And Mr. Chan knew, which is why we were there in the first place, participants in an art project that had everything, or at least a lot: objects, words, images, ideas, emotions, discourse, actions, lessons, beauty, politics, criticality and generosity.
The classical meanings become the preconditions for success of the discourse actions.
Like discourse, actions are "open worlds" whose meaning, which outlives their initial performance, is not fully determined by their performers and their immediate audiences.
Since dynamic semantics focuses on the discourse actions of sender and receiver, it is, in a sense, close to use-oriented approaches to meaning in philosophy, such as the work of Wittgenstein and Dummett.
It follows from the analogies between discourse and action that all action is in principle interaction, just as all discourse is in principle dialogical.
Among these themes are: (a) discourse and action, (b) selves as agents, (c) the temporality of action, (d) narrativity, identity, and time, (e) memory and history, (f) ethics, and (g) politics.
It might be suggested that universities are places of discourse, not action.
Instead, providing infrastructure and specialised institutions to states that are seen to be suffering the effects of climate change should be integrated into international development policy ahead of the current IMF and World Bank economically driven "sustainable development" discourse and action.
Professor Iqbal Z. Quadir founded the Legatum Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007 to promote discourse and action on bottom-up development and support MIT students who intend to launch enterprises in low-income countries.
"A convention is a publicity free-for-all and that's not necessarily his favorite environment, because it's not the place for good debate or discourse or action," said Al Cardenas, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party and a friend of Mr. Bush.
