Contextualist Semantics Research Articles

A generic framework for the semantic contextualization of indicators

Indicators are quantitative or qualitative measures used to gauge various aspects of society and assess change over time (such as monitoring the progress or effectiveness of a public policy). Ideally, indicators should be precisely defined and measured according to harmonized procedures that may not be feasible in practice, especially in domains such as health, where indicators are often derived from preexisting, heterogeneous datasets. Integrating such data has posed a persistent challenge, but semantic technologies offer advantages by enriching data in a relatively simple, linkable, and non-disruptive way. However, without harmonized frameworks, the difficulties associated with data integration are unlikely to be resolved. In this article, we propose a generic, domain-neutral indicator contextualization framework for structuring and linking distributed datasets with contextual metadata according to a standard model. The framework integrates the concepts of the International Organization for Standardization/International Electrotechnical Commission (ISO/IEC) 11179 metadata registry standard with the common core ontologies (CCO) mid-level ontology suite, and incorporates other semantic technologies to make it adaptable and interoperable within and across domains. Application of the framework to an example indicator illustrates the versatility and adaptability of the approach in a federated data architecture. The contextual information can be dereferenced using standard query tools to provide data users a comprehensive understanding and overview of the indicator. The framework is amenable to deep learning applications via the principles of semantic data models, linked open data, and knowledge organization systems. The ideas are presented to stimulate further reflection and consolidation of standard data contextualization frameworks.

Reasons for Belief in Context

AbstractThere is currently a lively debate about whether there are practical reasons for belief, epistemic reasons for belief, or both. I will argue that the intuitions on all sides can be fully accounted for by applying an independently motivated contextualist semantics for normative terms. Specifically, normative terms must be relativized to a goal. One possible goal is epistemic, such as believing truly and not believing falsely, while another possible goal is practical, such as satisfying desires, or maximizing value. I will argue that we have practical reasons given the practical goal and epistemic reasons given the epistemic goal. Disagreement disappears when we make the context explicit. The result is an independently motivated version ofpluralism.

Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion

<i>Sharing Knowledge: A Functionalist Account of Assertion</i>

Bicontextualism

Can one quantify over absolutely everything? Absolutists answer positively, while relativists answer negatively. Here, I focus on the absolutism versus relativism debate in the framework of theories of truth, where relativism becomes a form of contextualism about truth predications. Contextualist theories of truth provide elegant and uniform solutions to the semantic paradoxes while preserving classical logic. However, they interpret harmless generalizations (such as “everything is self-identical”) in less than absolutely comprehensive domains, thus systematically misconstruing them. In this article, I show that contextualism is broadly compatible with absolute generality. More specifically, I develop a bipartite contextualist semantics, or “bicontextualism,” on which sentences are split in two groups: the unproblematic sentences, which are compatible with absolute generality, and the problematic ones, which are given a relativist semantics. I then argue that bicontextualism retains the advantages of (orthodox) contextualism and does not give rise to new revenge paradoxes.

Formulating Moral Error Theory

This paper shows how to formulate moral error theories given a contextualist semantics like the one that Angelika Kratzer pioneered, answering the concerns that Christine Tiefensee developed.

Jeremy is a... Expressive-relativism and expressives in predicative positions

Expressives are words that convey speakers’ attitudes towards a particular object or situation. Consider two examples:Attributive: That f**khead Jeremy forgot the turkey.Predicative: Jeremy is a f**khead. In both examples the word f**khead communicates some expressive content - the negative attitude of the speaker. However, only in Predicative does it appear to contribute to the truth-conditional content. The task is to explain the semantics of the word f**khead when it seemingly behaves wildly differently in different syntactic positions. In this paper I consider several good candidates for dealing with f**khead occurring in Predicative position: Expressivist and Descriptive approaches that treat f**khead in Predicative as purely descriptive; and Expressive-Contextualism that treats Predicative as communicating to both expressive and descriptive dimensions. I show that none of the options fully capture the meaning of f**khead. Treating Predicative as purely descriptive leaves out the highly important expressive element, whilst Contextualist semantics does not seem as a suitable descriptive theory for expressives. I finally present a novel hybrid account that combines Expressivist semantics with Relativism. I call this view Expressive-Relativism. I show that by adopting Expressive-Relativism we can not only explain the relationship of f**khead in Attributive and Predicative, but also give a suitable descriptive theory that captures the truth-conditions of Predicative.

