the illiterate. (4) Abridgment: Condensing lengthy texts into concise and accessible formats; (5) Canonization: Elevating the divine status of deities through spirit-writing, thereby enhancing their religious authority; (6) Translation: Rendering classical texts into vernacular language for broader accessibility. Building upon J.L. Austin’s speech act theory, this study reconceptualizes these textual innovations as a form of “text acts”, arguing that Maoshan texts did not merely transmit religious doctrine but actively shaped pilgrimages and devotional practices through their illocutionary and perlocutionary force. Additionally, this study also highlights the crucial role of social networks, particularly the efforts of key individuals such as Zhang Hefeng 張鶴峰 (fl. 1860–1864), Long Zehou 龍澤厚 (1860–1945), Jiang Daomin 江導岷 (1867–1939), Wang Yiting 王一亭 (1867–1938) and Teng Ruizhi 滕瑞芝 (fl. 1920–1947) who facilitated the reconstruction, reprinting and dissemination of these texts. Furthermore, this study considers pilgrimages to Maoshan as a form of popular mobilisation and resistance to anti-clerical and anti-superstition campaigns, illustrating how, against all odds, Maoshan emerged as a site where religious devotion and economic activity coalesced to sustain the local communities. Ultimately, despite the challenges identified in applying speech act theory to textual practices, the findings conclude that the survival and revival of Daoist traditions at Maoshan was not only a result of textual retention and innovation but also a testament to how religious rhetoric, when coupled with strategic social engagement, can fuel popular mobilisation, reignite collective devotion, and reshape cultural landscapes in transformative ways. Full article

Concepts in science have an important role: They delimit and specify objects, activities, processes, and abstract entities. When terms are diffuse, mean different things to different persons, and lead more to qualifications than demarcation, they cease to be concepts and may become labels, which are informal alternative designations. There are many labels in science and they have become abundant in taxonomy: α-taxonomy, integrative-taxonomy, iterative-taxonomy, etc., are only a few examples. α-taxonomy is a negative label that obtained popularity at the same time the term α-diversity became popular in ecology. The label α-taxonomy conveys a negative meaning to taxonomy because the nature of its evidence—originally morphological—is seen by many as “merely descriptive” and, thereby, supposedly inferior to other forms of evidence. This has contributed to substantial and unwarranted damage to the status of this science and to the careers of taxonomists. The recent history of methodologies for species delimitation shows that what some have considered of low value (morphology), compared to “new” data (molecular), is in many cases the critical factor to delimit species. We propose to eschew these kinds of labels and simply refer to taxonomy to avoid stigmatizing of any kind of practicing taxonomist, whether focused on morphology, cytology, molecular biology, or other fields of biology. Taxonomy implies the use of the current best evidence, theories, and methods to demarcate species and their relationships. Full article

Argumentation theorists need to command a clear view of the sources of the obligations that arguers incur, e.g., their burdens of proof. Theories of illocutionary speech acts promise to fill this need. This essay contrasts two views of illocutionary acts: one, that they are constituted by rules, the other, that they are constituted by paradigmatic practical calculations. After a general comparison of the two views, the strength of the pragmatic view is demonstrated through an account of the illocutionary act of making an accusation. It is shown that the essential conditions of ACCUSING revealed by conceptual analysis are just what is practically necessary to manage a routine, but complex, communicative problem. The essay closes with remarks on the implications of the pragmatic view of speech acts for argumentation theory generally. Full article

Criminals use online social networks for various activities by including communication, planning, and execution of criminal acts. They often employ ciphered posts using slang expressions, which are restricted to specific groups. Although literature shows advances in analysis of posts in natural language messages, such as hate discourses, threats, and more notably in the sentiment analysis; research enabling intention analysis of posts using slang expressions is still underexplored. We propose a framework and construct software prototypes for the selection of social network posts with criminal slang expressions and automatic classification of these posts according to illocutionary classes. The developed framework explores computational ontologies and machine learning (ML) techniques. Our defined Ontology of Criminal Expressions represents crime concepts in a formal and flexible model, and associates them with criminal slang expressions. This ontology is used for selecting suspicious posts and decipher them. In our solution, the criminal intention in written posts is automatically classified relying on learned models from existing posts. This work carries out a case study to evaluate the framework with 8,835,290 tweets. The obtained results show its viability by demonstrating the benefits in deciphering posts and the effectiveness of detecting user’s intention in written criminal posts based on ML. Full article

Effective communication in task-oriented situations requires high-level interactions. For human–agent collaboration, tasks need to be coordinated in a way that ensures mutual understanding. Speech Act Theory (SAT) aims to understand how utterances can be used to achieve actions. SAT consists of three components: locutionary act, illocutionary act, and perlocutionary act. This paper evaluates the agent’s verbal communication while collaborating with humans. SAT was used to anatomize the structure of the agent’s speech acts (locutionary acts), the agent’s intention behind the speech acts (illocutionary acts), and the effects on the human’s mental state (perlocutionary acts). Moreover, this paper studies the impact of human perceptions of the agent’s speech acts on the perception of collaborative performance with the agent. Full article

This paper explores the relationship between natural language and the phenomenon of information. It argues that the Philosophy of Information can provide a bridge between linguistics and information science by offering a deeper understanding of how these two spheres of experience are entangled. Proceeding from the author’s 2002 Foundations of Information Science Online Conference paper ‘The Phantom of Information’ it first asks the question ‘How can we best define information’? The author then offers a brief historical perspective on the Philosophy of Language (PL) and the Philosophy of Information (PI) and highlights where the two fields overlap and interact. He indicates how the ‘information turn’ of the 1990’s grew organically out of the ‘linguistic turn’ in philosophy. The author treats the phenomenon of information as a new language with distinctive features akin to syntax, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood. Specifically he examines Chomsky’s concept of recursion and redundancy, Wittgenstein’s language as game, Saussure’s langue and parole, Benveniste’s énonciation, informative illocutionary acts (Austin, Searle), the semantic approaches of Dretske Floridi and Barwise, Grice’s implicature and Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker’s ‘inevitable circle between language and information’. He briefly discusses Terrence Deacon’s recent work in biological anthropology on language and information as it relates to his concepts of deixis, reciprocal reference and incompletion. Secondly, the paper indicates how the notion of ‘information’ is embedded in traditional grammar through adpositions which empower language as a faculty for thought and communication. The Subject/Object template of historical grammar imposed on all natural languages is reviewed from the perspective of pragmatics. The notion of ‘information’ itself is traced back (by way of Capurro’s informatio) to a configuration of ideas and concepts in classical Greek philosophy, specifically those of Epicurus and Chrysippus—the founder of formal grammar. Implications for the history and science of information are discussed. Finally, it proposes future directions for this area of study to explore how our total experience of the sphere of language and that of information are interconnected within a broader framework of mind. A distinction between cognition and connaissance is made. The faculty of human language, once the hallmark of humanism, is now under threat by the omnipresent Datocracy and its champion, Homo Informaticus. The informed and informing citizen, Homo Informationis, as defender of the information commons and infoversity, will need to ally with Herder’s Homo Loquens if s/he is to survive. Information philosophers can provide a deeper understanding of these intriguing twin phenomena necessary for our civilization. Full article