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Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Cats and categories – reply to Teubert
AU - Sealey, Alison
N1 - This article has been published in the journal Language and Dialogue. It is under copyright, and the publisher should be contacted for permission to re-use the material in any form.
PY - 2014
Y1 - 2014
N2 - This paper is a response to the discussion article in Language and Dialogue 3:2 by Wolfgang Teubert, “Was there a cat in the garden? Knowledge between discourse and the monadic self.” Teubert deals there with a number of themes, including a discussion of some philosophical issues raised by Roy Harris and Martin Heidegger. In my response, I am less concerned with those aspects of the article than with the claims made by Teubert about the contrasts between humans and other animals. I respond to Teubert’s position on the status and origins of categories of animals from a realist perspective, with reference to evidence from the natural sciences and anthropology. I suggest that Teubert’s thesis rests on a number of errors, including an over-estimation of the power of discourse, an under-estimation of the range of sensory and semiotic perception available to different kinds of creatures, and a lack of attention to contemporary developments in relevant ethological research.
AB - This paper is a response to the discussion article in Language and Dialogue 3:2 by Wolfgang Teubert, “Was there a cat in the garden? Knowledge between discourse and the monadic self.” Teubert deals there with a number of themes, including a discussion of some philosophical issues raised by Roy Harris and Martin Heidegger. In my response, I am less concerned with those aspects of the article than with the claims made by Teubert about the contrasts between humans and other animals. I respond to Teubert’s position on the status and origins of categories of animals from a realist perspective, with reference to evidence from the natural sciences and anthropology. I suggest that Teubert’s thesis rests on a number of errors, including an over-estimation of the power of discourse, an under-estimation of the range of sensory and semiotic perception available to different kinds of creatures, and a lack of attention to contemporary developments in relevant ethological research.
KW - ethology
KW - discursive reductionism
KW - taxonomies
KW - semiotics
KW - realism
U2 - 10.1075/ld.4.2.07sea
DO - 10.1075/ld.4.2.07sea
M3 - Journal article
VL - 4
SP - 299
EP - 321
JO - Language and Dialogue
JF - Language and Dialogue
SN - 2210-4127
IS - 2
ER -