Cultivating the Capabilities of the Marginal Person in Language Study
This paper seeks a method to cultivate the capabilities of the marginal person in language study by focusing on the concept of capability. The traditional utilitarianism and contractarianism ignore the marginal person at the beginning of the design of social structure, since one of the crucial motivations they pursued is mutual advantage. In contemporary society, Rawls innovatively mixes the Kantian ideas and the contractarian traditions, proposing the theory of justice to address the issue of inequality. Whereas, Amartya Sen find some drawbacks of Rawls' theory and criticize it, for this reason, Amartya Sen initially and creatively came up with the concept of capability to deal with the unequal phenomenon in his book The Quality of Life. Furthermore, Martha Nussbaum, based on Amartya Sen's capability approach, provided a core capabilities list to extend the scope of justice towards the marginal person, so as to help the disabilities and impairments get more actual opportunities to live a dignified life. She emphasized the vital roles of the government, the education, as well as the institution within her theory. In order to better find a method for understanding and supporting the marginal person, this paper would illustrate the radical interpretation model of triangulation proposed by Davidson within his method of truth-conditional theory of meaning. Consequently, combined the concept of capability with the model of triangulation, the difficulties which the marginal person have encountered could be dealt with reasonably and appropriately.