A widely discussed philosophical puzzle in contemporary epistemology is the so-called sceptical paradox. Ascriber contextualism has taken centre stage as the anti-sceptical theory that purportedly offers the best solution to the sceptical paradox. Ascriber contextualists Stewart Cohen (1988, 1999) and Keith DeRose (1995) advertise their anti-sceptical theory as the one that exclusively explains and solves it. This is false advertising, however. My thesis, which has been greatly influenced by the critical work of Michael Williams (1991) and Duncan Pritchard (2005), is that the generation of the sceptical paradox depends on whether the epistemologist is an internalist or externalist about knowledge, and that the ascriber contextualist attempt to solve the sceptical paradox rests on a long history of mistakes concerning internalist assumptions made by externalists Fred Dretske (1970) and Robert Nozick (1981). By applying the semantic thesis of ascriber contextualism to epistemology, ascriber contextualists seek to emend the rejection of the closure principle made by these externalists. This rejection came from these externalists mistakenly making internalist assumptions when facing sceptical hypotheses. Unfortunately, ascriber contextualists leave much unfixed, and end up inheriting and suffering from the serious mistake about internalist assumptions that had plagued the epistemologies of these externalists and now infects the ascriber contextualist solution to the sceptical paradox. With the help of hindsight to examine this history and an appreciation of how the adoption of one of these respective views about knowledge makes all the difference for whether the sceptical paradox arises, we come to see that the contextualist solution to the sceptical paradox is unnecessary.

A widely discussed philosophical puzzle in contemporary epistemology is the so-called sceptical paradox. Ascriber contextualism has taken centre stage as the anti-sceptical theory that purportedly offers the best solution to the sceptical paradox. Ascriber contextualists Stewart Cohen (1988, 1999) and Keith DeRose (1995) advertise their anti-sceptical theory as the one that exclusively explains and solves it. This is false advertising, however. My thesis, which has been greatly influenced by the critical work of Michael Williams (1991) and Duncan Pritchard (2005), is that the generation of the sceptical paradox depends on whether the epistemologist is an internalist or externalist about knowledge, and that the ascriber contextualist attempt to solve the sceptical paradox rests on a long history of mistakes concerning internalist assumptions made by externalists Fred Dretske (1970) and Robert Nozick (1981). By applying the semantic thesis of ascriber contextualism to epistemology, ascriber contextualists seek to emend the rejection of the closure principle made by these externalists. This rejection came from these externalists mistakenly making internalist assumptions when facing sceptical hypotheses. Unfortunately, ascriber contextualists leave much unfixed, and end up inheriting and suffering from the serious mistake about internalist assumptions that had plagued the epistemologies of these externalists and now infects the ascriber contextualist solution to the sceptical paradox. With the help of hindsight to examine this history and an appreciation of how the adoption of one of these respective views about knowledge makes all the difference for whether the sceptical paradox arises, we come to see that the contextualist solution to the sceptical paradox is unnecessary.

My thesis on contemporary animated documentaries links new media aesthetics with the documentary turn in contemporary visual culture. Drawing from the fields of Contemporary Art, Animation, Film Studies and Gaming Theory, my aim has been to explore the development of animated documentaries in the context of animation's intersection with other visual fields in a very specific technological moment of the past two decades in order to broaden the scope within which animation is analysed and understood. The starting point of my research was the widely accepted divide assumed to exist between animation and documentary. I, however, claim that the supposedly contradictory nature of animated documentaries can no longer be considered a given. Despite the potentially challenging reception of animated documentaries, it is important to identify what it is that the animated image contributes to documentary, which is the visualisation of what is otherwise un-representable. My thesis investigates a new area of the intangible, focusing on the virtualisation of culture rather than on subjective or imaginary aspects of documentary works and visual interpretations. This cultural shift consequently requires new aesthetics of documentation that exceed the capacities of the photographic. My main argument is that due to contemporary technological changes, animation has permeated real contexts of daily life to the extent that it has become disassociated from the realm of fiction. Rather, in altering the way viewers are becoming accustomed to observing, learning about and connecting with reality, animation has brought about a constitutive change in ways of seeing one's world. This change can be described as animation’s impact on the relation between visual signification and believability. It is this which necessitates a reconsideration of what shapes a sense of realism in documentaries today. My research therefore culminates with new conceptualisations concerning the cultural role of animation, introducing what I argue is the formation of the "animated document" and "documentary animation". In these contexts, animation is no longer an interpretive visualisation substituting for photography but a direct capturing of animated realities. Animation thus expands what is considered to constitute reality and, as a result, also destabilises assumptions about the perceived conflict between animation and documentary, widening the sphere of documentary aesthetics.

