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Hermeneutics: The pursuit of meaning following specified principles of interpretation.
Heresy: An opinion or doctrine at variance with those generally accepted as authoritative.
Blog: A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links; a mixture of what is happening in a person's life and what is happening on the Web. -
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Monthly Archives: July 2007
Media and scenarios of public opinion formation
Disfavor for Bush Hits Rare Heights – washingtonpost.com That may stem in part from the changing nature of society. When Caddell’s boss was president, there were three major broadcast networks. Today cable news, talk radio and the Internet have made … Continue reading
Negotiating image projections: Who has the power?
New Statesman – Who is the real Hillary? she is certainly the most extraordinarily self-disciplined politician I have ever watched in action. But then she has to be, because she must balance the projection of images of supposedly masculine US … Continue reading
Posted in Cognition, Discourse - text, Feminism, Framing, Society and politics
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Walking robots and local grammars
BBC NEWS | Technology | Robot unravels mystery of walking “Babies use a lot of their brains to train local circuits but once they are trained they are fairly autonomous.”Only when it comes to more difficult things – such as … Continue reading
Posted in Cognition, Linguistics, Technology and life
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Negotiating scenarios of democracy
OpinionJournal – Peggy Noonan President Bush was hired to know more than the people, to be told all the deep inside intelligence, all the facts Americans are not told, and do the right and smart thing in response. That’s the … Continue reading
Posted in Analogies, Cognition, Framing, Society and politics
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Atheism as religion and limits of rationality
Michael Gerson – What Atheists Can’t Answer – washingtonpost.com So the dilemma is this: How do we choose between good and bad instincts? Theism, for several millennia, has given one answer: We should cultivate the better angels of our nature … Continue reading
Posted in Analogies, God
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Sources of usage consensus in language change
Shifting Idioms: An Eggcornucopia : OUPblog Original New sleight of hand: 85% 15%: slight of hand fazed by: 71% 29%: phased by Ben Zimmer lists the increasing changes (by ‘false’ analogy) in the spelling of some … Continue reading
Posted in Linguistics
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Conservatism as part fo language competence
Language Log: Keeping “wrong grammar” off the air A program will be assigned a “PG” rating if it shows “people speaking with wrong grammar (except for humorous effects).” The article doesn’t say who gets to be the “grammar cop” — … Continue reading
Posted in Linguistics, Philosophy, Social Science
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Collective negotiation of causal relations
Congress must end U.S. role in a civil war nobody voted for That is why we propose to end the authorization for the war in Iraq. The civil war we have on our hands in Iraq is not our fight … Continue reading
Posted in News and media, Society and politics
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Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics
Language Log: The Supreme Court Fails Semantics All that the Court actually argues is that “BONG HiTS 4 JESUS” contains a reference to drug use. Gibberish is surely a possible interpretation of the words on the banner, but it is … Continue reading
Posted in Linguistics, Society and politics
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Professional linguists and folk theory of language
Language Log: The Linguistic Abilities of the Presidential Candidates For what it’s worth, if we count only confirmed languages spoken fluently or reasonably well, the average number of languages other than English spoken by the Democrats is 0.83, by the … Continue reading
Posted in Discourse - text, Linguistics
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