In his influential essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”, Donald Davidson argues that we cannot make sense of conceptual relativism, the doctrine that there could be incommensurably different systems of concepts applicable to a single world. According to Davidson, there is no criterion of identity for language that does not imply or presuppose the possibility that we interpret that language by means of our own language. Given some plausible assumptions, this implies that there is at most one conceptual scheme, one way of interpreting or representing the world. But then the very idea of a conceptual scheme is empty. The dissertation is an examination of Davidson’s reasoning, and a defence of a different position regarding conceptual relativism. I reject much of Davidson’s argumentation, and his radical (subordinate) conclusion that we would be able, at least in principle, to make sense of any language. Languages that we would be unable to translate or interpret, even in principle, are at least logically possible, in my view. However, this possibility should not be thought to imply or encourage conceptual relativism. In this respect, I think that Davidson and many of his critics have conflated the notion of a difference in conceptual scheme, which requires incommensurability between languages or systems of concepts, and mere conceptual difference. I argue that a genuinely alternative conceptual scheme would be associated with language unintelligible to us because of its relation to our language. For what is at issue, supposedly, is a conceptual relation: a relation between languages, not a relation between speakers, or their capacities, on the one hand, and languages, on the other. I try to show how some of Davidson’s arguments, suitably modified, can be deployed against the possibility of an alternative scheme, so understood, and provide some additional arguments of my own. My position is thus significantly weaker than Davidson’s: there could not be languages that we would be unable to interpret because they are incommensurable with our own.

El presente artículo ofrece una breve exposición de la metodología desarrollada en el marco de los trabajos técnicos realizados conjuntamente con los especialistas de la Dirección Nacional de Presupuesto Público del Ministerio de Economía y Finanzas, en el marco de la implementación del enfoque de presupuesto por resultados. Si bien ha habido retrasos en la implementación de este nuevo enfoque, esto ha permitido afinar detalles que enriquezcan la metodología, la cual se sustenta en cinco principios relativos a la gestión delas instituciones públicas: i) Asignación de recursos financieros en función al logro de objetivos estratégicos, ii) Traducción de la concepción estratégica a términos operacionales iii) Rediseño de las estructuras organizacionales a la luz de las correspondientes concepciones estratégicas. iv) Introducción de coherencia entre la evaluación de gestión y al planeamiento estratégico, utilizando a los indicadores de desempeño como vínculo clave entre ambos procesos v) Participación de los involucrados en los procesos de planeamiento estratégico y evaluación o auditoria de gestión. Por último es necesario mencionar que la aplicación de dicho enfoque permitirá la sabia aplicación de recursos públicos a las diversas intervenciones del Estado. La metodología propuesta, en esencia, lo que busca es orientar a los ejecutivos de las entidades públicas en el proceso de asignación de recursos públicos en función de resultados mensurables.

Conceptual Art (henceforth CA) has the peculiar status of being at once a neglected topic in philosophical aesthetics, and one on which a degree of philosophical weight disproportionate to the attention it has received is placed. On the one hand it is frequently mentioned by philosophers as a problematic case, one that general theories of art have difficulty dealing with, but on the other, there is a notable lack of philosophical research taking CA as its focus. It is largely taken as a given that CA is radically different from other art in various ways and thus poses problems for some of the general statements about art that philosophers tend to make. But it is striking that these claims are not, for the most part, grounded in a thorough investigation into the nature of CA. The purpose of my research is to conduct such an investigation; to address the question of what CA is, and what makes it different from other art, in order to come to a clearer view of what particular philosophical issues or difficulties CA raises for the philosophy of art. In existing literature on CA, it is standard to take CA’s distinctiveness to have something to do with the importance of ‘ideas’. I investigate what could be meant here by ‘idea’, and identify two broad schools of thought as to what form this emphasis on ideas in CA takes: Priority Accounts, which claim that in CA ideas are the most important aspect of the work and Constitution Accounts, which claim that works of CA are ideas. I identify serious problems for Constitution Accounts, in general, and for some kinds of Priority Account. I then put forward a new kind of Priority account which I think overcomes the problems faced by its rivals.

This essay aims to find a correlation between the poetry of William Butler Yeats and the social-cultural context of its time-period. With the aid of conceptual history, representations of fundamental concepts can be revealed in the written text. The methodological approach is based on Reinhart Koselleck's Begriffsgeschichte where concepts are used for timing history. The two concepts in focus in the essay are 'crisis' and 'the Golden Age'. The results found in the analysis of Yeats' poems displayed to a high amount the representation of the concept of 'crisis', revealing that crisis in the society at that time is reflected in Yeats' poems, but representations of the counter-concept 'the Golden Age' was only partly found in poems from his later collections. A suggestion for further research is to perform a study where several contemporary poets are investigated simultaneously with the aid of conceptual history.

