assemblage 1:

*from larger work in progress: The Emergence of Novel Compositional Organizations

5. Belousov, Zhabotinsky, and Lines of Flight

In 1950, while heading the Laboratory for Biophysics of the Soviet Ministry of Health, chemist Boris Belousov began research driven towards finding an inorganic analog for the Krebs cycle[1]. Also known as the citric acid cycle, the Krebs cycle is a autocatalytic series of catalytic chemical reactions within organisms through which energy can be converted and stored in useful forms such as ATP, GTP, NADH, FADH2. It is a fundamental process within cellular respiration in eukaryotic cells.

In 1937, Hanz Krebs identified the citric acid cycle and was able to reduce this intricate process into 12 catalytic chemical steps for the reaction. This allowed chemists to obtain a provide a precise account of this phenomena at the micro level and to provide the mechanisms for this cycle. The Krebs cycle illustrates how known species of non-aggregate material assemblages, in this case at the compositional level of organic molecules, interacting synergistically, can undergo predictable self-sustaining autocatalytic processes.

The results Belousov detailed in his 1951 manuscript however diverged sharply from the initial aims of his research. In fact, they diverged sharply from the whole set of theoretical assumptions brought to the conceptual table by contemporary chemistry and physics of the time. Belousov combined bromate, citric acid, and Ce4+ ceric ions, expecting to observe yellow Ce4+ converting to clear Ce3+. What he observed were dissipative waves of yellow traveling through the medium. He also discovered that when constantly stirred, the medium exhibited a regular oscillatory pattern that flashed through the system. The period of this oscillation could be altered by manipulating several parameters such as the relative concentrations of mineral acids, organic substrate, catalyst, bromate ion, as well as temperature. What he discovered was one of the first known examples of a chemical clock. When he submitted his results they were roundly rejected on the grounds of physical impossibility. In fact, the paper was not even published in Russia for thirty years, and he gave up on the line of research for some time. Meanwhile, in the West, papers were being published explaining why chemical oscillatory patterns in a homogenous solution such as the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction and the Bray-Liebhafsky reaction were impossible on grounds ranging from the accusations of an accidental introduction of heterogeneous particles, to a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. They were not, however, without reason. The model they had for periodic oscillation was the idealized linear harmonic oscillator. A harmonic oscillator in an idealized environment will exhibit a linear oscillation that passes in and out of its equilibrium point, each progressive state being fully predictable through a knowledge of the former state. Abiding by the second law of thermodynamics, the system will progressively lose energy and the oscillation period will gradually diminish until the oscillator settles into a rest state at thermodynamic equilibrium, “they thereby concluded that an oscillating reaction would require the free energy of the system to oscillate as the reactants were converted to products and then back to reactants, thus contradicting the Second Law.”[2] However, the oscillatory chemical solution observed by Belousov was never passing through an equilibrium point. On the contrary, it is a strong example of far-from-equilibrium phenomena.

Ten years after Belousov’s manuscript was drafted, a graduate student at Moscow State University by the name of Anatol Zhabotinsky got a hold of the recipe for his original experiment of 2 g KBrO2, .16 g Ce(SO4)2, 2 g citric acid, 2 mL H2SO4, and enough water to yield 10 mL of solution, and began research into this phenomena. It was not until a conference in 1968 entitled “Biological and Biochemical Oscillators” that interest in chemical oscillations began to spread throughout the scientific community.

Zhabotinsky and his collegues extended greatly the findings of Belousov in several important ways. 1970, the year of Belousov’s death, Zhabotinsky and Zaikin published findings detailing the results of a modified recipe. During some of his trials, Belousov had added ferroin to enhance the color transition. In its reduced state, ferroin is red but turns blue when oxidized. Zhabotinsky and Zaikin found that ferroin was a sufficient catalyst for the reaction, alleviating the necessity for cerium. This allowed them to observe the reaction as it occurred in thin layers of unstirred solution. The exact mechanisms were unknown at the time, but what they discovered were self-propagating chemical waves that formed into intricate, variable spiraling patterns.

As early as 1955, Ilya Prigogene had begun to characterize emergent structures and phenomena in open systems (thermodynamics applies to energetically closed systems) far from equilibrium. While linear oscillation in a closed system must always tend towards a lower energy rest state at equilibrium, oscillation in these far-from-equilibrium open systems can be maintained through control parameters in the form of additional reagents. The periodic oscillation exhibited in the Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction are not the reactants and the products but rather the intermediates.

