Language as social action: Gertrude Buck, the "Michigan School" of rhetoric, and pragmatist philosophy.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Gertrude Buck and collaborators developed a sociologically and pragmatist-informed approach to language that has been neglected in later scholarship. Buck approached the study of language from the standpoint of pragmatist functional psychology, which is indebted to John Dewey's pragmatism at the University of Michigan, and which views language as a normal, dynamic action of human organisms engaged in necessary cooperative relations with one another. Her approach overcomes the small-minded pragmatism that would criticize figurative or poetic language as impractical, and instead shows how figuration is essential to the particular ways in which language is action that conveys meaning to others and serves broader social functions. Buck's forgotten work helps overcome criticisms of the application of pragmatic action theory to language and literature, sketching how language structure may be explained on the basis of language as a natural social-communicative act, how figurative language is inherent in the normal act of communicating situated bodily experiences to others, and how rhetorical speech and writing contributes to participation in democratic social processes. This paper also indicates how Buck's work has been partially rediscovered in Composition Studies, as well as prefigures later reader-response esthetics and feminist analyses of language.

The construction of mind, self, and society: the social process behind G. H. Mead'S social psychology.

Mind, Self, and Society, the posthumously published volume by which George Herbert Mead is primarily known, poses acute problems of interpretation so long as scholarship does not consider the actual process of its construction. This paper utilizes extensive archival correspondence and notes in order to analyze this process in depth. The analysis demonstrates that the published form of the book is the result of a consequential interpretive process in which social actors manipulated textual documents within given practical constraints over a course of time. The paper contributes to scholarship on Mead by indicating how this process made possible certain understandings of his social psychology and by relocating the materials that make up the single published text within the disparate contexts from which they were originally drawn.

A planar, chip-based, dual-beam refractometer using an integrated organic light-emitting diode (OLED) light source and organic photovoltaic (OPV) detectors.

We present a simple chip-based refractometer with a central organic light-emitting diode (OLED) light source and two opposed organic photovoltaic (OPV) detectors on an internal reflection element (IRE) substrate, creating a true dual-beam sensor platform. For first-generation platforms, we demonstrate the use of a single heterojunction OLED based on electroluminescence from an Alq(3)/TPD heterojunction (tris-(8-hydroxyquinoline)aluminum/N,N'-bis(3-methylphenyl)-N,N'-diphenylbenzidine) and light detection with planar heterojunction pentacene/C(60) OPVs. The sensor utilizes the considerable fraction of emitted light from conventional thin-film OLEDs that is coupled into guided modes in the IRE, instead of into the forward (display) direction. A ray-optics description is used to describe light throughput and efficiency-limiting factors for light coupling from the OLED into the substrate modes, light traversing through the IRE substrate, and light coupling into the OPV detectors. The arrangement of the OLED at the center of the chip provides for two sensing regions: a "sample" channel and a "reference" channel, with detection of light by independent OPV detectors. This configuration allows for normalization of the sensor response against fluctuations in OLED light output, stability, and local fluctuations (temperature) that might influence sensor response. The dual-beam configuration permits significantly enhanced sensitivity to refractive index changes, relative to single-beam protocols, and is easily integrated into a field-portable instrumentation package. Changes in refractive index (DeltaRI) between 10(-2) and 10(-3) RI units could be detected for single beam operation, with sensitivity increased to DeltaRI approximately 10(-4) RI units when the dual-beam configuration is employed.