Linguistic Turn Research Articles

Learning text analytics without coding? An introduction to KNIME

The combination of the quantitative turn in linguistics and the emergence of text analytics has created a demand for new methodological skills among linguists and data scientists. This paper introduces KNIME as a low-code programming platform for linguists interested in learning text analytic methods, while highlighting the considerations necessary from a linguistics standpoint for data scientists. Examples from an Open Educational Resource created for the DiMPAH project are used to demonstrate KNIME’s value as a low-code option for text analysis, using sentiment analysis and topic modelling as examples. The paper provides detailed step-by-step descriptions of the workflows for both methods, showcasing how these methods can be applied without writing code. The results suggest that visual or low-code programming tools are useful as an introduction for linguists and humanities scholars who wish to gain an understanding of text analytic workflows and computational thinking. However, as with more traditional programming, caution must be exercised when using methods without fully understanding them. In conclusion, KNIME is a potential avenue for innovative research and teaching computational methods to humanities scholars.

What is not mentioned in the famous article by Edmund Gettier

The paper aims to unfold the «internal» content of Gettier’s argument as a skeptical argument against knowledge in terms of answering the question: «why he could be right when he says what he says». Our initial hypothesis is that E. Gettier does not say anything about the «accidentality of the fact that Smith has 10 coins in his pocket», but he uses the words «entailment» and «deduction», which substantiates the «truth of the conclusion», and on the basis of which he attributes «knowledge» to Smith. The article comes out at a certain time, E. Gettier uses the rhetoric of necessary and sufficient conditions, with regard to justification an analogue of the closure principle is given, there are exactly two examples – all this lead to the assumption that E. Gettier’s «justification» in the form he speaks about it in the staging part of the article – is a logical relationship between beliefs that are interconnected by the relationship of entailment and are fixed in the same way in the person’s belief system. Much of the evidence on pages two and three is an illustration of why this «logical interpretation» of reasoning doesn’t work. Contrary to most popular points of view, E. Gettier managed to show only that the implementation of formal relations between beliefs does not allow one to get to «knowledge» in the form in which he defines it. In particular, such a reading makes it possible to block various attempts to propose a «fourth condition». It must meet the task set – to restore confidence that the fulfillment of the formal relations between beliefs can help to get to «knowledge». However, within the framework of the linguistic turn paradigm, in which E. Gettier works, this is impossible, because in general, it simply lacks adequate means of discussing the persuasiveness of the inference. In this sense, «knowledge» is, by definition, a fuzzy concept that brings us back to «classical notions» in which the persuasiveness of an argument implies not only validity, but also soundness, relevance, and usefulness.

Says who? Language regard towards speaker groups using English loanwords in Dutch

Abstract This paper contributes to the ongoing Cognitive Linguistic turn in research on lexical borrowing: rather than searching for objective and universal linguistic criteria to demarcate different contact phenomena, we prioritize language users’ subjective perception of contact-induced change. In particular, combining insights from folk linguistics and social role theory, this paper presents the results from a survey targeting 177 Belgian Dutch respondents’ expectations on the use of English loanwords. The survey uncovers variation in these expectations, depending on the age of the projected speaker (RQ1), on the social role of the projected speaker (RQ2), and whether (unexpected) use of English by projected social role actors leads to negative evaluations (RQ3). Results reveal shared expectations regarding the use of English loans by age, with a perceived peak in late adolescence. Regarding the use of English by social role actors, we find high anticipated use of English loans for modern roles (e.g. rapper, gamer), whilst the expectation on English use for public (e.g. primary school teacher) and traditional roles (e.g. farmer) is significantly lower. Finally, our results indicate that role violation only seems to trigger negative evaluations when the role actor is a public figure with social responsibility. The discussion reflects on the implications of the results, contrasting the top-down or bottom-up emergence of shared beliefs on speaker groups and contact-induced variation.

Il Linguistic turn in prospettiva. Su Une histoire inquiète di Sabina Loriga e Jacques Revel

The book traces the debate that absorbed the community of historians - and the humanities more generally - in the decades of the linguistic turn, the theoretical movement that placed language at the centre of philosophical reflection between the 1970s and 1990s. Examining the linguistic turn in the light of the category of postmodernism, the authors reconstruct the controversies, genealogies and ramifications of a movement that was anything but homogeneous. A discipline traditionally secure in its methods and results, history has emerged far more uneasy and doubtful about the possibility of producing objective and verifiable knowledge.