In 1968, Prigogene and Lefever came up with an abstract mathematical model of a chemical reaction, later nicknamed “the Brusselator” after the city where this work was done, that exhibited both oscillation and propagating waves. This chemically reasonable model reaction provided skeptics with a mechanism for self-organization in chemical systems far from equilibrium. In 1972, Field and Noyes published further findings detailing for the first time an actual chemical mechanism, dubbed the FKN mechanism, to explain non-equilibrium chemical oscillations and were able to explain the pattern formation in thin layers later that year. By 1979, De Kepper and colleagues, were able to provide a systematic account for oscillatory chemical reactions in general.

Afforded with these mechanisms, were then able to investigate a whole host of self-organizing phenomena in far-from-equilibrium chemical systems. Priogene had already introduced the concept of dissipative structures in 1955 to describe spatiotemporal configurations within a system, so a groundwork was laid for a micro level account necessary to account for non-aggregative macro level system properties. Of growing interest in the 70’s and 80’s in the fields of physics and mathematics was deterministic chaos. Chaotic systems are not random systems despite being unpredictable. They are described in terms of deterministic equations. But due to an extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, it becomes impossible to predict future states far from the initial conditions. Chemists researching non-linear chemical oscillations on the other hand, found themselves further absorbed in researching the control parameters that shaped chemical oscillators and dissipative structures. These combined foci could then pave the way for understanding self-organization and emergent compositional structures and phenomena.

[1]This is an aim that would have had great currency in Soviet Russia, where the government apparatus heavily mandated the course of scientific research through socialist utilitarian and economic directives. Science, both in the U.S.S.R. and abroad was currently being motivated and revolutionized by a series of discoveries in the realm of Nuclear Physics. On August 29th of 1949, the first Soviet atomic test bomb, RDS-1, was successful and the U.S.S.R. immediately proceeded with research towards the Hydrogen Bomb, accomplished in 1953. These revolutions in scientific understanding of energy at the molecular and atomic levels can explain, perhaps, Belousov’s interest in finding a nonorganic analog for one of the key processes in the metabolizing of energy into fuel within multi-cellular organisms, just as nuclear physicists came to reproduce the catalytic chain reactions exhibited in nuclear fission.

[2] Epstein and Pojman, “An Introduction to Non-Linear Chemical Dynamics”. Pg. 9

assemblage 2:

At the origin of any economy you will find food. Before the first instances of domestication that took place primarily in the Fertile Crescent over ten thousand years ago, the value of food was fundamentally caloric, humanity toiled much as the rest of the animal kingdom—if only more clever. With the first efforts of agriculture came surplus (sporadically relegated before to flood and fortune, the whim of nature) and the first economies emerged, the first granaries discovered are roughly ten thousand years old. This was the point of radical departure for humanity: men and women could now produce more ‘fuel’ than they expended. The labor of ten could feed twenty. Exchange values were placed upon these surpluses; chieftains and potters emerged, monarchs and priests, bakers and cooks.
Nowadays, it’s pretty intuitive to most that there is more to food than either its nutritional value or economic value. We know that the priests of the first civilizations, that had wrested from the earth through the labor of men and women the energy needed to form the first urban centers, ritually sacrificed animals to their divinities. In fact, most of the methods of seers and soothsayers for scrying into the future have revolved around the bodies of animals, whether the from the bowels of a dove in Ancient Greece, or the shoulder-blades of domesticated goats or the shells of tortoises in the antiquity of China. Even the immortal gods themselves have their food, Zeus and his pantheon shared Ambrosia on the heights of Olympus.

In fact we find reference to an early, protean cookie in the Old Testament, when God gave to the wandering Israelites the divine gift of Manna with the morning dew, which was pounded and made into small, sweet cakes that “tasted like a wafer made with honey.” Food items such as these cakes are assembled from various ingredients to produce food items that are not only the sum of their ingredients but also quite more. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guatarri described this in terms of qualities of content, such as the ingredients and steps that go into making a cookie, and qualities of expression, such as the buttery, honey taste and wafer quality of the manna cakes as well as their role as gift from God. For while He gave them, for forty years in their wandering, “the grain of heaven”, it was the sweet “bread of angels” upon which they dined. In each of these epithets, we find qualities of both content and expression, and it is the combination that makes manna unique. Manna by itself was not consumed, despite the calories provided by the grains that appeared with the morning dew, but with it the Israelites were able to grind it into a flour, combined perhaps with the milk from their stock, bake them in pots, and create their sanctified cookies.