Social Mobility and the Social Representation of Sparkling Wine in Brazil and France

Wine is a social object, established in the Old World and later migrated to the New World. Champagne is an internationally important and famous French sparkling wine, significantly present worldwide. Brazil, a New-World wine producer, has a recent but expanding history of sparkling wine production and consumption. As to its social aspect, this product has different representations and roles in both these countries. Therefore, this study aims to understand how culture and social status influence the organization of social representations associated with sparkling wines in Brazil and France. Thus, we used the Social Representation approach, a theory of knowledge and communication. For content collection, we carried out a verbal association task. Two hundred and thirteen Brazilians and one hundred ninety-eight French participants provided the first four words which came to mind after hearing four inducted words. The verbal associations were categorized using semantic contextualization. Then, we performed a Correspondence Factor Analysis. The results supported our hypothesis that culture, social status, and social origins all influence social representations associated with sparkling wine, revealing this kind of wine to be a product of social distinction and affluence.

Will I get a job? Contextualism, belief, and faith

Does faith require belief? “Belief-plus” accounts of faith say yes. “Non-doxastic” accounts say no but tend to place a “no-disbelief constraint” on faith. Both sides, I argue, are mistaken for making belief (or disbelief) explanatorily prior to faith. Indeed, both “faith” and “belief” have contextualist semantics, which leaves only a tenuous tie between the applications of the two words.

Ought-contextualism and reasoning

What does logic tells us how about we ought to reason? If P entails Q, and I believe P,should I believe Q? I will argue that we should embed the issue in an independentlymotivated contextualist semantics for ‘ought’, with parameters for a standard and set ofpropositions. With the contextualist machinery in hand, we can defend a strongprinciple expressing how agents ought to reason while accommodating conflictingintuitions. I then show how our judgments about blame and guidance can be handledby this machinery.

Assertions and future tense semantics

Non-bivalent semantics of the future tense assert that propositions regarding future contingents are neither true nor false. One of the most relevant non-bivalent semantics is supervaluationism (Thomason in Theoria 36(3):264–281, 1970; Thomason, in: Gabbay, Guenthner (eds) Handbook of philosophical logic, Springer, Berlin, 1984), which preserves important logical principles. Recently, non-bivalent semantics are under attack from some pragmatics arguments: these semantics would be incompatible with our practices of asserting future contingents and with the probability we ascribe to such assertions (Besson and Hattiangadi in Philosophical Studies 167(2):251–271, 2014; Cariani and Santorio in Mind 127(505):129–165, 2018). The aim of this paper is to defend supervaluationism against this kind of criticism. We argue that, if probability is interpreted as the subjective belief in a proposition and if a semantic contextualism is adopted, supervaluationism makes correct predictions concerning the norms that govern our practices of asserting future contingents. Obviously, other arguments can be proposed against supervaluationism, but they must be of a different kind, such as metaphysical arguments.

Does polysemy support radical contextualism? On the relation between minimalism, contextualism and polysemy

ABSTRACT Polysemy has only recently entered the debate on semantic minimalism and contextualism. This is surprising considering that the key linguistic examples discussed in the debate, such as ‘John cut the grass’ or ‘The leaf is green’ appear to be prime examples of polysemy. Moreover, François Recanati recently argued that the mere existence of polysemy falsifies semantic minimalism and supports radical contextualism. The aim of this paper is to discuss how the minimalism-contextualism debate relates to polysemy. This connection turns out to be far from clear-cut. This is partly due to the fact that the term ‘polysemy’ is used in a number of different ways in the literature, which will be reviewed in this paper. Finally, I discuss and reject Recanati’s claim that the existence of polysemy supports radical contextualism against moderate versions and semantic minimalism. I show that minimalism has a number of plausible options to account for polysemy.

Análise textual com IRaMuTeQ de pesquisas recentes em História da educação matemática no Brasil: um exemplo de Humanidades Digitais

El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar la producción de conocimiento en historia de la educación matemática (HEM) bajo la óptica de las Humanidades Digitales, a partir de tesis de maestría y doctorado realizadas en 2012 y 2017 en Brasil. La muestra está compuesta por 52 tesis y se utilizó el software IRaMuTeQ para el análisis multidimensional de sus resúmenes. El análisis de frecuencia de palabras posibilitó la identificación de temáticas y metodologías; mientras que el análisis factorial de correspondencia posibilitó 1) la contextualización semántica y 2) visualizar las distancias entre los corpus textuales (resúmenes de tesis). En Brasil, la evolución de HEM muestra aumento del número de tesis, diversificación de temáticas y metodologías. En los años analizados la formación de profesores es el principal tema de interés. La hermenéutica de profundidad es el principal referente teórico-metodológico en las tesis de 2017. Los hallazgos evidencian la influencia de los grupos de investigación en las agendas de investigación de las universidades. Los resultados confirman la utilidad de las herramientas de las Humanidades Digitales, específicamente las relativas a la minería de texto, para analizar la evolución de la producción de conocimiento en HEM