New Paradigms in French Historiography, or the Same Old Ones?

This article presents some recent trends in French historiography that concern the relationship between history and literature. Among the recent developments are “experiments” carried out by a few historians, which are characterized by an explicit determination to focus on narrative, along with a willingness to share one’s own historical subjectivity. By going through some of the examples from this approach, this article highlights how these literary reflexes make important contributions. However, it also points out the weakness of this proposed method of making history on epistemological grounds. That is, it abandons the form of historical writing that requires distance and an appreciation that history’s vocation is to propose solid but uncertain propositions (to paraphrase Zemon Davis). By insisting on emotional and sensitive understanding, the knowledge gained from these experiments only questions the scientific aspects of history and history itself. This recent trend is not exactly new, as it evidently links up with some of the consequences generated by the linguistic turn.

Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

<i>Cultural Capital</i>: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Ideas of class

This text was originally published by David S. Parker in 1998 as an introduction to the book The Idea of the Middle Class: White-Collar Workers and Peruvian Society, 1900-1950, published by Penn State University Press. In the book, the author reflects on the union organization of private employees in Lima (Peru) and the origin of the 1924 law that established a legal distinction between empleado (white-collar employee) and obrero (blue-collar worker). Both the “constructivist” school and the linguistic turn argue that social classes are abstractions, inventions of the collective imaginary, that is, ideas that compete in an ideological market. Among the infinite ways of conceptualizing society, only a few images and discourses become common sense, influencing the formation of identities and inspiring laws and public policies. This text affirms and characterizes that the formation of the middle class concept in Peru is due to ideological, discursive and political processes.

Parties, Voters and Political Change in Early Twentieth-Century Manchester: Reconnecting Politics and Society.

In the wake of the linguistic turn the 'new political history' has recognized the importance of both political language and social context. In practice, however, over recent years much political history of the pre-1918 period has become increasingly focused on language and party, relegating society and economy to the margins. This study emphasizes the interconnectedness of party politics and society, arguing that smaller municipal electoral districts offer potential new insights into the impact of religion, class, gender and ethnicity upon both, party policy and practice, and voter behaviour. Parties adapted their campaign strategies and policy stances to reflect their understanding of the social make-up of local electorates. Voter responses to party campaigns could be strongly influenced, but not determined, by individual or group perceptions of social standing. By exploring the connected fortunes of all three major parties new light is shed on the development of local political culture before 1914. The article also assesses the shifting strengths and weaknesses of Conservative, Liberal, and Labour parties, and contributes to historiographical debates on the politics of slum and suburban communities, and the pre-war trajectories of the major parties.

Close, but No Cigar

Close, but No Cigar

텍스트의 탈맥락화

Ontological turn challenges the humanistic studies which has been deeply immersed in linguistic turn. Graham Harman and Quentin Meillasoux, the representative thinkers, argue that thing/object/reality exist for itself, regardless of its contexts, relations, or co-relations. Harman says that literary critics should see how text/thing withstand its contexts and environment or even culture, and Meillasoux argues that reality is an absence of reason and we can get to it only by a narrative which is disconnected from every logic and predictable law. Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein can be read in terms of what these ontological thinkers say. The monster in the text is an excellent example of ‘thing itself.’ Its narrative is about disconnections and disruptions, exemplifying Meillasoux’s idea of “extro-science fiction.”

Introduction to special issue: The critical theory of society

The state of theorizing bearing on an explicit, contemporary, critical theory of society is first of all outlined. While contemporary conditions of scholarship are not promising in this respect, the potential of a distinctive critical theory of society nonetheless remains tantalizing. The mostly agreed, even if mostly only implicitly, core architectonic of critical theory is outlined as a foundation, though disagreements persist over the significance of the linguistic turn and context-transcendent versus context-immanent modes of theorizing. On the basis of the outline of the general architectonic, suggestions are made, pointing forward to the articles in the special issue, as to how the contemporary democratic focus of the theory offers inspiration for a more explicit, modern articulation. Such a theory would follow the lead of the first generation, but it would additionally take on board the multiple theoretical as well as social changes that have since occurred.

