At first place the article should serve as clarification of the term "lifeworld" ("Lebenswelt) by means of selected lifeworld-conceptions of 20th. century philosophy.I would like to explikate the attempts of reflexive reference to lifeworld which exist in the concept of Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Searle. According to the explanations of Husserl and Heidegger my main interest lies in the problematic of validity. The relation between lifeworld and reflection shall be dealt with in the light of the philosophy of language (Wittgenstein, Searle).At least I would like to discuss the relation between tifeword and science.

The world of daily life - taken as a product of cultural beings living in a certain state of knowledge -is in the philosophical reflexion not primary of interest as a field of scientific research. Life-world - constituted in itself by knowledge - provides an occasion to discuss the pretensions of social and philosophical sciences. This paper tries to outline some possibilities to see the relations between knowledge of different levels as a means to advance the understanding of the role of daily life and scientific knowledge.

This paper argues that Niklas Luhmann's theory of modem society's differentiation into autopoietically operating subsystems is widely accepted on false grounds. Modem society's empirical differentiation into relatively autonomous subsystems is falsely taken as the empirical point of reference for Luhmann's theory. Luhmann, his advocates and his critics; however; conflate analytical differentiation with empirical differentiation which occurs on a basis completely opposite to autopoiesis. Empirical differentiation consists of the permanent production and reproduction of codes and programs for economic, political, legal or other types of action by societal struggles which include elements of cultural legitimation, legal regulation, political enforcement and economic calculation. Such codes and programs are not evolutionary universals but historically particular institutions. Secondary conservative and critical interests support Luhmann's theory because they take it as a reflection of what they want either to preserve or to change, as the case many be.

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.

The paper presents an outline of the systemtheory of Niklas Luhmann. The foci here are the basic conceptual decisions of his approach, the relationship between systems-, media- and theory of social evolution on the one hand and the status of systemrationality and the rationalization of lifeworld on the other. One aspect of Luhmann's theorizing will be discussed critically, namly the status of relationship between structure and process of the social integration in terms of norms which regulate the interaction process.

Public Opinion in the United States of America can rightfully be described as an important part of everyday life. It is shaped by different structural constraints as well as through social interaction. In order to relate public Opinion and political Culture it is therefore necesary to begin with methodological presuppositions. In this article a qualitative macro-sociological approach is put foreward instead of methodological individualism. It is argued that it is possible to delineate elements of the political culture within the realm of public opinion from a cultural standpoint.American political culture is used here to illuminate some traits of public opinion: Republicanism, the Liberal Tradition, Populism, Civil Religion and a specific brand of american Can-do-Philosophy.Vied form this perspective political culture as well as public opinion in the United States provide a system of complex world views which might best be interpreted through the schema approach known form cognition psychology. Criticism form communitarians as well as from multiculturalists against a supposedly closed system of every-day has to therefore be rejected.

The individual disciplines of the social sciences appear to be divided as if they were concerned with different objects but they are united through many of the questions which they are asked to answer. Although the individual disciplines were about to be institutionally separated at the time of the historical school major proponents of the historical method like Schmoller were still able to combine the different approaches in a unified framework The psychology of individuals establishes a link between social behaviour and economic interests. The intuuitive method allows to understand analogies between different manifestations of the lifestyle in a nation. There have to be coherent ethical norms for individual behaviour; social integration and economic cooperation. The article describes how Schmoller came to treat ethics as a unifying principle of sociological and economic research, starting from observations on the unifying power of culture in Germany in the classical period. Lessons are drawn for modern interdisciplinary research by examining examples of topical research projects.

The concept "Präsenzfigur" combines conversation analysis and objektive Hermeneutik to show how language structure and social meaning are related. The concept concentrates on the local sensitivity of interactional structures. Empirical data are not taken to show the realization of contextfree general structures (e.g. turn taking conditional relevance). Contextsensitivity is analysed both as document and result of the selectivity, inherent in the participants’ activities in contributing to the local construction of social organization according to their dominant orientations as participants. For empirical analysis a four step modell (including maximal and minimal contrast) is proposed.

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.