In the case of manna, if the content of the cookie is dictated by such an undefineable as divine flour sprinkled across the dessert, we at least find attested the process of making cookies and the significance a particular cookie can have. And to look into history, we can look first for the necessary ingredients, for lack of such holy victuals. The cereal grains that made up the early flours have been domesticated for over ten thousand years. With flour came bread, and around the same time cattle, goats, and sheep were domesticated. Likewise, honeybees apiaries began to appear in the Levant as early as 4000 BC. However it is fair to assume that honey has been a part of the human diet long before the fog of prehistory first began to part. So long before the Israelites began to create their divine baked treats, all of the necessary ingredients—the content going into making a cookie—was there, but we can only guess early cookies ever expressed themselves in prehistoric times. Cookies may, indeed, be as old as the mixing cereal grains and the honey of wild bees in a stone mortar.

In the historical era, record goes back to 6th century AD, when the Persians had finally obtained the crucial, missing ingredient, Sugar. Sugarcane had been cultivated in India as early as twelve thousand years ago, but it was not until the the 4th Century AD that the Gupta Dynasty first crystallized it. By the 8th Century, it was being exported to China, and a hundred years later it was being cultivated in Egypt by the 11th Century it was trickling into southern ports such as Salerno and taken as plunder of the Crusades. However, for some time, sugar would remain a luxury good, remained to the tables of the Wealthy.

It was not until sugarcane was cultivated in European colonies in the New World, that the first great revolution in the world of cookies occurred. Through the labor of slaves in the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean, Europe was able to import vast quantities of processed sugar, allowing prices to drop within the means of the lower classes. And, after all, cookies have rarely been restricted to haut cuisine.

This was the first revolution in the history of cookies. While sugar was never cheap, peasants often had bricks of granulated sugar in their houses, saved for special occasions. And that is the crucial quality of cookies, their association with and expression of special occasions. Most of the cookies in this collection illustrate this attribute. And with affordable sugar and grain, the availability of butter and the eggs of brought with chickens through the Silk Road, a proliferation of cookies appeared. In some cases, the kinds of cookies that emerged were only made on particular holidays, at other times they were paired with other recent arrivals in Europe, coffee and tea.

The second great revolution occurred was triggered by the introduction into the kitchens America and Europe the leavening agent, pearlash. This was soon followed by baking powder and corn syrup on the one hand, and the proliferation of cooking books published by experienced cooks. From then on, cookies began to multiply, diversify, spread across the world (often following the population shifts of Western Expansionand fall into numerous special occasions, for example the Kue Nastar made in the contact of Dutch traders and natives of Indonesia. Clear families of cookies emerged based on how and with what they were made, a combination of their content and expression.

They have also evolved over time in various ways. For example, the Hermit of New England and the Morovian Herrnhuter of Winston-Salem, North Carolina both share a common anscestor that sat upon the table, filling the air with their buttery spiced scent of Moravian immigrants in the German town of Herrnhut (Lord’s Watch), which is now the center of the Moravian Church. Immigrants arrived from Europe in Winston-Salem, where their Moravian spiced cookies eventually became the paper-thin mass-produced cookies they have today. However, a group of Moravians seem to have gone up to Pennsylvania, settling in towns such as Nazareth (home of the Nazareth Sugar Cookie) as well as moving into New England, where Hermits appeared. The spiced squares you find up north are actually more like the spiced, rolled cookies found in Europe.

The globalization of food and the proliferation recipes and general food writing has continued to increase unabated, one can find hundreds of variations on the peanut butter cookie, each tailored over time just so to the habits of a family, a congregation, a son’s affinity for chocolate chips. And with the internet has come the third revolution in the world of cookies. Cookies, which are such intimate food, are now available in thousands and thousands of varieties and often times the dialogue between web users fine tune the recipes and yield cookies that are the result of a cooperative effort of expression between cookie makers, and a careful tinkering with the contents and process of making them. And these days, we are in the midst of a burgeoning global cuisine where techniques and ingredients can be passed among people any distance apart. The tailoring of recipes posted on the internet by other users also helps to refine each cookie into a tastier result. Thus, while the internet might seem to threaten the traditions and classics of the cookie world with a chaotic multitude of cookies, a Tower of Babylon of recipes, the interactivity of the internet ensures that the history of cookies will proceed in a way crafted by consensus and good taste.