Historical Perspective on Mental Health: Emergence, Transformations of Subjectivity and Consequences in Clinical Practices

Mental health has become a prolific field of research, concern, debate and intervention in the health sciences and human sciences in the last two decades. The fundamental interest of this brief history of the concept of mental health is to analyze the semantic and pragmatic configuration of the concept. There is a wide range of social uses of mental health. In the conditions of life of post-industrial capitalism since the Second World War, mental health has become a field of production of discourses and commodities addressed to the individual as coping templates, tools for self-understanding of their lives or mechanisms of meaning to overcome the difficulties of life. The event of mental health entails registers social events, socially mediated life experiences, cultural meanings, as well as capacities of agency over reality to the point of becoming a systematic articulation of human acts and contents of experience that ordered reality, therefore, it acquired the quality of a concept. Mental health is of relevance for historical work because it has left in its wake sources of various categories that require an exercise of compilation, systematization, reflection and narration. It is a reflexive concept for history: it reflects on experience, functions, practices and uses. It is part of what has been called the linguistic turn and the emotional turn, the awareness that both language and affective sensitivities sediment the understanding of the world. For this historiographic approach it is necessary to understand the context of emergence, the transformations of subjectivity, the consequences on clinical practices, and the means that have allowed its scientific and cultural appropriation in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Linguistic Turn in the Early Frankfurt School: Horkheimer and Adorno

Was there a linguistic turn in Frankfurt School Critical Theory before Habermas's communications-theoretic one? Might later Wittgenstein and the early Frankfurt School have adopted similar pictures of language? I propose that both questions should be answered affirmatively, focusing on Horkheimer's Eclipse of Reason. I argue that, thanks to the picture of language that Horkheimer and Adorno share with (later) Wittgenstein, we can reconstruct their theory in a way that renders it more defensible. Insofar as the human life form and language are inseparable, language can be an inextinguishable reservoir of what Horkheimer called "objective reason." Recognizing this allows us to answer Habermas's critique of Horkheimer and Adorno. Moreover, paying attention to this inseparableness can enable us to engage in disclosing social critique (for example, regarding current debates about sustainability).

От логики к бессмысленности: философия языка Людвига Витгенштейна в повести Томаса Бернхарда «Хождение»

The article attempts to reveal the scale of influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus on the subject matter and writing method of Thomas Bernhard. On the basis of the novella Walking, published in 1970, we demonstrate that the issues raised by Wittgenstein at the beginning of the 20th century were of primary importance for Bernhard. The Austrian writer was interested not only in establishing the relationship between the world and language, but also in extrapolating this metaphysical problem to an understanding of the nature of literary creativity. Wittgenstein in his work asked the critical question about the possibility of adequate transmission of events by means of language and sought to explore its ontological and logical foundations. However, this idea of the philosopher receives an unusual refraction in the novella Walking. On the one hand, Bernhard casts doubt on Wittgenstein’s assumption about the initial isomorphism of words and objects and condemns his characters to endless wandering in the closed space of speech. On the other hand, in such a negative way he confirms the ideological core of the “linguistic turn”, and, in fact, that human existence is determined by language. Thus, literary exploration of themes of madness, suicide, the deceptiveness of reality, which in the logical continuum of the Tractatus are declared nonsensical, leads Bernhard’s narrative to an existential level.

Humanizing Philosophy

Abstract In this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium on Richard Rorty, the author attempts to identify what he calls “the heart of Rortyism.” Beginning with Rorty's query, as an undergraduate, about “what, if anything, philosophy is good for,” Višňovský associates this question, as Rorty did throughout his career, with the question of the meaning of human life. On the basis of this association—the association of a seriously, consistently pursued metaphilosophy with a defense of humanity against all comers, including theology and science—Rorty moved methodically through the arguments of the “Linguistic Turn” analysts, the pragmatists, the antirepresentationalists, and postmodernists until he achieved an anti-absolutist, antiauthoritarian humanism all his own.

Time and the Rhetoric of Capital

Abstract Lauren Berlant, Moishe Postone, and Michael Silverstein were colleagues at the University of Chicago for over thirty years. Postone was one of the leading Marxist thinkers in the world; Silverstein was the leading linguistic anthropologist of his generation; and Berlant was the most influential literary theorist of her generation. This article examines whether Marxism, semiotic linguistics, and literary studies are compatible. However, the author will go back to the “linguistic turn” and revisit some older debates about the role of rhetoric. But a revitalized rhetoric of temporality will answer the questions that Benedict Anderson raised almost forty years ago: How do the temporalities of capital and narration interact to create new social affects and emotions? What would a Marxist approach to a semiotic linguistics of affect and subjectivity look like?