Guided by the question of what does photography bring into being, 'Against Indexicality' is a proposition to rethink the foundation of the philosophy of photography - to rethink the supposed relation of truth between the photograph and the world. Taking Indexicality as a messy and convoluted conceptual field comprised of the notions of pointing, stillness, and fragmentation, this study works to untangle the three from each other, separately challenging each individual notion. In analysing each of the three through their conceptualisation by prominent thinkers, including Charles S. Peirce, Susan Sontag, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and examining them against and through examples of photographic images, this study points to the imprecisions, insufficiencies, and incompatibilities of Indexicality in relation to the photographic image and form. Undoing Indexicality as a field, this study resists Indexicality as a paradigm, proposing a new theoretical framework for photography: rather than looking at photographic images as truth bearers that can evidence the photographed, it proposes to look at photographic images as formations that form a thought out of the photographed. In that, this study works to remedy the Indexicality fever, or compulsion, which it identifies as the root cause of theoretical mess within the philosophy of photography. By evincing that Indexicality is a wrong, albeit necessary, solution to a problem that is to do with identifying the relation of the photograph to the world, it not only lifts photography out of a Procrustean bed in which it was never comfortable, but also allows for a new solution to develop. This solution is the theory of photo-poiesis: a move beyond the materiality and away from the referentiality of photography towards its being in the world and the thought that it forms and brings-forth - towards thinking.

This thesis investigates the construction of identity and authenticity through sociophonetic variation, focusing on British Hip Hop artist Amy Winehouse. Prior work on British vocal artists’ phonetic variation has relied upon regional categorical frameworks (Trudgill, 1983; Carlsson, 2001) and found variation to be evidence of production errors and speakers’ misidentification of targeted speech patterns, resulting in summative interpretations of conflict between speakers’ discreet identities and speech pattern categories. More recent work has attended to linguistic processes within cultural movements influenced but not strictly delimited by sociolinguistics’ canonical categories of region, class, race, etc. Within the context of the Hip Hop cultural movement, which demands members maintain authenticity via its mantra of keepin’ it real, scholars have described processes by which authenticity is redefined and re-localized (Pennycook, 2007), emphasized the performative process of the construction of identity rather than the categorical delineation of identity (Alim, 2009), explicated the construction of authenticity within Hip Hop as inextricable from Hip Hop’s roots in the Black American Speech Community (Alim, 2006), and shown how linguistic processes mediate the markedness of artists’ Whiteness as they construct authenticity within Hip (Cutler, 2007). This work applies sociophonetic analytic tools to sung and spoken speech informed by indexical theory. Through indexical theory, the construction of identity is examined via the employment of variants that do not convey fixed meanings but instead create complex fields of possible meaning (Eckert, 2008). The variables examined include postvocalic contexts of the liquids /l/ and /r/ and intervocalic instances of /t/. Findings indicate that Winehouse’s use of non-rhotic postvocalic /r/ in spoken language, rhotic postvocalic /r/ in singing language, glottal [ʔ] intervocalic /t/ in spoken language, intervocalic /t/ as [ɾ] in singing language, and categorical use of vocalized postvocalic /l/, demonstrates a negotiation between a Hip Hop identity and a White British non-posh identity. Her spoken and singing language represent a re-localizing of Hip Hop’s demand for authenticity within Winehouse’s British context. Findings indicate that phonetic features can index a redefinition of authenticity as forms of talk, such as Hip Hop, gain ownership in new contexts.

