Both as regards their compass (non-other-addressed speech and non-informative communication are in effect ignored) and their scarcely empirical nature, there is reason to be dissatisfied with recent developments in Pragmatics. How to find a sounder basis for pragmatic investigation? If a psychological (in this sense: centered on underlying mental processes) appproach is adopted in Pragmatics investigation, a strategic detour through mental processes leading to other kinds of activities is likely to prove methodologically sound and heuristically fruitful. For it allows outlining an abstract model of (mental processes) inception of any kind of activity, keeping so at bay theoretical bias from the particular pragmatic standpoint that the theorist may happen to favor. And filling in the model with the specific features of language use shows promise to provide more specific models of the psychological processes underlying performance of linguistic activities.

This paper addresses first the appticability of the main notions included in the general notion meant item, meant partial situation (MPST), meant activity (MACT), and implicitly meant background situation (IMBST) -that of meant agent will be only mentioned in an aside-, plus the notion meaning activity (MNGACT). It will be shown that, when coupled to other notions, such as ‘ontological status’ of IMBST relative to the focussed (part of) current situation (FCST), as well as to the matching ‘ontological’ properties of the meant items above, they allow to set up unified and apparently successful methods to explore important and debated pragmatic issues. Then their usefulness for research in the domain traditionally accorded to speech-act theory is put to (a preliminary) test; and finally the general processual sketch of linguistic activity advanced in the last Sections of P.I is carefully gauged as to its prospects regarding actual implementation of more specific processual sketches of both emission and reception linguistic activities.

This paper analyses some aspects in Osiander’s (1498-1552) “Preface” to De Revolutionibus (1543) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1473-1453) and the “Preface Letter” also by Copernicus to the Pope Paul III (1468-1549). The reading is carried out from the intellectual framework where the works are written, taking as a reference De Disciplinis (1531) by Juan Luis Vives (1492-1538), whose pedagogical thought had great influence on the 16th century. This paper points at the coincidence of attitudes as to the function of Mathematics, and therefore, of Astronomy, for both a purely probabilistic assessment of theastronomical hypotheses, and the overcoming of the instrumentality of the calculations by means of their practical use. This last channel, promoted by a sceptic academicism which was already present in the first half of the 16th century, contributes to a better understanding of the reality of the progressive acceptation of a new structure of the world. Vives has very frequently been talked of as the clear antecedent of the great masters of thought of the modern culture, but his style and the dynamics of his thought -totally Humanist- are very different from those of Copernicus and Osiander, and thus, this paper aims to analyse his cultural context and his reflections about himself.

There are several areas in logic where the monotonicity of the consequence relation fails to hold. Roughly these are the traditional non-monotonic systems arising in Artificial Intelligence (such as defeasible logics, circumscription, defaults, ete), numerical non-monotonic systems (probabilistic systems, fuzzy logics, belief functions), resource logics (also called substructural logics such as relevance logic, linear logic, Lambek calculus), and the logic of theory change (also called belief revision, see Alchourron, Gärdenfors, Makinson [2224]). We are seeking a common axiomatic and semantical approach to the notion of consequence whieh can be specialised to any of the above areas. This paper introduces the notions of structured consequence relation, shift operators and structural connectives, and shows an intrinsic connection between the above areas.

An information recovery problem is the problem of constructing a proposition containing the information dropped in going from a given premise to a given conclusion that folIows. The proposition(s) to beconstructed can be required to satisfy other conditions as well, e.g. being independent of the conclusion, or being “informationally unconnected” with the conclusion, or some other condition dictated by the context. This paper discusses various types of such problems, it presents techniques and principles useful in solving them, and it develops algorithmic methods for certain classes of such problems. The results are then applied to classical number theory, in particular, to questions concerning possible refinements of the 1931 Gödel Axiom Set, e.g. whether any of its axioms can be analyzed into “informational atoms”. Two propositions are “informationally unconnected” [with each other] if no informative (nontautological) consequence of one also follows from the other. A proposition is an “informational atom” if it is informative but no information can be dropped from it without rendering it uninformative (tautological). Presentation, employment, and investigation of these two new concepts are prominent features of this paper.

Before processual analyses of the activities of Iinguistic emission and reception are performed, a modicum of elaboration of the notions and technical devices previously suggested is necessary. First, theoretical resources previously developed are revised in two different fashions: some require to be elaborated in higher detail, while in other cases what is needed is to remove, at least in part, some restrictions initially laid down for simplification purposes. Then some notional clarifications and new specific distinctions a.nd notions are suggested for the study of emission, since the fact that this kind of linguistic performance is all but ignored in traditional (psychological) Pragmatics calls for an attempt to dispel some confusions originating in such a virtual neglect, and, on the other hand, for creation of a suitable array of such theoretical tools.

This final part of the essay begins by exploring some linguistic resources that organize the overall structure of utterances and longer stretches of discourse. Then specific study of emission is broached: after touching upon some further constraints and patterns of interpersonal behavior, the previously developed general sketch of (actionlike) activities’ inception is applied to several types of speech (soliloquy, full other-addressed speech and an intermediate type); the section ends with an assessment of results. Study of linguistic reception is prefaced by a general sketch of processes occurring in perception-like activities, which is then specified for Iinguistic reception; on this basis alternative preferential interpretations of an example are delved into. After an appraisal of results and perspectives and a section on general (mainly methodological) conclusions, the essay comes to a close with several Appendixes.

Does the deconstruction of scientific discourse and experimental procedures undercut realism? In this paper I want to argue that the revelation of the rhetorical character of science serves rather to support realism, since it is in the interests of the presentation of scientific writing as factual and of scientific experiments as disclosing or revealing reality that the various rhetorical devices are employed.

It is widely acknowledged that scientific discourse is full of metaphors. Does this undermine the commitment of such a discourse to truth and objective knowledge? Does this mean that the scientist (any scientist) is, after all, only a ‘rhetorician in disguise’?In what follows I will try to argue for quite the opposite view. I will show that metaphor is not simply a rhetorical device -at least, in the derogatory sense of rhetoric. There are metaphors which can be used to increment our knowledge, and to explore new conceptual domains. This appears to be the case not only for natural science, but also for the so-called ‘sciences of the social’.