With the onset of heretofore unprecedented instances of labor unrest in the summer of 2010, it has become readily apparent that China’s economy has reached a critical juncture. Perceptions of rising social inequity and redistributive injustice are indicative of strains of economic growth that have proved as inevitable as they are consequential. Against the backdrop of an impending leadership transition and a global economy emerging from recessionary throes, changing labor market conditions will shape economic development and growth in substan­tive ways as first-tier cities and provinces are beginning a transition from take-off to early maturity stage of development. In its effort to mitigate regional disparities, China is locked into a precarious socio-economic balancing act with far-reaching consequences for domestic stability and international competitiveness. What are the short- to medium-term implica­tions for China’s domestic political economy space? What is the likely effect on China’s global labor cost arbitrage and international competitiveness?

This paper examines heterotopias of homelessness in contemporary Japan. Against received claims about a shift from a social to a post-social form of politics, the paper draws attention to distinct temporal horizons that shape statist and precarious political subjectivities at sites of economic abandonment, complicating generalizations about the demise of the social and the shift to new (post-representational) political practices in neoliberal Japan. In contrast to the politics of representation that continue to mobilize statist social imaginaries around advocacy and care for the homeless, political heterotopias of homelessness index a critical refusal of hegemonic interpellations of home and home-coming. In an effort to expand understanding of the political in Japan, the paper draws attention to the multiple temporalities constitutive of the social space of homelessness. In so doing, it seeks to make visible fugitive forms of political subjectivities beyond statist and neoliberal enclosure, and contribute more broadly to a critical discourse on the nature of politics in contemporary Japan.

This paper explores the different ways in which the Chinese Party-state has promoted for-profit service provision and the philanthropic initiatives of private entrepreneurs, in order to elucidate the changing nature of China’s social contract. Throughout the 1980s and up to the mid-1990s the prevalent social contract, built around the idea that market mechanisms would bring economic prosperity to all citizens, had largely not been challenged. That changed in the late 1990s as a result of rising socio-economic inequalities, massive lay-offs from state owned enterprise reform, rising urban poverty, rising health care costs, the countryside consistently falling behind urban levels of development, and other social issues. Over the last decade there has been a reconfiguration and rearticulation of the social contract in China, with social welfare policy becoming a key element of the Party-state’s efforts to maintain legitimacy. Initially adopting an ambivalent position towards the private provi­sion of core public services such as health and education, the Party-state now recognises the important role played by private service providers, and has introduced legislation designed to protect the providers of such services, while also ensuring that their activities can be regulated more closely.

Ever since the onset of the latest global financial crisis in 2008, China’s continuous rapid growth has led many to see the Chinese model as a viable alternative to neoliberal development. Some even see Chinese capitalism as the last hope for the rejuvenation of global capitalism. This paper argues that rather than constituting a progressive alternative to neo­liberalism, China’s stellar export-led economic growth is in fact a core part of the global neoliberal order. The exceptional competitiveness of China’s export sector originates in an urban-bias policy that is detrimental to rural-agricultural development, creating a large rural surplus labor, perpetuating the low manufacturing wage among rural migrant workers, and restraining domestic consumption. The falling consumption share of the economy led China to depend on western markets, the US in particular, for its exports. The global financial crisis ended the consumption spree in the US and elsewhere in the global North, precipitating a crisis of China’s export-led growth. China’s apparent success in weathering the global economic crisis so far is grounded on a stimulus program that escalated debt-financed fixed asset investment, which is unsustainable, though the beginning of the end of the urban bias is also evident over the last few years. The continuous rise of China as the new center of global capitalism in the long run, therefore, hinges not on the perpetuation of China’s current model of development, but on whether China could shift to a new model of development based on urban-rural balanced growth and larger household consumption share of the economy.

