Charles Travis

selected essays

Occasion-sensitivity

This book mounts a sustained attack on ideas that are dear to many practitioners of analytic philosophy. It rejects the idea that thoughts are essentially representational items whose content is independent of context. In doing so, it undermines the foundations of much contemporary philosophy of mind.

Representation in Thought and Language

Unshadowed Thought

Thought's Footing is an enquiry into the relationship between the ways things are and the way we think and talk about them. It is also a study of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: Charles Travis develops his account of certain key themes into a unified view of the work as a whole. His methodological starting-point is to see Wittgenstein's work as a response to Frege's. The central question is: how does thought get its footing? How can the thought that things are a certain way be connected to things being that way? Wittgenstein departs from Frege in holding that there are indefinitely many ways of filling out (giving content to) the notion of truth.. The truth of a thought or utterance is connected with the consequences of thinking or saying it. That is the point of Wittgenstein's introduction of the notion of a language game. The second key theme is this: a representation of things as being a certain way cannot take the right form for truth-bearing without a background of agreement in judgements: its form must belong to thinkers of a given kind. The third key theme is that the proprietary perceptions of a given sort of thinker as to what would be a case of judging when there is a particular way for things to be is not subject to criticism from outside it. Along the way Travis gives his own distinctive take on such topics as the problem of singular thought, the notion of a proposition, rule-following, sense and nonsense, the possibility of private language, and the representational content of experience. The result is an original and stimulating demonstration of the continuing value of Wittgenstein's work for central debates in philosophy today.

A Theme in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations

Thought's Footing

Ferenc Gyuris

Francis Ludlow

This book illustrates how literature, history and geographical analysis complement and enrich each other’s disciplinary endeavors. The Hun-Lenox Globe, constructed in 1510, contains the Latin phrase 'Hic sunt dracones' ('Here be dragons'), warning sailors of the dangers of drifting into uncharted waters. Nearly half a millennium earlier, the practice of ‘earth-writing’ (geographia) emerged from the cloisters of the great library of Alexandria, as a discipline blending the twin pursuits of Strabo’s poetic impression of places, and Herodotus’ chronicles of events and cultures. Eratosthenes, a librarian at Alexandria, and the mathematician Ptolemy employed geometry as another language with which to pursue ‘earth-writing’. From this ancient, East Mediterranean fount, the streams of literary perception, historical record and geographical analysis (phenomenological and Euclidean) found confluence. The aim of this collection is to recover such means and seek the fount of such rich waters, by exploring relations between historical geography, geographic information science (GIS) / geoscience, and textual analysis. The book discusses and illustrates current case studies, trends and discourses in European, American and Asian spheres, where historical geography is practiced in concert with human and physical applications of GIS (and the broader geosciences) and the analysis of text - broadly conceived as archival, literary, historical, cultural, climatic, scientific, digital, cinematic and media. Time as a multi-scaled concept (again, broadly conceived) is the pivot around which the interdisciplinary contributions to this volume revolve. In The Landscape of Time (2002) the historian John Lewis Gaddis posits: “What if we were to think of history as a kind of mapping?” He links the ancient practice of mapmaking with the three-part conception of time (past, present, and future). Gaddis presents the practices of cartography and historical narrative as attempts to manage infinitely complex subjects by imposing abstract grids to frame the phenomena being examined— longitude and latitude to frame landscapes and, occidental and oriental temporal scales to frame timescapes. Gaddis contends that if the past is a landscape and history is the way we represent it, then it follows that pattern recognition constitutes a primary form of human perception, one that can be parsed empirically, statistically and phenomenologically. In turn, this volume reasons that literary, historical, cartographical, scientific, mathematical, and counterfactual narratives create their own spatio-temporal frames of reference. Confluences between the poetic and the positivistic; the empirical and the impressionistic; the epic and the episodic; and the chronologic and the chorologic, can be identified and studied by integrating practices in historical geography, GIScience / geoscience and textual analysis. As a result, new perceptions and insights, facilitating further avenues of scholarship into uncharted waters emerge. The various ways in which geographical, historical and textual perspectives are hermeneutically woven together in this volume illuminates the different methods with which to explore terrae incognitaes of knowledge beyond the shores of their own separate disciplinary islands.

Landscapes of Time and Place

Historical Geography, GIScience and Textual Analysis

Alexander von Lünen

The case studies in this book illuminate how arts and humanities tropes can aid in contextualizing Digital Arts and Humanities, Neogeographic and Social Media activity and data through the creation interpretive schemas to study interactions between visualizations, language, human behaviour, time and place.

Neogeography, Social Media and Big Data Integrations and Applications

The Digital Arts and Humanities

The Uses of Sense provides a novel account of Wittgenstein's view of language as expressed in the Philosophical Investigations. On the account, Wittgenstein's view is a radical break with a still-dominant Fregean tradition. Travis applies this account to show the significance of private language and of other major themes in the Investigations, such as family resemblance and language games. Wittgenstein uses the idea of private language for a thought experiment. What is the experiment meant to test? Travis suggests that it is two pictures of the having of semantic properties, by whatever items might do so, that are at stake. One picture is Fregean. The other is opposed to it in denying a certain fixity in the semantic properties of an item which, for example, might permit simply defining some items as the bearers of such-and-such semantics. On Wittgenstein's picture, the semantics of any item is variable across occasions for viewing it or using it. This variability arises through the dependence of any item's semantics on its users and their uses of it. This dependence requires publicity of a sort excluded by private language. If items may still have semantics privately, Travis argues, then Wittgenstein's picture may not be compulsory. But if semantics collapses under such unnatural conditions, then, in ways Wittgenstein indicates, that shows something fundamentally mistaken in the Fregean approach.