The essay draws attention to the growing numbers of contemporary artists who are exploring and exploiting the creative protocols of design in their work. It is argued that this trend has become an important theme and pressing issue in contemporary visual art. Though it is an uneven, fragmented, widely dispersed and apparently incoherent phenomenon without any clearly defined, unitary objectives, the essay proceeds from the assumption that the adoption of design as creative idiom by a wide variety of artists is informed by social dynamics and material resources that are coherent enough to be meaningfully identified and described. It therefore sets out to develop and account of this phenomenon by situating it within our contemporary historical context. To this end, the essay first addresses the conceptual resources that are currently available to artists. The author proposes, in this regard, that a gradual mutation in the general epistemological sensibility of Modernity over the last number of decades has come to transform our understanding of the nature of, and relationship between, art, aesthetics, cognition and ethico-political life, and therefore of how art could potentially function in our individual and collective consciousnesses. More particularly, these broad epistemological developments have registered in contemporary art practice through the coagulation of two distinct sets of conceptualist priorities. It is argued that these two sets of priorities both accommodate, if not facilitate, in their own ways, the adoption of design as creative idiom in contemporary art. The essay also addresses the social conditions within which contemporary artists’ creative practices are situated. In order to identify and describe the social conditions and dynamics that may contribute towards the poignancy and currency of design as creative idiom within in art, the author utilizes the insights of a number of prominent scholars from the field of Sociology. These authors’ observations suggests that a significant transformation has taken place in the material basis of social life, over the last number of decades, under the combined influence of a number of important technological and economic developments. Together, these developments have conspired to produce a dynamic and disorientating world full of uncertainty and insecurity. The author suggests that this fluid situation may have contributed, in various ways, not only to the current prominence of design in social life, but also to the apparent willingness of artists to explore design as creative idiom in their work. Arguing that significant relations can be drawn between the work of individual artists based on the shared intellectual climate and social dynamics within which it is developed, the author tries, in the final section, to ground his observations in the concrete singularity of individual artistic practice. To this end, the work and interests of American artist Andrea Zittel is examined and interpreted. Zittel’s work is explored as an example of the complex ways in which personal motives, social forces and intellectual currents meet at the intersection of art and design.

Cette étude adopte une analyse cognitive et contrastive des métaphores de l'alimentation en arabe tunisien, en français et en anglais. Cette étude a pour objectif la comparaison des métaphores dans leurs cadres culturels tout en analysant l'effet du contexte socioculturel sur la compréhension et l'utilisation de ces métaphores. Cette étude part d'un corpus qui contient des expressions métaphoriques utilisant des termes en rapport avec l'alimentation. Ces termes incluent les différents types d'aliments et la description des expériences accompagnant l'alimentation. Le corpus a été collecté en consultant des dictionnaires pour le français et l'anglais dans les langues étudiées et en enregistrant des communications avec des sujets parlant la langue arabe tunisienne, où ils répondent à des questions portant sur l'utilisation des termes de l’alimentation. L'analyse qualitative du corpus est basée essentiellement sur les correspondances entre les domaines (cross-domain mapping) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980 ; Lakoff, 1993) l'un des principaux axes sur lesquels la théorie de la métaphore conceptuelle est construite. L'étude est divisée en trois grandes étapes : 1-Une description et l'analyse des différentes métaphores de l'alimentation dans les trois langues tout en essayant d’extraire les différentes métaphores conceptuelles et en expliquant leur rôle en interaction avec la théorie de l’incorporation (embodiment) : Johnson, 1987 ; Lakoff & Johnson, 1999 ; Maalej, 2004) dans la compréhension et l'utilisation de ces métaphores. 2- Une comparaison de ces métaphores en se basant sur le modèle postulé par Kövecses (2005) analysant la variation métaphorique et l'effet du contexte culturel. Ce modèle étudie les différents aspects de variation métaphorique entre langues/cultures. Ces aspects sont les domaines source et cible, les relations entre la source et la cible, les métaphores linguistiques, les correspondances et modèles culturels. 3- Une investigation de l'effet du contexte socioculturel sur la compréhension et l'utilisation des métaphores de l'alimentation a lieu à travers une étude basée sur la décomposition des différentes métaphores étudiées en métaphores simples et métaphores complexes. Ce modèle développé par Yu (2008) démontre à travers une étude comparative des métaphores conceptuelles l’existence d’un filtre culturel qui permet l’apparition ou l’absence de certaines métaphores spécifiques à la langue/culture en question. / This study adopts a cognitive contrastive analysis of English, French and Tunisian Arabic (for short TA) food metaphors corpora. The three main objectives of the present study are: 1) reveal the cognitive tools governing the understanding of food metaphors across the three languages. 2) sort out and compare the different target domains of food in the three languages with a particular focus on universality and variation. 3) address through variation, the impact of the socio-cultural context on metaphors understanding, use, creation and recreation. Investigating the conceptual role of food expressions, the impact of culture and the interaction between mind, body and culture is the common point among the main objectives of the present research. The study started with collecting a corpus of food-related terms used metaphorically in context. The data collection relied on written and spoken material. The corpus was then analysed qualitatively on the basis of the cross-domain mapping. The study investigated the pertinence of food and related practices in conceptualizing abstract experiences and then being a depository of familiar experiences ready for being created and recreated to frame newly abstract domains and situations. By doing so, the present work defined the role of the socio-cultural settings in metaphorical thought and reviewed the ways through which the context shapes metaphor use and understanding.

