Philosophy Seminar: System of Dress

Event Details

Date:

Friday, 27 November 2015

Time:

3:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Room:

Room E303

UQ Location:

Forgan Smith Building (St Lucia)

URL:

http://hapi.uq.edu.au/seminars-and-events

Event category(s):

Full Description:: Systems of Dress: A Gricean Proposal for Communication by Bodily Adornment.
Presented by Ms Marilynn Johnson (CUNY)

One of the purposes our bodies serve is as a surface on which we place adornments that convey certain meanings to those around us, such as, ‘I am a police officer’, ‘I am the queen’, and ‘I protest the war in Vietnam’. In this talk I will argue that communication through adornment of the body is best understood as a branch of philosophy of language, and, in particular, within a Gricean theory of meaning. This argument begins with discussion of a previous study of meaning in bodily adornment undertaken by Roland Barthes working in the Saussurean, semiotic tradition. I argue that Barthes’ attempt fails for the same reason many theories of linguistic meaning failed: they treat meaning as the result of a system of codes – an assumption that leads to theories that can never fully explain communication. I take Barthes’ attempt as an indication that dress should be treated instead as a fundamentally Gricean, intentional process, with meaning first delineated into Grice’s categories of natural, and non-natural meaning, as well as a new category I will introduce: ‘imitation of natural meaning’. I present specific cases to show how these categories apply to meaning in dress. In the course of this argument I will defend the Gricean picture that ties meaning to intentions from a number of objections.