This research project investigates how estrangement is manifested within the photographic image, and how levels of estrangement establish conditions for the relationships between the subject, viewer and artist. Since the medium's inception the photographic process has involved encountering and negotiating otherness and the place of strangers. Over time a consistent photographic power dynamic has been established, and this project examines to what extent participants in this dynamic can escape or yield to the historically sedimented structures in which they find themselves participating. The images in this body of work tread the line between typological portraits and tentative encounters with strangers. These encounters/images do not suggest personal identity but question what it is to be a photographic subject. Rather than offer psychological insight into the subject, they attempt to foreground the signifying systems and process of photographic "representation". The project explores estrangement through physical and conceptual distance, negotiating photography's relationship to the real as a process, an image and an object.

This thesis proposes that there are two kinds of clauses: indexical clauses, which are evaluated with respect to the speech situation; and anaphoric clauses, which are evaluated with respect to a contextually-given (anaphoric) situation. Empirical motivation for this claim comes from the clause-typing system of Plains Cree, an Algonquian language spoken on the Canadian plains, which morpho-syntactically distinguishes between two types of clauses traditionally called INDEPENDENT and CONJUNCT orders. In the current analysis, the INDEPENDENT order instantiates indexical clauses, and the CONJUNCT order instantiates anaphoric clauses. After laying out the proposal (chapter 1) and establishing the morphosyntax of Plains Cree CPs (chapter 2), the remaining chapters discuss the proposal in detail. Chapter 3 focusses on the syntax and semantics of indexical clauses (Plains Cree’s INDEPENDENT order). Syntactically, I show that there is an anti-c-command and an anti-precedence condition on indexical clauses. Semantically, I show that indexical clauses are always and only evaluated with respect to the speech situation, including the speech time (temporal anchoring), speech place (spatial anchoring), and speaker (referential anchoring). Chapter 4 focusses on the syntax and semantics of anaphoric clauses (Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT order). Syntactically, I show that anaphoric clauses must always be either preceded or dominated by some other antecedent clause. Semantically, I show that the value of temporal/spatial/referential dependent elements within an anaphoric clause is determined by an antecedent. Chapter 5 turns to the syntactic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there are three classes: chained clauses, adjunct clauses, and mediated argument clauses. I provide two kinds of diagnostics that distinguish these classes, and explore the consequences of this classification for argument clauses and complementation. Finally, Chapter 6 proposes a semantic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there is a direct mapping between the morphology and the semantics: one complementizer encodes presupposition of the proposition, the lack of a complementizer encodes a-veridicality of the proposition, and one complementizer is semantically unspecified (the elsewhere case). This means that Plains Cree’s clause-typing is fundamentally concerned with how the truth of the proposition is represented.

