Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Edidin, Aron

Keywords

Discourse, Language, Philosophy

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

Philosophical accounts of discursive practice often take one of two forms. One wants to say what is distinctive about discourse, and so highlight the line that separates us from our non-speaking brethren. The other wants to say what discourse shares with strategies used to prevail over the environment, and so see it as subject to desire, power, and violence. Each account motivates a choice of vocabulary, either logical or natural, and a form of critique, either rational or genealogical. 'The force of the better argument' either refers to the force generated by argument, or the force deployed in argument. We need not make that choice-if we can see how natural abilities develop into normative practices that underwrite discourse. Then we can view knowing-that something is thus and so as a special kind of knowing-how to do something. We can view the force of argument as a special kind of force between adversaries. We can preserve the insights of each account, while also seeing them each as equally one-sided. The specific claims on offer in this thesis may not go through, but the broader aim is therapeutic. If it convinces that some such account is plausible, then we should hesitate to accept the alternatives as incompatible.

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