The Disappearance of Ignorance

Keith DeRose’s new book The Appearance of Ignorance is a welcome companion volume to his 2009 book The Case for Contextualism. Where latter focused on contextualism as a view in the philosophy of language, the former focuses on how contextualism contributes to our understanding of (and solution to) some perennial epistemological problems, with the skeptical problem being the main focus of six of the seven chapters. DeRose’s view is that a solution to the skeptical problem must do two things. First, it must explain how it is that we can know lots of things, such as that we have hands. Second, it must explain how it can seem that we don’t know these things. In slogan form, DeRose’s argument is that a contextualist semantics for knowledge attributions is needed to account for the “appearance of ignorance”—the appearance that we don’t know that skeptical hypotheses fail to obtain. In my critical discussion, I will argue inter alia that we don’t need a contextualist semantics to account for the appearance of ignorance, and in any case that the “strength” of the appearance of ignorance is unclear, as is the need for a philosophical diagnosis of it.

Perspectivism

AbstractConsider the sentence “Lois knows that Superman flies, but she doesn't know that Clark flies”. In this paper we defend a Millian contextualist semantics for propositional attitude ascriptions, according to which ordinary uses of this sentence are true but involve a mid‐sentence shift in context. Absent any constraints on the relevant parameters of context sensitivity, such a semantics would be untenable: it would undermine the good standing of systematic theorizing about the propositional attitudes, trivializing many of the central questions of epistemology, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of action. In response to this problem, we prove a series of tenability results. We show that, given certain constraints on the parameters of context sensitivity, there is a broad class of principles of propositional attitude psychology whose good standing follows from corresponding claims about people's mental representations. But these constraints also have some surprising consequences: they are jointly incompatible with coarse‐grained theories of propositions, and they are in tension with a natural picture of how speakers and hearers coordinate on the interpretation of attitude ascriptions. In light of these consequences we explore different ways in which the contextualist picture might be developed, and argue that our preferred way compares favorably with Fregeanism and neo‐Russellianism.

Interpretive Context, Counterpart Theory and Fictional Realism without Contradictions

Abstract Models for truth in fiction must be able to account for differing versions and interpretations of a given fiction in such a way that prevents contradictions from arising. I propose an analysis of truth in fiction designed to accommodate this. I examine both the interpretation of claims about truth in fiction (the ‘Interpretation Problem’) and the metaphysical nature of fictional worlds and entities (the ‘Metaphysical Problem’). My reply to the Interpretation Problem is a semantic contextualism influenced by Cameron (2012), while my reply to the Metaphysical Problem involves an extension and generalisation of the counterpart-theoretic analysis put forth by Lewis (1978). The proposed analysis considers interpretive context as a counterpart relation corresponding to a set of worlds, W, and states that a sentence φ is true in interpretive context W iff φ is true at every world (w∈W). I consider the implications of this analysis for singular terms in fiction, concluding that their extensions are the members of sets of counterparts. In the case of pre-existing singular terms in fiction, familiar properties of the corresponding actual-world entities are salient in restricting the counterpart relation. I also explore interpretations of sentences concerning multiple fictions and those concerning both fictional and actual entities. This account tolerates a plurality of interpretive approaches, avoiding contradictions.

Description of Cartographic Heritage in Europeana Data Model

Abstract. Europeana is a portal that provides access to millions of objects from all kinds of cultural heritage communities. It enables users to find digital cultural works made available by cultural institutions throughout the European Union. Currently, Europeana provides access to a collection of more than 50 million books, periodicals, video clips, maps, photographs and digital documents from libraries, archives, museums and audio-visual archives in Europe. To facilitate Europeana’s participation in the Semantic Web Europeana Data Model (EDM) has been developed. The idea of EDM is to constitute a framework for collecting, connecting and enriching metadata. It is a theoretical data model that allows data to be presented in different ways according to the practices of the various domains that contribute data to Europeana. EDM brings more meaningful links to Europe’s cultural heritage data. Data from partners or external information resources with references to persons, places, subjects, etc., will connect to other initiatives and institutions. This will result in sharing enriched content, adding to it and thereby generating more content in ways that no single provider could achieve alone.Presented research is the continuation of authors earlier study. In previous research, authors have proposed to integrate EDM structured information with geographic information system for movable heritage providing the semantic relations of movable heritage to the geographical space. This was a step into mixing GIS and Europeana world with the use of semantic contextualization for the object representations. Current research is the next step in this study and is going towards development of the new areas of EDM implementation – in cartographic heritage description.