assemblage 3:

Stateless Kings and Real Dragons:

Semiotic Feedback and The Co-constitution of Statements and Context

I have several roommates. One of them, W., well, by means of the gracious labor of his grandparents, he doesn’t work much these days. He tinkers around the house, tacking the detritus of his now-gone childhood home onto the walls, filling holes with foam, things of that nature; he sleeps a lot. So, one day J. came home and asked anyone was around, and I told him, the king is on the throne, and he nodded his head and glanced down the stairs towards W.’s bedroom, before moving on to some other case. Now, disregarding its truth or falsity, this statement fulfills Bertrand Russell’s definition of a definite description denoting an entity but also illustrates the insufficiency of the construal of statements in terms of analytical logic. Kieth Donnellan, in “Reference and definite descriptions”, articulates the necessity for a proper treatment of what he describes as the attributive and referential functions of definite descriptions. These considerations illuminate important characteristics of the nature of all statements and their relationship with referents. That the statement was both true and logically invalid demands a description of its referential function of deictically linking the king to W. But it’s also true that it was an ironic cutting statement; that is to say that there was an attributive function; I was not only indicating where W. was (relative to ourselves) but I was also identifying him, if ironically, as the king. Further, in order to understand how these kind of statements can be successful, above and beyond these other properties, an understanding of how speech acts formulate models of the relationships of place and identity they point to and reformulate, in the world.

It becomes clear that a reductivist approach to language yields not only an incomplete description but also a distorted description. A first impulse might be to launch into constructivist model of language use, but the move requires a great deal of footwork, with an eye out for unbidden assumptions. That statements that deictically relate to the world through an interactional framework of communication co-textually embedded intentionally and unintentionally in a context allows can allow for us to demystify the irreducibility of statements exchanged between interlocutors, and reveal speech acts as far broader than the serial concatenation of linguistic signs, in every case co-constituted multiply in an interactional framework where participants are constantly repositioning and recoding one another, the signs they use, the entities they refer to, and the communicative and pragmatic aims of each other. We cannot remove a statement from its context, because the success, the meaningfulness of any statement is constituted by the terms it entails, words and referents alike.

Russell writes, “if “C” is a denoting phrase [as definite descriptions are by definition], it may happen that there is one entity x (there cannot be more than one) for which the proposition “x is identical with C” is true…We may say that the entity x is the denotation of the phrase “C.[i]” Donnellan suggests that “referring is not the same as denoting and the referential use of definite descriptions is not recognized on Russell’s view.”[ii] By the same token, the property of a definite description being true or false does not depend upon its referring use. However, we can clearly see that the truth value of the example of the king I gave above necessarily requires the use of reference. Donnellan suggests that P.F. Strawson, who attempted to bring Russell closer to a contemporary understanding of reference and language, allows for a referential function of definite descriptions, while maintaining the assumption Russell carries that “we can ask how a definite description functions in some sentence independently of a particular occasion in which it is used.”[iii] Donnellan notes further that while Strawson acknowledges the referential function, he explicitly separates it from the statement itself, describing it as an action a speaker takes rather than a property of a statement that is itself construable only through an embedding in context, and a contextual framework of feedback between statement, interlocutors, referents, and wide variety of presuppositions established, exchanged, and within any speech act.

Yet this leaves us without any means for understanding the function of a definite description within a speech act. Donnellan note that “If I state that the king is on his throne, I presuppose or imply that there is a king…Both Russell and Strawson assume that where the presupposition or implication is false, the truth value of what the speaker says is affected. For Russell the statement made is false; for Strawson it has no truth value.”[iv] The question of the presuppositions held for statements must be reformulated in the context of reference or we run the risk of obfuscating the accuracy of statements bound to specific referents.

Surely, if one were to ask either of us if there were any king to speak of, the response would be a firm negative; likewise, there is no throne anywhere near our house. Though it is not the case, if I were to say that if was common parlance in our house to refer to W. as ‘the king’, it would make the successful retrieval of W. from the term ‘king’ a simple, explicit procedure, even if one embedded already in a contextual framework of presupposition constituted through a contingent, historical accumulation of house-register deictic norms of reference. However, the success of the statement was not in the term ‘king’ nor in the term ‘throne, but rather in the contextual framework modeled. Indeed, the statement must be taken as a whole in order to achieve a positive construal and must be referentially connected, as a whole, to the world it represents.

