This thesis integrates the epistemology of testimony with work on the epistemology, psychology, and metaphysics of language. Epistemologists of testimony typically ask what conditions must be met for an agent to gain testimonial justification or knowledge that p given that p has been asserted, and this assertion has been understood. Questions regarding the audience's ability to grasp communicated contents are largely ignored. This is a mistake. Work in the philosophy of language (and related areas) suggests that the determination and recovery of communicated contents is far from straightforward, and can go wrong in many ways. This thesis investigates the epistemology of testimony in light of this work, with a special focus on miscommunication. The introduction provides a brief overview of some relevant work on testimony, the philosophy of language, and psychology, and argues that there is good reason to investigate the three. One obvious problem in this area is that if testimonial knowledge requires knowledge of what is said then the risk of miscommunication will block testimonial knowledge. Chapter two argues that testimonial knowledge does not require knowledge of what is said. The remaining four chapters discuss problems which do to arise from miscommunication. Chapters three and four focus on the epistemic uncertainty of communication with context sensitive terms. Chapter three argues that many beliefs formed on the basis of context sensitive testimony are unsafe and insensitive. Chapter four argues that speakers often have plausible deniability about the contents of their assertions. Chapters five and six explore types of miscommunication which arise as a result of background mental states affecting our linguistic understanding. Chapter five explores the social/ethical consequences of this, arguing that certain groups are disproportionately subject to harmful misinterpretation. Chapter six argues that testimonial anti-reductionists make the wrong predictions about a range of cases of cognitive penetration.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1979. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ENGINEERING. / Vita. / Bibliography: leaves 365-385. / by Theodore Thomas Kuklinski. / Ph.D.

published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

A dichotic listening task was used to investigate the lateralization of sarcasm processing. Thirty-nine right-handed students were asked to identify which ear heard sarcastic and sincere phrases. Prosody and discourse context were simultaneously manipulated. For some trials, participants heard only the short prosodic phrases, while on other trials participants heard short vignettes prior to the phrases, which provided a context that primed either literal (sincere) or non-literal (sarcastic) interpretation. Contrary to Voyer et al. (2008), there were no differences in accuracy between the two hemispheres. However, when discourse context and prosody did not match, there was a significant right hemisphere advantage for sarcasm recognition and a left hemisphere advantage for the recognition of sincere utterances. / Department of Psychological Science

Thesis (M.S.)--Duquesne University, 2006. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p.38-40) and index.

Orientador: Carmen Zink Bolognini / Tese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T19:41:36Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Mello_GianaMariaGandiniGianide_D.pdf: 530169 bytes, checksum: 6ca1a0d2dfcab8e1b4faea20eb050f94 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2005 / Resumo: Este trabalho pretende mostrar o papel participativo do tradutor na produção de legendas de filmes. A partir de trechos dos filmes O Auto da Compadecida, com legendas em inglês, e A Outra, com legendas em português, contrastamos aspectos dos filmes em língua original e as respectivas traduções com o objetivo de apresentar as diferenças de interpretação dos tradutores. Os trabalhos sobre legendagem, como mostramos, buscam reproduzir os sentidos dos diálogos originais, supostamente imutáveis e estáveis, nas legendas traduzidas, buscando sempre a não-diferença entre original e tradução. O tradutor teria como obrigação resgatar as intenções do autor das falas e colocá-las nas legendas. Em direção oposta, partimos do princípio de que toda leitura/interpretação denuncia sua origem, contexto, história e circunstâncias de produção. Assim, o tradutor não escapa de suas características mais singulares e as leva para a tradução de legendas, imprimindo, inevitavelmente, um viés, um contorno, uma particularidade que influencia o resultado final do texto das legendas. Pretendemos mostrar, então, que para o espectador que não compreende a língua original, as legendas apresentam o enredo, os personagens, o filme conforme os olhos de cada tradutor / Doutorado / Teoria, Pratica e Ensino da Tradução / Doutor em Linguística Aplicada