Error possibility, contextualism, and bias

A central theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism is that it can explain something that invariantism cannot. Specifically, contextualism claims that judgments about “knowledge” are sensitive to the salience of error possibilities and that this is explained by the fact that salience shifts the evidential standard required to truthfully say someone “knows” something when those possibilities are made salient. This paper presents evidence that undermines this theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism. Specifically, it demonstrates that while error salience does sometimes impact “knowledge” judgments as contextualism predicts, it does so in ways that are consistent with invariantism and does not require positing any additional contextualist semantics to explain. These results advance our understanding of the pathways by which error possibility affects “knowledge” judgments, answer a major challenge to invariantism, and suggest several methodological improvements for the study of knowledge attribution.

The Prapañca Paradox

Madhyamaka claims that while everything is in fact empty, the use of concepts invariably leads to the error known as prapanca or hypostatisation, in the form of the supposition that there are things with intrinsic nature. This may be put as the claim that all conceptualisation falsifies. But this claim is paradoxical in that its truth would entail its falsity. While Mādhyamikas have not directly addressed this problem, a solution might be found utilizing the resources of contextualist semantics. This paper explores the origins of the paradox by tracing the history of the notion of prapanca, and then examines how a contextualist approach might resolve the difficulty.

Contextualismo vs Minimalismo: um embate sobre a (in)dependência entre Semântica e Pragmática

Este artigo tem como objetivo apresentar um debate entre duas correntes teóricas opostas: o minimalismo semântico e o contextualismo semântico. Mostraremos que o cerne dessa disputa faz referência às relações estreitas que a semântica e a pragmática possuem no que tange ao tratamento do significado de uma sentença e a possível influência do contexto em sua compreensão. Para os minimalistas Cappelen &amp; Lepore (2005), o significado de uma sentença é definido em grande parte pelos seus elementos gramaticais; nessa concepção, a referência contextual não apresenta qualquer influência em seu conteúdo semântico, salvo os indexicais. Já os contextualistas como Recanati (2010) defendem que o contexto modaliza o conteúdo semântico de uma sentença: diferentes significados podem ser atribuídos a uma mesma sentença a depender do cenário dos atos de proferimento. A discussão entre essas diferentes abordagens parece uma alusão ao quão dependente ou independente a semântica é da pragmática, se elas estão ou não em relação de interface no tratamento do significado e do contexto. Se considerarmos a concepção minimalista, a semântica e a pragmática são áreas de estudos separadas; porém, se considerarmos a concepção contextualista, essas áreas são interdependentes, ou seja, as condições de verdade de uma sentença dependem da informação contextual do ato de fala.

ID+Lab – Analyzing, Modeling and Designing Interdisciplinarity

Interdisciplinary collaboration is the key to solving complex tasks. At the same time, the communication and cooperation within such a collaboration are themselves characterized by multifaceted, dynamic processes. The ID+Lab explores the structures of interdisciplinary cooperation in order to better understand, visualize and test them. The ID+Model developed for this purpose enables us to acquire an altogether new and detailed view of these structures. ID+Model allows complex collaborations to be analyzed, modeled and designed as a network of actors and connections. The basic elements are eleven ID+Actors that have proven to be essential in interdisciplinary collaborations: people, organizations, events, tasks, methods, tools, money, topics, time, sources and places. The ID+Actors form a network through semantically defined ID+Ties with different status, values and intensity. The formal definition of modeling in the ID+Ontology makes research data available for the Semantic Web and the Linked Open Data Cloud. Based on the ID+Model, the ID+Lab is developing a semantic research contextualization platform – the ID+Stage. The ID+Backstage modeling tool uses a structured question dialogue to gather all the critical actors and connections of a publication, translate them in the background into a machine-readable format, and store them. When a research result is connected to the modeled context of origin, the ID+Publication is formed. Consequently, not only are the research results disclosed, so are their development processes. The ID+Publications are published on the ID+Stage. The ID+Ontology enables the semantic recording and searchability of all data as a modeling foundation.