This thesis proposes that there are two kinds of clauses: indexical clauses, which are evaluated with respect to the speech situation; and anaphoric clauses, which are evaluated with respect to a contextually-given (anaphoric) situation. Empirical motivation for this claim comes from the clause-typing system of Plains Cree, an Algonquian language spoken on the Canadian plains, which morpho-syntactically distinguishes between two types of clauses traditionally called INDEPENDENT and CONJUNCT orders. In the current analysis, the INDEPENDENT order instantiates indexical clauses, and the CONJUNCT order instantiates anaphoric clauses. After laying out the proposal (chapter 1) and establishing the morphosyntax of Plains Cree CPs (chapter 2), the remaining chapters discuss the proposal in detail. Chapter 3 focusses on the syntax and semantics of indexical clauses (Plains Cree’s INDEPENDENT order). Syntactically, I show that there is an anti-c-command and an anti-precedence condition on indexical clauses. Semantically, I show that indexical clauses are always and only evaluated with respect to the speech situation, including the speech time (temporal anchoring), speech place (spatial anchoring), and speaker (referential anchoring). Chapter 4 focusses on the syntax and semantics of anaphoric clauses (Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT order). Syntactically, I show that anaphoric clauses must always be either preceded or dominated by some other antecedent clause. Semantically, I show that the value of temporal/spatial/referential dependent elements within an anaphoric clause is determined by an antecedent. Chapter 5 turns to the syntactic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there are three classes: chained clauses, adjunct clauses, and mediated argument clauses. I provide two kinds of diagnostics that distinguish these classes, and explore the consequences of this classification for argument clauses and complementation. Finally, Chapter 6 proposes a semantic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there is a direct mapping between the morphology and the semantics: one complementizer encodes presupposition of the proposition, the lack of a complementizer encodes a-veridicality of the proposition, and one complementizer is semantically unspecified (the elsewhere case). This means that Plains Cree’s clause-typing is fundamentally concerned with how the truth of the proposition is represented.

This research project investigates how estrangement is manifested within the photographic image, and how levels of estrangement establish conditions for the relationships between the subject, viewer and artist. Since the medium's inception the photographic process has involved encountering and negotiating otherness and the place of strangers. Over time a consistent photographic power dynamic has been established, and this project examines to what extent participants in this dynamic can escape or yield to the historically sedimented structures in which they find themselves participating. The images in this body of work tread the line between typological portraits and tentative encounters with strangers. These encounters/images do not suggest personal identity but question what it is to be a photographic subject. Rather than offer psychological insight into the subject, they attempt to foreground the signifying systems and process of photographic "representation". The project explores estrangement through physical and conceptual distance, negotiating photography's relationship to the real as a process, an image and an object.

This thesis proposes that there are two kinds of clauses: indexical clauses, which are evaluated with respect to the speech situation; and anaphoric clauses, which are evaluated with respect to a contextually-given (anaphoric) situation. Empirical motivation for this claim comes from the clause-typing system of Plains Cree, an Algonquian language spoken on the Canadian plains, which morpho-syntactically distinguishes between two types of clauses traditionally called INDEPENDENT and CONJUNCT orders. In the current analysis, the INDEPENDENT order instantiates indexical clauses, and the CONJUNCT order instantiates anaphoric clauses. After laying out the proposal (chapter 1) and establishing the morphosyntax of Plains Cree CPs (chapter 2), the remaining chapters discuss the proposal in detail. Chapter 3 focusses on the syntax and semantics of indexical clauses (Plains Cree’s INDEPENDENT order). Syntactically, I show that there is an anti-c-command and an anti-precedence condition on indexical clauses. Semantically, I show that indexical clauses are always and only evaluated with respect to the speech situation, including the speech time (temporal anchoring), speech place (spatial anchoring), and speaker (referential anchoring). Chapter 4 focusses on the syntax and semantics of anaphoric clauses (Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT order). Syntactically, I show that anaphoric clauses must always be either preceded or dominated by some other antecedent clause. Semantically, I show that the value of temporal/spatial/referential dependent elements within an anaphoric clause is determined by an antecedent. Chapter 5 turns to the syntactic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there are three classes: chained clauses, adjunct clauses, and mediated argument clauses. I provide two kinds of diagnostics that distinguish these classes, and explore the consequences of this classification for argument clauses and complementation. Finally, Chapter 6 proposes a semantic subclassification of Plains Cree’s CONJUNCT (i.e., anaphoric) clauses. I propose that there is a direct mapping between the morphology and the semantics: one complementizer encodes presupposition of the proposition, the lack of a complementizer encodes a-veridicality of the proposition, and one complementizer is semantically unspecified (the elsewhere case). This means that Plains Cree’s clause-typing is fundamentally concerned with how the truth of the proposition is represented. / Arts, Faculty of / Linguistics, Department of / Graduate