E.A. Schegloff, in ‘Notes on a Conversation Practice: Formulating Place’, introduces a useful notion of ‘correct’ reference, “if one looks to the places in conversations where an object (including persons) or activity is identified…then one can notice that there is a set of alternative formulations for each such object or activity, all the formulations being, in some sense, correct (i.e., each allowing under some circumstance ‘retrieval’ of the same referent).[v]” For instance, I could have just as easily said, The dragon is in his lair, in response to, Is anyone home?, and been equally successful in the effective construal of the facts I was intending to convey: that W. is home and in his room. Clearly, both statements taken in themselves cannot be either true or false, as their is no particular entity having the identity of either king of dragon, and the place terms of throne and lair do not localize to any actual location. Yet construal yields an effectively true statement, and so it is necessary to look for a standing-for relationship deictically mediating the statement with particular entities and classes of entities in the world. In order to begin to interpret the successful reference in the speech act, we have to extend our analysis beyond the definite description itself, even as it’s particular interlocutive function as a definite description embedded in a particular context,

J. Is anyone home?

Aa. The king is on the throne.

Ab. The dragon is in his lair.

Naively, it would seem that on the one hand ‘anyone’ hardly narrows our population of candidate entities, and on the other that among anyone, there is no king referred to and a empty set of real world dragons to specify a particular entity in the two definite descriptions. Yet, this is to take the term alone. Which, as we have said is an insufficient methodology for understanding definite descriptions as speech acts. To ameliorate the situation, we have to address an interesting function of locational terms in the deictic positioning of cotextual signs. As you note in chapter 1.4, deixis is “the ground floor of the semiotic architecture whereby language allows language users to talk about specific ‘things’[vi]”.

The referential function, proceeding through the serial concatenation of deictic tokens in speech involves constantly deictic reconfiguration of the interactional framework between the dynamics of cotextual signs and between the referents they denote. Yet ‘anyone’, as a categorical presupposition would seem to hardly have the desired effect. Given the cotextuality of deixis, ‘anyone’ shrinks suddenly to a far smaller set of entities bound by deictic co-coordination between the three words in the question. Already marked as entities contemporary with the zero-ground of the speech act, ‘anyone’ already denotes referentially a class smaller than the infinite nomic set of candidates given by the sign taken in isolation. This is followed by the locational term ‘home.’ ‘Home’ denotes not only a place and location, but also an attendant set of entities (in this case designated by ‘anyone’) possessive of membership within that home. The selection of the term home, as the initial linguistic sign formulating place, has as footing the fact that J. and I are in a home, and that we are members of that home. This readily allows for an unambiguous construal of the deictic and referential function of ‘home.’

The statement can also be framed within the locational and relational footing providing the presupposition of shared membership within the referred ‘home’ as well as the correspondence of the sign to the locational and temporal zero-ground of the speech act. The selection of the locational term ‘home’ is therefore already embedded in the particular context, and the standing for relationship of the sign for the location of the utterance becomes transparent.

One of the tacit metapragmatic aims of interrogative statements is to deictically constrain the terms given in response—i.e. the expectation of the answer to select a particular entity or collection of entities from the set of entities framed in the question. And the use of the localization term within J.’s query addresses this aim with “sensitivity to the respective locations of the participants and referent”[vii]. Thus, the question demands the selection of an entity positively marked for membership within the home within which the interlocution occurs. And the construal of this class is itself constrained by the mutual assumptions both J. and I have concerning actual members, a quite small class.

So, to return to my two responses. In both cases, through a next-turn modeling of possible referent selection, J. has constrained my options to, in reality, two possible choices, W. and D. The interrogative put forward demands a specification within a class comprised of two individuals, yet on the surface both of these responses would fail to denote either. If I were to say, you’re Greek roommate, or, your Chinese roommate, I would have been explicitly denoting one or the other of the two options. However, we share our abode with neither kings nor dragons, and thus, we have to look at the attributive function of definite statements. As Donnellan remarks, “we have neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for a referential use of the definite description. A definite description can be used attributively even when the speaker believes that some particular thing or person fits the description, and it can be used referentially in the absence of this belief.[viii]

We can see in this case, where the terms do not explicitly denote the referents deictically framed, that the marriage of the attributive and referential functions of the definite description provide the successful construal. Neither W. or D. are either king or dragon, yet the choice of either sign is made in order to refer to a particular entity among these two options. A successful interpretation of the definite description must in this case rest upon these two functions through the co-modeling of the contextual socio-interactional framework and group boundaries among members—in this case both referent and interactants—provided through deixis and the functionality of locational terms as well as the relative positioning of these members within a bounded proximity relative to the zero-ground of the interlocution.