Wittgenstein's Philosophy of Language

The Uses of Sense

Charles Travis investigates a central problem in philosophy, one of the most puzzling. Thought must be about a world independent of us. But our capacities for thought shape thought's objects. So it can seem that what is true, and what is not, cannot be independent of us. Objectivity and the Parochial suggests how we might resolve this paradox.

Objectivity and the Parochial

Charles Travis presents a series of essays in which he has developed his distinctive view of the relation of thought to language. The key idea is 'occasion-sensitivity': what it is for words to express a given concept is for them to be apt for contributing to any of many different conditions of correctness (notably truth conditions). Since words mean what they do by expressing a given concept, it follows that meaning does not determine truth conditions. This view ties thoughts less tightly to the linguistic forms which express them than traditional views of the matter, and in two directions: a given linguistic form, meaning fixed, may express an indefinite variety of thoughts; one thought can be expressed in an indefinite number of syntactically and semantically distinct ways. Travis highlights the importance of this view for linguistic theory, and shows how it gives new form to a variety of traditional philosophical problems.

Selected Essays

Occasion-Sensitivity

The Uses of Sense provides a novel account of Wittgenstein's view of language as expressed in the Philosophical Investigations. Charles Travis argues that Wittgenstein's view is a radical break with a still-dominant Fregean tradition. On this basis, Travis gives an original treatment of the significance of private language and of other major themes in the Investigations, such as family resemblance and language games.

Luke Bergmann

Deborah P. Dixon

Robert Legg

Arlene Crampsie

The Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities explores the digital methods and tools scholars use to observe, interpret, and manage nature in several different academic fields. Employing historical, philosophical, linguistic, literary, and cultural lenses, this handbook explores how the digital environmental humanities (DEH), as an emerging field, recognises its convergence with the environmental humanities. As such, it is empirically, critically, and ethically engaged in exploring digitally mediated, visualised, and parsed framings of past, present, and future environments, landscapes, and cultures. Currently, humanities, geographical, cartographical, informatic, and computing disciplines are finding a common space in the DEH and are bringing the use of digital applications, coding, and software into league with literary and cultural studies and the visual, film, and performing arts. In doing so, the DEH facilitates transdisciplinary encounters between fields as diverse as human cognition, gaming, bioinformatics and linguistics, social media, literature and history, music, painting, philology, philosophy, and the earth and environmental sciences. This handbook will be essential reading for those interested in the use of digital tools in the study of the environment from a wide range of disciplines and for those working in the environmental humanities more generally.

Routledge Handbook of the Digital Environmental Humanities

Armida de la Garza

This volume is dedicated to collaborative research across STEM disciplines, the arts and humanities. It includes six sections, framed from a global perspective and exhibits contributions from key experts in the field, emerging scholarly voices, and STEAM practitioners. The added value of STEAM projects in research is highlighted in the first section of this book. Ranging from the spatial, medical and environmental humanities to heritage science, this section discusses the course and paths STEAM projects may evolve to in the near future. The second section features reflective essays by scientists and artists on the development of their research, their professional growth and personal learning experiences that the art/science collaborations have afforded their work and careers. Sections III and IV provides practical guidance and advice on facilitating STEAM teams and describe successful collaborative projects. By presenting the objectives and outcomes of relevant research, the chapters in these sections discuss the various steps taken by different teams to achieve project fruition. Paying particular attention to barriers inhibiting STEAM collaboration, these sections also explore the ways in which research teams were able to work effectively. The fifth section presents a review of policy issues and the potential impacts of STEAM research for administrators, funders and policy makers. In its pursuit for balance and inclusion, the volume concludes with a critical reflection on STEAM that argues a different perspective and will prove food for thought to readers.

Transdisciplinary Approaches to Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, Humanities and Mathematics

The STEAM Revolution

Comment garantir l'objectivite de notre rapport au monde? Le rationalisme et l'empirisme renvoient, chacun a leur maniere, a une capacite generale de l'esprit humain - capacite desengagee du monde, decontextualisee. La nouveaute radicale qu'introduit Wittgenstein dans sa seconde philosophie est une vision contextualiste et proprement humaine de l'objectivite. Dans cet ouvrage, issu de lecons donnees au College de France en 2002, Charles Travis prend appui sur Frege, Wittgenstein et J.L. Austin pour montrer que l'operation de desangagement du monde propre aux differentes theories de la connaissance contemporaines ne permet plus a la pensee (ou a la perception) d'etre objective et a fortiori d'etre vraie. Elle ne permet pas de veritable rapport au monde. C'est plutot au sein de nos pratiques les plus ordinaires que se fondent l'objectivite qui est la notre, la verite, ainsi que les differents accords du monde avec le langage et la pensee. La verite n'est pas abstraite, nos representations sont situees. Toute signification, comme toute pensee, est sensible a l'occasion. Charles Travis propose ici une lecture originale de Wittgenstein, conjuguee a une approche particuliere des grands problemes de la philosophie analytique.

Wittgenstein sur la pensée et le monde : leçons au Collège de France, juin 2002

Les liaisons ordinaires

Pragmatics often begins by supposing that specifying and describing truth bearers is a proper task for semantics. The main thrust of the present work is to show why truth and truth bearers lie essentially beyond the descriptive reach of semantics, and to outline a theory of truth bearers as a proper and fundamental task for pragmatics. It is also common for treatments, or definitions of truth to be confused with substantive theories about truth bearers, with a variety of unfortunate results. This monograph suggests a way of separating these tasks, and shows how many problems are thus avoided. Some emphasis is placed on the generally universal  i.e., nonlanguage-specific  character of pragmatic topics, and of truth. These issues occasion a discussion of semantic paradoxes, and of several relativities in the notion of truth.

Charles Travis

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