Thursday, 28 October 2010

ABSTRACT MARK BEVIR

ð Classifies Skinners approach as inspired in the Cambridge School tradition according to which; to understand an utterance is to locate it in the appropriate linguistic context.

ð Divides the English School in two:

o Conextualists: The available modes of speech give the intention of the text by giving the authors the means to perform his idea.

§ Focus on what is said

§ Pockoc

§ The meanings available to the authors depend on the ways of thinking, writing, or speaking (language) that exist in their communities.

o Conventionalists: Highlights authorial intentions rather than discourses.

§ Focus on the purpose of what was said, and on what was meant to be said

§ Skinner

ð Despite the differences, they both regard the study of linguistic context of an utterance as necessary for understanding to occur.

o They are both trying to understand the content through the language

§ Contextualists tries to understand the context through the language

LANGUAGE -> CONTEXT -> CONTENT

§ Cenventionalists tries to understand the language through the context

CONTEXT -> LANGUAGE -> CONTENT

o Anyway, both them tries to explain the content using the language, however in different levels.

o Both insist on the autonomy of intellectual history because any attempt to reduce a text to its economical, political, or biographical contexts implicitly denies the need to study the linguistic context.

o Denny the existence of perennial problems in the history.

o Denny the Myths – of coherence, doctrine, continuity, prolepsis.

ð Some Cambridge School commentator say that their theories are just epistemological issues, and not methodological. However, Keane points that, since Skinner and Pockoc define their methods as pre-requisites of understanding, they thereby fuse epistemology with methodology.

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