Reviews for Communication Theory Today

The average rating for Communication Theory Today based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-18 00:00:00 Stanley Pidima I was enjoying reading Hume, Kant and Mill for the Phil Perspectives class. Now I'm back to reading for the dissertation, worrying about technical senses of "what is said". This is a massive overview of the literature on the pragmatics of communication. It covers Grice's views, various Neo-Griceans, relevance theory, and affiliated characters like Bach and Recanati. Carston herself advocates a streamlined form of relevance theory, which uses general considerations about cognitive processing and interpretation to explain everything from different ways of understanding "and" and "not" to loose use, metaphor, and Travis-like phenomena. There are hundreds of examples, which can be overwhelming for philosophers, who are used to staring long and hard at one or two examples in a given area ("A bachelor is an unmarried male"/"The leaves are green"/ "Add two"/ "X is good" etc.). In the taxonomy of varieties of contextualism, this is "radical" contextualism, because it maintains that there are no sentences that determine propositions/truth conditions without some contribution from context sensitive pragmatic effects. But it isn't "Wittgensteinian" contextualism (of the Travis/Searle variety) because it makes use of the idea of a non-context-sensitive metalanguage (that is, that it doesn't think that the terms that the theory uses are themselves context-sensitive).

Review # 2 was written on 2017-10-15 00:00:00 Phyllis Mitchell How English became the Global language ? Crystal argues it's the power no more. The powerful technologies, culture, economy, alongside the British empire in the past, are the key factors of English to dominate the world . The problem with Crystal is that he describes the English language phenomenon regardless of its dangerous consequences on the other languages in terms of the linguistic identity and multilingualism. Moreover, those who argue for the linguistic imperialism position are'naive' and 'ideals, in which they don't realize the new role of English which has nothing to do with the present politics any longer, he argues. Among those who argue against the unethical role English has been playing is Robert Phillipson in his book Linguistic Imperialism 1992. To better understand the other half of the truth it is good to read Phillipson's position.