OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Join us for the first in our series of work-in-progress seminars, where researchers in our network present in-progress papers for discussion and feedback. This seminar will be a presentation followed by discussion.
I discuss the problems of giving definitions of linguistic terms especially in contentious fields such as religious studies. Alternatives are considered in the form of ostension and the use of exemplars. Having considered problems with some definitions of divination, I provide a new one that couples a rubric with a list of exemplary types and exemplary questions. The exemplars demarcate the domain to which the rubric should be applied. This definition does not rely on beliefs, deities (the supernatural) or modes of cognition.