When a speaker selects a term to apply to a deictically selected entity that is logically a poor fit for that entity, the success of the reference must be explained in terms of the attribution of properties that in some sense allow the interpreter to nonetheless select a particular entity. It is worth again noting that a successful construal of this kind of definite statement—logically false or at least not true according to Russell and Strawson—particular in response to a question demanding the selection of a specific entity both real and proximate, demands taking the referential function of the statement as a whole. Thus, while there would perhaps be a frustrating degree of ambiguity if I were to say, the king is home, or, the dragon is home, the locational functions of the terms ‘throne’ and ‘lair’, also both poor fits for any ontological properties of the space constituting our home, necessarily denote a spatial marking within the parameters of the locational index of ‘home’. The statement taken as a whole must then by taken as a whole located deictically within the spatial orientation of the interlocutors and the referent already marked for proximity membership within the same spatial orientation.

Both of these definite descriptions provided in response to J.’s query are in a metapragmatic sense functionally analogous, indicating that it is true that W. is in his room. They are also referentially analogous, scarcely different in their deictic embedment into the zero-ground of our conversation. Further, this surrounding context of enunciation and location itself provides the attribute of a logical truth value to each definite description. This is only possible through a constant semiotic feedback between environment and the semiotic representational co-modeling of interlocution. While the syntactic composition of these signs into statements yields an emergent semiotic structure that is not reducible to the properties of its individual signs, the success of these statements depends on a successful reference to actual entities localized relative to the zero-ground of enunciation. These entities and their relational properties in turn, successfully pointed out, constitute the terms used to refer to them. Thus, if W. was to be heard saying from behind his door, Who’s the dragon?!, or, Which king?, either of us might respond, Why you, my friend. And we can imagine a muffled snort…

And what of that snort, the last line in this conversation? Clearly W. doesn’t like being characterized as a dragon, and likely isn’t too comfortable, in his current state, being referred to as king. In fact, the singularity of each term, and the relative positioning to myself and W. also serve a stratifying function of drawing internal boundaries within interpersonal compositions of both membership spatial orientation—I am also marking his room in a particular and incongruous fashion. The statements are clearly neither simply pointed out things in the world and saying things true of them, not identical. And the difference between them lies in the attributive function of each definite description. This function becomes particularly pronounced when we try to point out dragons in the world, or kings in Philadelphia; when we deictically pick out entities employing the use of incongruous categories. Yet it is always the case that when we point things out in the world, we are also saying things about these, attributing characteristics and associations upon them. Essentially, all reference is typified by a resultant laminating of semiotic attributes upon the very entities, classes of entities, or phenomena that constitute the referring linguistic terms. Any evaluation of successful or correct reference must be made in terms of four primary functions: the internal composition of speech into potentially meaningful statements; the representational model these statements in a certain sense template for; the referential coordination of these terms to entities and phenomena that constitute them within the discursive co-modeling over the course of interlocution; and the attributive process of semiotically coding upon and localizing these referents. No approach taken alone can make sense of linguistic communication without introducing distortion. To capture the semiotic exchange transpiring, we must look at all significant elements as co-constituting a dynamic self-organizing structure of linkage between signs and speakers and the world they find themselves located in, constantly recoordinating the relationships of entities in that world.

[i] ‘On Denoting’, reprinted in Logic and Knowledge, ed. Robert C. Marsh (London, 1956), pg. 51

[ii] ‘Reference and definite descriptions’, 100.

[iii] Donnellan, pg. 101.

[iv] Donnellan, pg. 101.

[v] ‘Notes on a Conversational Practice: Formulating Place’, from Studies in Social Interaction, ed. D. Sudnow (Free Press, 1971), pg. 95.

[vi] Agha, Asif. Language and Social Relations, pg. 37.

[vii] Schegloff, pg. 131.

[viii] Donnellan, pg. 111.

7 responses to “Assemblages

  1. put some bird feed/ wildlife feeds outside your garden.

  2. RaiulBaztepo

    Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
    See you!
    Your, Raiul Baztepo

  3. Hello ! 🙂
    And want to ask you: is this blog your hobby?
    Sorry for my bad english:)
    Your Piter Kokoniz, from Latvia


  5. it is just for fun by a bunch of different people

  6. I could see something like this -really- being useful for me

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