Chinese education was for millennia been based on memorization of texts and teacher-centered instruction. However, new primary school moral education texts produced in the past decade in both the PRC and Taiwan are based on a radically different pedagogy with students as the focus and as personally involved in their education through research, analysis of findings, and active classroom participation. Moreover, their education extends beyond acquiring knowledge and includes confidence building, social skills and emotional problem solving. The major questions are the extent to which this new pedagogy will be followed and be extended to other subjects and into middle school.

Three out of five paradoxes previously identified within international development are considered to be the core challenges to professional practice and congruence. The first, that of fostering autonomy, is considered from the perspective of the role that language plays in maintaining inappropriate donor ascendancy taking the concept of participation as an exemplar. The second, based in determinism and free will, is discussed in terms of the gap between practitioners’ espoused theory and theory-in-use that creates a syndrome of dissonance that undermines practice by elevating the importance of techne above phronesis and exemplified in the practice of planning. The third, where help appears as a threat, is discussed in terms of the moral hazard and the failure to distinguish need from deficiency, linked to humanitarian assistance and development assistance.

According to Steven Pinker and his associates the cooperative model of human communication fails, because evolutionary biology teaches us that most social relationships, including talk-exchange, involve combinations of cooperation and conflict. In particular, the phenomenon of the strategic speaker who uses indirect speech in order to be able to deny what he meant by a speech act (deniability of conversational implicatures) challenges the model. In reply I point out that interlocutors can aim at understanding each other (cooperation), while being in conflict. Furthermore, Pinker’s strategic speaker relies on the Cooperative Principle when conveying a conversational implicature, and so non-cooperative behaviour (denial) only emerges as a response to a negative reaction from the audience. It is also doubtful in the cases Pinker presents whether a denial will successfully cancel the conversational implicature – change the audience’s interpretation of speaker’s meaning. I also argue that a strategic speaker might choose indirect speech due to the ignorability of conversational implicatures, in which case the strategic speaker can be highly cooperative.

It is argued that organizations are the mechanisms that transform human action into social processes. Organizations are the origins of individuality and organizations are the foundations of what is regarded as societies. Four features make up the basis of organizations a) affiliation and exclusion b) resources c) exchangeability of individuals d) accumulative control. There are four main types of organizations: enterprises, voluntary associations, states and families. The main social actors are the organizational centaurs, which are part human and part organization. Social processes and social change are analyzed in terms of interaction between ana constellations of organizations. Organizations transcend the boundaries of systems and societies.

How does language relate to value? Why do we concern with the relation up to now? I will analyze the background of increasing interests in the relation of language to value in contemporary philosophy of language, provided with ideas that language has meaning with intention which determines the way of acts in relation with values in societies, and that, when we consider the value in language, we are searching for consequences of our speech acts for final goals of language.

There are two problematic assumptions in Kripke’s semantic argument against descriptiv­ism. Assumption 1 is that the referential relation between a name and its bearer is only a metaphysical relation between language and the world; it has nothing to do with our public linguistic practice. Assumption 2 is that if name N has its meaning and the meaning is given by one description or a cluster of descriptions, the description(s) should supply the necessary and sufficient condition for determining what N designates; it is possible for us to find out such a condition for fixing the referent of N. Emphasizing the sociality, conventionality and historicity of language and meaning, this paper criticizes Assumption 1 and Assumption 2, and concludes that Kripke’s semantic argument fails.

Grammatically, “good” is a one-place predicate. Many authors were misled by the surface grammar and thus mistook good as a simple property. Pragmatically good is a relational property if it is somehow a property. As a term for relational property, “good” captures a particular type of relations between events and the needs of persons. Therefore, all statements in which “good” occurs are statements of facts. Moral terms such as “morally right”, “morally good”, “ought to do” can be adequately defined in terms of “good” and thus all statements of values are at final analysis statements of facts. There is no dichotomy between fact and value, and the question of derivation of an ought from an is is nonsensical. Moore misunderstood the property good or the predicate “good” and thus his objection to naturalistic approach to goodness is pointless. Naturalism concerning goodness commits no fallacy.

