Jonathan R Cohen

A bedrock principle in pragmatics is that the linguistic signals produced by speakers generally underdetermine the meanings that are communicated to interpreters. For Grice, for instance, utterance meaning lies close to what is overtly encoded, allowing only for the resolution of indexicals, tense, reference, and ambiguity. Lepore and Stone (L&S) agree, but with a stunning twist: they analyze all extrasemantic content as being derived from ambiguity resolution, leaving no work for Gricean tools. Despite significant areas of concurrence with L&S, we ultimately find their analysis to be untenable. To establish this, we focus on a form of pragmatic enrichment that recruits coherence establishment processes to apply within the clause—‘eliciture’—for which we see no credible analysis in terms of ambiguity resolution. We argue that an adequate account of language understanding must recognize the robust roles of both ambiguity resolution and pragmatic enrichment, using tense interpretation as a case study.

It appears that the distinctive feature at the core of our understanding of synesthesia—informational integration between psychological systems—is also ubiquitous in normal perception. This observation invites the question whether synesthesia is a fundamentally distinct, pathological outlier, or a syndrome continuous with capacities present in normal perception. In this chapter I offer several arguments for the continuity view. I suggest that the forms of integration in synesthetic and normal perception exhibit striking, detailed, and unexpected similarities, while the evidence some have taken to reveal significant, qualitative dissimilarities is less decisive than it may first appear. Moreover, the continuity view correctly predicts the otherwise surprising result that synesthetes perform better than non-synesthete controls in integrative perceptual tasks that don’t implicate synesthetic perception. I’ll conclude that synesthetic perception is usefully viewed as closer to non-synesthetic perception (a fortiori, less clearly pathological) than standard views allow.

Full-length studies of individual books of Nietzsche have been lacking until now both because of the immaturity of the field and because Nietzsche's style itself seems to contraindicate them. Close reading, however, reveals a great deal of literary and philosophical unity. This holds good even of Human, All-Too-Human, Nietzsche's longest and most unwieldy work. The book represents Nietzsche's break with Schopenhauer and Wagner, as well as the birth of Nietzsche as we know him in the later works. The book's embrace of science as conducive to culture follows the early works' vilification of science as anathema to culture. This reassessment is possible because science is now seen as a method and a discipline rather than an insatiable drive for knowledge, and culture is now a broad set of symbols and activities rather than a narrowly focussed "unity of artistic style." Both changes were motivated by Nietzsche's rejection of Wagner. Part of the help science provides culture is its release from restrictive metaphysical beliefs. Nietzsche battles metaphysics, principally that of Schopenhauer, by means of scientific arguments meant both to provide alternative explanations of phenomena and to expose the origin of countervailing metaphysical beliefs. However, even when combined in a two-pronged attack, these arguments still fall short of their goal of refuting metaphysics. The scientific world-view may nonetheless aid the development of "free spirits," whose unalloyed devotion to knowledge makes them science's paragons. The free spirits are the prototypes for the later works' strong individuals, yet here they are viewed as crucial elements in the cultural development of general society. Nietzsche seeks both to create them and to encourage their devotion to the needs of culture. Part of his effort to do this is the deployment of a terse, elliptical style which will involve the reader more thoroughly than can be done by means of argument alone. Study of the book's structure reveals that its core, Parts 1, 5, and 9, outlines the relation between science, culture, and free spirits.

The passage in question begins with a breakdown in the discussion between Socrates and Protagoras because of disagreement about what its ground rules will be and concludes with the discussion’s restoration. Though formally a mere hiatus from the main line of argument, this passage in fact contains a parable about politics, addressing the question, "How can people of differing abilities and preferences come together to form a community?" Since the passage appears in the middle of a dialogue explicitly concerned with education, the parable extends to education as well. The passage thus provides a springboard for insight into some essential interconnections between and among philosophy, education, and politics. On the one hand, a genuine practitioner of any of the three is ipso facto a engaged in the other two at the same time. And on the other hand, the three share an internal structure which is reflexive and transitive at the same time.