Метафилософия философских «поворотов»: не­сколько примеров на одну тему

The purpose of the article is to consider the phenomenon of philosophical “turn” in the framework of descriptive metaphilosophy. Using the example of analytical, linguis­tic, pragmatic and ontological turns, an attempt is made to highlight the characteristic fea­tures of “turns”. The author shows that the analytical turn is associated with the develop­ment of methods of philosophy, primarily with the diversification of the concept of analy­sis itself. Consideration of the linguistic turn leads to the position that its characterization as a change in the subject of philosophy is not quite adequate – in fact, it is a change in the methods of philosophical analysis, which leads to the emergence of new problem areas not only in philosophy, but also in linguistics. The pragmatic turn is characterized by emphasizing the role of pragmatism in overcoming the existing opposition of analytic and continental philosophy through the use of both logical and, for example, axiological methods or the “pragmatic principle”. The ontological turn, characteristic of anthropol­ogy, the philosophy of technology, as well as for “general” philosophy, is associated with a change in the methods of analysis in the direction of solving the problem of seeing “things in a new way” and how “they really are”. The analysis in the case of an ontologi­cal turn is aimed not so much at “multiculturalism” as at “multi-naturalism”, at taking into account the active role of the subject and building the research models capable of taking this into account. The final position of the author is that according to which a “turn” is a change in research methods that leads to the formation of a new subject area and the formulation of new problems. They, in turn, stimulate the next “turn” and the de­velopment of new methods and methodologies.

Review of Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism by Jeffrey T. Nealon (University of Minnesota Press)

Jeffrey T. Nealon’s 'Fates of the Performative: From the Linguistic Turn to the New Materialism' crafts a history of performativity within contemporary theoretical thought. Through the structure of a genealogy, Nealon examines the nascence of performativity and its intersection with biopolitics and neoliberalism to predict not only the future of the performative, but also to imagine new avenues of criticism within the humanities.

The linguistic turn and its philosohpical understanding about ‘learning’ and ‘pedagogy’ in 2019 British Columbia early learning framework

본 연구는 우리나라와 같은 시기에 개정된 2019 개정 브리티시 컬럼비아 유아교육과정에 대한 후기질적연구 내의 문헌분석을 통해 「2019 개정 누리과정」에서 강조하고 있는 어린이의 배움과 교사의 교육전문성에 대한 새로운 이해의 가능성을 찾고자 하였다. 이를 위해 첫째, 2019 BC ELF의 언어적 전환과 철학적 전제를 살펴보고, 둘째, 어린이의 ‘배움’과 교사의 ‘페다고지’에 대한 이해를 살펴보았다. 2019 BC ELF는 유아교육을 오랫동안 지배해 온 실증주의와 인본주의, 그리고 발달주의에 근간을 둔 어린이와 배움에 대한 이해를 넘어 사상적 전환과 실천을 교육과정을 통해 구현시켰다. 우선, 관계적 존재론, 포스트 휴머니즘과 신물질 주의를 근간으로 배움을 리좀으로, 학습영역을 살아있는 탐구로, 목표를 경로로 개념의 전환을 시도하였다. 이와 더불어 유아교사의 교육 실천을 경청의 페다고지, 비판적 성찰, 협력적 대화와 교육적 나레이션으로 명명하고, 교수-학습을 물질, 교사, 어린이와의 공동의 살아있는 탐구로 보았다. 언어와 그것이 담고 있는 개념은 생산적인 힘을 가진 살아있는 물질이다. 새로운 용어와 개념은 어린이의 배움과 교사의 페다고지를 새로운 방식으로 볼 수 있도록 이끈다. 2019 BC ELF의 용기있는 도전으로 유아교육은 새로운 실험의 길을 걷게 되었다. 실험은 새로운 교육실천의 가능성을 만들어 낼 것이다.

Gabriella Gelardini. Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews: Collected Essays

Gabriella Gelardini. <i>Deciphering the Worlds of Hebrews: Collected Essays</i>