Nominalists should give up on one of Frege’s semantic tenets, and adopt an account on which the truth-value of a sentence depends on the senses, rather than the referents, of its syntactic constituents. That way, sentences like ‘2+2=4’ and ‘Hamlet did not exist’ might be true, without components like ‘2’ and ‘Hamlet’ having a referent.

Contemporary debates on the principle of compositionality provoke a perplexing problem about its import on natural language. Whether the principle of compositionality makes any substantial constraints on the meaningfulness of natural language has an indeterminate answer. In this paper, I try to argue against the principle of compositionality for natural language by considering its significance for understanding. Part one is a general survey of the principle of compositionality pertaining to the meaning of a complex expression; and in part two, I will focus on the issue of understanding a sentence or more complex expression, pointing out that principle of compositionality is neither sufficient nor necessary for understanding, even though compositionality is true for natural language, it is trivial and useless; the final part aims to criticize the principle of compositionality from its underspecification of meaning, which is at odds with our general idea of the representational feature of natural language and the hypothesis of isomorphism among mind, language and reality.

This paper is about the interface between two phenomena—context sensitivity and pre­supposition. I argue that favored competing treatments of context sensitivity are incompatible with the received view about presupposition triggering. In consequence, I will urge a reconsideration of a much-maligned view about how best to represent context s ensitivity.

In this paper I examine cases in which we attach different meanings to words and in which we litigate or argue about the best way of defining the term in dispute. I reject the idea that this is just a matter of imposing our will on our interlocutors – I think that the process of litigation is normative. To some extent recent work in the theory of argumentation has shed considerable light on this process, but we will need to retrofit that work for the kinds of considerations we are engaged with here. I’ll begin in Section 1, with some important terminological preliminaries. Then in Section 2, I will offer a general description of how we come to notice that there are disputes about meaning and how we engage the meaning variance once it is recognized. In section 3 I’ll then take up a case that is relatively less controversial – the definition of ‘planet’ – and use it to construct a model for our meaning litigation works. Finally, in section 4 I’ll then turn to more contentious and substantial issues – the definition of ‘rape’ and the definition of ‘person’ and begin exploring how disputes about the meanings of those terms can be normative and fail to be normative.

This paper surveys rich and important phenomena in language use that theorists study from a wide range of perspectives. And according to us, there is no unique and general mechanism behind our practices of metaphor and irony. Metaphor works in a particular way, by prompting the specific kind of analogical thinking And, irony works in its own particular way, by prompting new appreciation of the apparent contribution, speaker or perspective of an utterance exhibited for effect. Or so we will argue.

In theorizing about racial pejoratives, an initially attractive view is that pejoratives have the same reference as their “neutral counterparts”. Call this the identity thesis. According to this thesis, the terms “kike” and “Jew”, for instance, pick out the same set of people. To be a Jew just is to be a kike, and so to make claims about Jews just is to make claims about kikes. In this way, the two words are synonymous, and so make the same contribution to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. While the fundamental claim for the identity thesis that Jews are kikes sounds anti-semitic, it need not be actually anti-semitic. The identity thesis is usually bolstered with the further claim that the pejorative aspect of “kike” and other such terms is located elsewhere than in truth-conditional content, so what makes “kike” a bad word is a non-truth-conditional association with anti-semitism that is not shared with the word “Jew”. The exact nature and location of the negative moral content of pejoratives is a matter of some dispute among identity theorists. But whatever the intuitive appeal of the identity theory for those persuaded by such views, it is nevertheless inconsistent.

The meaning of a noun phrase like ‘brown cow’, or ‘cow that ate grass’, is somehow conjunctive. But conjunctive in what sense? Are the meanings of other phrases—e.g, ‘ate quickly’, ‘ate grass’, and ‘at noon’—similarly conjunctive? I suggest a possible answer, in the context of a broader conception of natural language semantics. But my main aim is to highlight some underdiscussed questions and some implications of our ignorance.