Posts published by Matthew Stone  1 Results  Philosophy and the
Poetic Imagination  The Stone    Here’s one striking puzzle: We
speak and write with remarkably different aims.  We sometimes
try to get clear on the facts, so we can reach agreement on how
things are.  But we sometimes try to express ourselves so we can
capture the uniqueness of our viewpoint and experiences.  It is
the same for listeners: language lets us learn the answers to
practical questions, but it also opens us up to novel insights
and perspectives.  Simply put, language straddles the chasm
between science and art.  A central challenge for philosophy is
to explain how language accommodates these two very different
kinds of enterprise.  Literary theorists and translators often
say that artistic language takes on special meaning (semantics),
different from what we ordinarily find.  Cognitive scientists
often say instead that the difference comes from our ability to
recognize the purposes and goals of speakers who use language in
different w