This study applies Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory to the comprehension of figurative language in poetry. Students' understanding of metaphor as a linguistic category and comprehension of metaphorical texts are analysed in terms of the principle of relevance. Patterns of comprehension in English first language (Ll) and English second language (ESL) students' analyses of metaphorical texts are discussed and through an analysis of similarities and differences in these patterns of comprehension an attempt is made to develop a pedagogy around relevance theory. Relevance theory's particular emphasis on the role played by "context" in cognition is seen to have significance for the teaching of literature in South African universities. Relevance theory's account of cognition generates a range of educational principles which could be specifically applied to the teaching of metaphor. An appraisal of the strengths and difficulties students experience in expressing their understanding of metaphor in an academic context is included. This was done to further develop relevance theory into a pedagogical approach which takes into account the academic context in which writing occurs. The investigation of the particular difficulties that English metaphor poses for ESL students entailed acquiring a working knowledge of the ways in which metaphor is taught and assessed in DET schools. The interpretations of students of different linguistic, social and educational backgrounds reveal unifying elements that could be incorporated into a pedagogy based on relevance theory. Such a pedagogy would be appropriate to the multilingual/multicultural/multiracial nature of classes in South African universities and would be a more empowering approach to the teaching of English metaphor.

According to the Encoding Model, speakers communicate by encoding the propositions they want to communicate into sentences, in accordance with the conventions of a language L. By uttering a sentence that encodes p, the speaker says that p. Communication is successful only if the audience identifies the proposition that the speaker intends to communicate, which is achieved by decoding the uttered sentence in accordance with the conventions of L. A consequence of the Encoding Model has been the proliferation of underdetermination arguments, each of which concludes against some linguistic theory T, on the grounds that, were T true, audiences would be unable to know what was said by utterances of some particular linguistic form, and therefore unable to know what speakers intended to communicate by these utterance. The result, if we accept the conclusion of these arguments, is radical restriction of the domain of viable linguistic theory. This Thesis defends an alternative model according to which there need be nothing encoded in an uttered sentence – nothing that is said by its utterance – for the audience to retrieve. Rather, there are indefinitely many ways to interpret uttered sentences – indefinitely many routes to the propositions that speaker intend to communicate – which proceed through different interpretations of what is said.

Cette thèse traite de l’adaptation automatique des applications sensibles au contexte par l’utilisation d’informations liées à l’environnement social des utilisateurs afin d’enrichir le service rendu par les applications. Pour cela, notre contribution s’articule autour de la modélisation multidimensionnelle des différents niveaux de contextes sociaux, notamment le poids de la relation entre les acteurs. Plus spécifiquement, nous synthétisons des contextes sociaux non seulement liés à la familiarité mais aussi liés à la similitude des communautés statiques et dynamiques. Deux modèles basés respectivement sur les graphes et les ontologies sont proposés afin de satisfaire l’hétérogénéité des réseaux sociaux de la vie réelle. Nous utilisons les données réelles recueillies sur les réseautages sociaux en ligne pour conduire nos expérimentations et analysons les résultats en vérifiant l’efficacité de ces modèles. En parallèle nous traitons le point de vue de l’application, et nous présentons deux algorithmes utilisant des contextes sociaux pour améliorer la stratégie de transmission des données dans le réseau opportuniste, et particulièrement la contre-mesure aux nœuds égoïstes. Les simulations des scénarios réels confirment les avantages liés à l’introduction des contextes sociaux, en termes de taux de succès et de délais de transmission. Nous effectuons une comparaison avec d'autres algorithmes de transmission traditionnellement décrits dans la littérature pour compléter notre démonstration / This thesis deals with the dynamic adaptation of context-aware applications using information related to the social environment of users to enrich the service rendered by the applications. To achieve this goal our contribution mobilizes multidimensional modeling of the different levels of social contexts, especially the weight of the relationship between the actors. Particularly, we synthesize not only social contexts related to familiarity but also social contexts reasoned from the similarity of static and dynamic communities. Two models based on respectively graphs and ontologies are proposed in order to satisfy the heterogeneity of the social networks in real life. We use the actual data gathered on online social networking services for conducting experiments and the results are analyzed by checking the effectiveness of the models. In parallel we consider the point of view of the application, and we present two algorithms using social contexts to improve the strategy of transmission of data in the opportunistic network, particularly countermeasure against selfish nodes. The simulations of real scenarios confirm the advantages of introducing social contexts in terms of success rate and delay of transmission. We carry out a comparison with other popular transmission algorithms in the literature

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 154-163).