Chris Dawson

Drawing on ideas from a cross-disciplinary examination of the concepts of “communication” and “argumentation”, the question of how communication can be optimized in a business setting is addressed. Philosophical hermeneutics suggests in general how genuine insights may be achieved from differing or incompatible starting points. The analogy between the structure of a company and that of the human body then illustrates how a company might be able to capture and use such insights. A three-tiered structure emerges which illustrates why informal contact, data availability and competitive discussion forums are all needed in order for a business to be successful in building a corporate identity and responding to market forces.

This paper is about different ways of understanding the notion of ontology, and about correspondingly different senses of 'being'. Heidegger is renowned for probing the question of the meaning of being, but also for writing in a fashion that is immensely obscure and confusing, largely on account of the fact that the word 'being' is used so often and in so many different ways. My hope in this paper is to clarify some of his central uses of the notion, and to offer a reading of his work that displays the way his expression of his philosophical views was forced to change in order to approach the conception of ontology he was trying to communicate.

The analysis of knowledge in terms of belief prevents a correct understanding of the role of belief in action. An analysis of belief as a tendency to act as if something were true reveals how the truth vaule of the statement believed is not of relevance to the holding of the belief.

In this paper I shall address the issue of whether a scientific terminology developed by a specialist community may have a privileged claim to objectivity through the fixed denotation of its terms. I do not pretend to have reached any definitive results, but instead offer a few comparisons between insights from sociology, linguistics, philosophical hermeneutics and psychology that can at least help to bring the outline of the question into focus. My suggestion is that in order to see what possibilities we really have for avoiding the dangers of ideologically laden discourse – a question that is becoming ever more important as international communication becomes central to everybody's life and we no longer have cultural certainties that we can fall back on in trying to answer pressing moral questions – we need to take seriously the possibility that even our most rigorous scientific procedures may not liberate us completely from our prejudices. I contend that whenever we speak or write we express much more than just a proposition about a specific feature of the outside world, and that our newly evolving situation therefore requires a new kind of listening and a new recognition of the personal and subjective element that remains even in science.