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This dissertation draws upon local aesthetic attitudes held by members of the elder generation of first-language Scottish Gaelic speakers in Cape Breton Island, Canada towards various forms of communally-based cultural expression as conceived through metaphor. Through such engagement one begins to sense the central role of emplaced identity alongside embodied experience in describing these forms. In many ways, to the ethnographic fieldworker, this is uncharted territory. Here fieldwork functions within emic models of the cèilidh (visit) through collective social engagement in seanchas, an intracultural form of metalinguistic and metacultural discourse. Such a methodological approach facilitates in unveiling an intersubjective understanding of past, present and future acts, the forging of collective identity in the social world and finding meaning in cultural expression. In the context of this dissertation, what began as a seanchas-based exploration into local ethnoaesthetic attitudes revealed a wealth of metaphor in various abstractions arising out of our shared discourse. Such organically yet creatively conceived metaphors function between that which is symbolic and habitual, capable of crossing the boundaries of genre and breaking-down the partitions of that which is at once deemed abstract and concrete. Through the conceptual metaphor theories of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson among others, this works employs a dynamic system of interpretation that, when working in this ethnolinguistic context, makes full use of the available body of cultural and linguistic knowledge both synchronically and diachronically. This ethnography of metaphor, therefore, follows a pathway arising out of a sequential understanding of sensory experience in interpreting both identity and aesthetic thought as expressed by these Scottish Gaels. Beginning with individual orientation in time and space through cultural, social and emotional engagement with both the physical and cognitive landscape, the ethnography goes on to explore both a synaesthetic and kinaesthetic awareness of the various ways in which we conceive expressive sound in its flow. Within this conceptual metaphor framework a system is unveiled in which the expression of communal tradition is seen as emanating from a shared cridhe (heart/centre). Subsequently, the transmission of this knowledge is conceptualised among encultured individuals as capable of being metaphorically eaten and, therefore, (re)internalised in the body. Such an understanding is intrinsically linked to the mutual aesthetic appreciation of language and music through their blas (taste). Ultimately, these metaphors are rooted in an integrated system oriented towards the collective attainment of social wellbeing and a principal desire to sustain that which they serve to describe.

Telehealth, the use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to support care delivery at a distance, is increasingly used in health systems worldwide. A service system is defined as a configuration of people, technologies, and other resources that interact with other service systems to create mutual value. Adopting a service system perspective thus allows understanding a telehealth service as an ICT-enabled service system. Adequately configuring resources, both tangible (e.g., hardware) and intangible (e.g., knowledge), is key to co-creating value through service systems. However, existing service system engineering methods and tools are not yet able to comprehensively capture the nature, role, and status of resources within service systems. In particular, while conceptual modelling is recognized as an excellent tool of understanding, designing, and monitoring for service engineering, existing conceptual modelling notations have limited abilities to express configurations of resources. In order to address this gap, the following research objectives are proposed: 1) Develop a conceptual framework of resource configurations as the basis for further developing a metamodel of resource configurations; 2) Develop a metamodel of resource configurations in ICT-enabled service systems that can formally express the constructs, relationships, and constraints within the domain of resource configurations; 3) Demonstrate and evaluate the metamodel by conducting a multiple-case study in the field of telehealth. This study will focus on telehealth as a representative instance of ICT-enabled service systems. The research design is guided by the Design Science Research Methodology (DSRM). DSRM provides a well-structured process for developing and evaluating information systems artifacts, such as the proposed metamodel, that can solve practical problems while contributing to a knowledge base. A multiple-case study of telehealth services at a Canadian hospital will support the evaluation and refinement of the metamodel. The results of this research project include both conceptual and practical contributions. The metamodel of resource configurations derived from the reviewed literature and conceptual framework will provide a formal understanding of resource configurations in ICT-enabled service systems. The metamodel may also be adopted as a tool for professionals to capture and analyze resource configurations in the domain of ICT-enabled services such as telehealth.

Metaphor is an important tool for describing musical structure and interpretation. Recent research suggests that metaphor goes beyond a linguistic device; we use conceptual metaphor frameworks and cross-domain mapping based upon our embodied experiences to understand our world around us. I review the linguistic origins of metaphor theory and show how the purview of metaphor theory has recently extended into cognitive domains through a case study, primarily using the work of metaphor scholar Zoltán Kövecses. I then review how two prominent music theorists--Michael Spitzer and Lawrence Zbikowski--have developed current theories of metaphor to refine their approach to music analysis. These sources provide an effective backdrop into my case study of isomorphic conceptual underpinnings of metaphors used in two prominent analytical essays in music theory, Donald F. Tovey's, "Tonality" and David Lewin's "Music Theory, Phenomenology, and Modes of Perception." Finally I utilize conceptual metaphor and cross-domain mapping to support my analysis of the tonal role of C♯/D♭ in Beethoven String Quartet No. 7 in F Major, op. 59, no. 1, first movement, and hexatonic cycles in Schubert Piano Trio in E♭ Major, D. 929, first movement. My analyses aim to elucidate the isomorphic aspects of evocative and useful metaphors in music analysis that help us engage with music in a deeper, nuanced manner.