ARGUMENTATIVE UNDERPINNINGS OF TELEOLOGICAL REFLECTIVE SENSE ASCRIPTON IN ENGLISH POLITICAL DISCOURSE
Abstract
Teleology as the philosophy of science is about purpose-related ‘ultimate’ explanation of meaning. The present paper is an attempt to address the problem of meaning formation in political discourse relying on the semantically relevant principles and methods of moral teleology, informal logic and psychology of perception. The conducted research is focused on purpose-related semantic, logical and psychological patterns of ‘deep’ understanding of the propositional content of utterances in political discourse. The basic assumption of this research is that the concept of the morally viable final goal proves to be a perennial point of contention among the parties concerned and the catalyst of teleological reflective sense ascription. Arguably, any utterance elicits explanation and justification of both the speaker’s meaning and of the meaning recovered by an addressee. The substantiation of the intended and recovered meaning in political discourse may assume different forms of an explicated purposive argument or of an introspective inferred conclusion about causes, purposes and potential consequences of what is said. The latter is posited in this account as teleological reflective sense ascribed by an addressee to the original propositional content. The purpose-related linguistic argumentative and explanatory construct assessing moral propriety of an utterance is viewed as a teleological explanation. The term ‘argument’ is treated in this paper as a linguistic representation of the outcome of teleological reflection about means and ends of what is said. An argument functions in discourse as an independent variable and as a logical construct underpinning the propositional content of an utterance. The argumentative proof supporting the plausibility of the ascribed teleological reflective sense comes in a wide variety of linguistic, logical and psychological manifestations. The analysis of the empirical material suggests that arguments validating the ascribed teleological reflective sense are mainly focused on: (a) the speaker’s motives; (b) the purposes declared or alleged; (c) the expected consequences; (d) the speaker’s track record. Arguments substantiating teleological reflective sense in political discourse tend to be subjective, frequently biased and occasionally non sequitur. The concepts of common sense, truth, moral value and the final purpose are critically important for natural language understanding and translation. In political discourse domain understanding the idea of moral propriety is inherently subjective and purpose-dependent. The assessment of moral rightness is notoriously difficult for human reasoning, it is all the more so for artificial intelligence as a computer aided basis for machine translation. Realising this, the developers are struggling to augment machine translation by embedding into the artificial ‘brain’ teleologically relevant ‘human’ traits like the awareness of the final goal, moral evaluation functions, an attention mechanism. Artificial intelligence with its current reliance on human supervision laid bare the critical issues for translators to grapple with in the process of natural language translation and while fine-tuning machine generated translations.
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