Semantic Indeterminacy Research Articles

Slurs and Semantic Indeterminacy

The analysis of the derogatory aspect of slurs has recently aroused interest among philosophers of language. A puzzling element of it is its erratic behaviour in embeddings, for instance negation or belief reports. The derogatory aspect seems sometimes to “scope out” from the embedding to the context of utterance, while at other times it seems to interact with the linguistic constructions in which the slur is implanted. I argue that slurs force us to maintain a kind of semantic indeterminacy which, to my knowledge, has passed largely unnoticed in philosophy of language.

Humor creation and the ambiguity of morpho-syntactic phenomena

Ambiguity of different types contributes significantly to humor creation, as predicted by incongruity theory This holds for homonymy, polysemy, structural and scope ambiguity, as well as any multiplicity of meanings that arises due to pragmatic factors. A consideration of languages with rich inflectional morphology, such as Russian, further reveals that linguistic humor may be based on the semantic indeterminacy of certain grammatical phenomena. The present paper provides evidence in favor of this claim by taking the imperfective aspect, genitive case-assignment and instrumental case-assignment into account. It is demonstrated that the ambiguity / indeterminacy associated with these phenomena gives rise to the creation of humorous effects. We further generalize that the core functions of case and aspect correlate with the less salient readings of ambiguous sentences (often the absurd, non-bona-fide ones). In contrast, the more peripheral and even idiomatic functions give rise to the salient, bona-fide readings. A functional explanation is put forward for this apparent discrepancy: the prototypical, easily accessible functions of case and aspect make it easier for the hearer to process a sentence in its non-salient interpretation.

Estructuras narrativas del videoarte

Se analiza la problemática del videoarte, desde su indeterminación técnica y semántica; por un lado, se propone una estrategia metodológica que defina su condición técnica multidisciplinar mediante el uso del concepto “bulbo” como estructura. Por otro lado, se estudia el contenido discursivo semántico mediante el concepto “rizoma", a través de la narrativa. Se plantean las tres características del concepto de “estructura” de J. Piaget como directrices que regulan el comportamiento del videoarte.

The Dual Semantics of ›International Community‹

This article deals with the term ‘international community’. Instead of investigating its factual existence, however, it reconstructs the usage of the concept, which is regularly applied to justify political action. To this end, three speeches by prominent political leaders – Tony Blair, Vladimir Putin and Slobodan Milosevic – are examined in detail. The results point out a dual character: The concept is open to different ideas of a just global order. At the same time, this semantic indeterminacy makes it possible – analogous to a generally recognized currency – to ‘buy’ legitimacy for quite contrary political purposes.

REALISMO E INDETERMINATEZZA NEI FONDAMENTI DELLA MATEMATICA

Two of the most influential foundational approaches in the philosophy of mathematics of the past thirty years, i.e. neologicism and ante rem mathematical structuralism, suffer from metaphysical and semantic indeterminacy. My present aim is to offer an explanation of this phenomenon and provide a solution in terms of arbitrary reference.

Review

Review

Logical pluralism, indeterminacy and the normativity of logic

According to the form of logical pluralism elaborated by Beall and Restall there is more than one relation of logical consequence. Since they take the relation of logical consequence to reside at the very heart of a logical system, different relations of logical consequence yield different logics. In this paper, we are especially interested in understanding what are the consequences of endorsing Beall and Restall’s version of logical pluralism vis-à-vis the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide to reasoners. In particular, the aim of this paper is threefold. First, in Sections 2 and 3, we offer an exegesis of Beall and Restall’s logical pluralism as a thesis of semantic indeterminacy of our concept of logical consequence – i.e. understood as indeterminacy logical pluralism. Second, in Sections 4 and 5, we elaborate and critically scrutinize three models of semantic indeterminacy that we think are fit to capture Beall and Restall’s indeterminacy logical pluralism. Third, in Section 6, following Beall and Restall’s assumption that the notion of logical consequence has normative significance for deductive reasoning, we raise a series of normative problems for indeterminacy logical pluralism. The overall conclusion that we aim to establish is that Beall and Restall’s indeterminate logical pluralism cannot offer an adequate account of the normative guidance that logic is taken to provide us with in ordinary contexts of reasoning.

How Vague Can Your Patent Be? Vagueness Strategies in U.S. Patents

Patent claims define the protection scope of the intellectual property sought by the patent applicant or patentee. Broad claims are valuable as they can describe more expansive rights to the invention. Therefore, if these claims are too broad a potential infringer will more easily argue against them. But if the claims are too narrow the scope of protection of the intellectual property is greatly reduced. Patent claims have to be, on the one hand, determinate and precise enough and, on the other hand, as inclusive as possible. Therefore patent applicants must find a balance in the broadness of the scope defined by their claims. This balance can be achieved by the choice of words with a convenient degree of semantic indeterminacy, by the choice of modifiers or other strategies. In fact, vagueness in patent claims is a desirable characteristic for such documents. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of a corpus of 350 U.S. patents provides a promising starting point to understand the linguistic instruments used to achieve the balance between property claim scope and precision of property description. To conclude, some issues relating vagueness and pragmatics are suggested as a line of further research.

Making sense of (in)determinate truth: the semantics of free variables

It is argued that truth value of a sentence containing free variables in a context of use (or the truth value of the proposition it expresses in a context of use), just as the reference of the free variables concerned, depends on the assumptions and posits given by the context. However, context may under-determine the reference of a free variable and the truth value of sentences in which it occurs. It is argued that in such cases a free variable has indeterminate reference and a sentence in which it occurs may have indeterminate truth value. On letting, say, x be such that x^2=4, the sentence ‘Either x=2 or x=-2’ is true but the sentence ‘x=2’ has an indeterminate truth value: it is determinate that the variable x refers to either 2 or -2, but it is indeterminate which of the two it refers to, as a result ‘x=2’ has a truth value but its truth value is indeterminate. The semantic indeterminacy is analysed in a ‘radically’ supervaluational (or plurivaluational) semantic framework closely analogous to the treatment of vagueness in McGee and McLaughlin (South J Philos 33:203–251, 1994, Linguist Philos 27:123–136, 2004) and Smith (Vagueness and degrees of truth, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2008), which saves bivalence, the T-schema and the truth-functional analysis of the boolean connectives. It is shown that on such an analysis the modality ‘determinately’ is quite clearly not an epistemic modality, avoiding a potential objection raised by Williamson (Vagueness, Routledge, London, 1994) against such ‘radically’ supervaluational treatments of vagueness, and that determinate truth (rather than truth simpliciter) is the semantic value preserved in classically valid arguments. The analysis is contrasted with the epistemicist proposal of Breckenridge and Magidor (Philos Stud 158:377–400, 2012) which implies that (in the given context) ‘x=2’ has a determinate but unknowable truth value.

Causal and Moral Indeterminacy

AbstractThis paper argues that several sorts of metaphysical and semantic indeterminacy afflict the causal relation. If, as it is plausible to hold, there is a relationship between causation and moral responsibility, then indeterminacy in the causal relation results in indeterminacy of moral responsibility more generally.

Conditions for a Digital Metaphysic

Through an interpretation of Plato and Aristotle, I argue that the founding values of traditional metaphysics were made possible by speci c conditions of language and metaphor. Using the premises drawn from these Greek philosophers, I evaluate the ways digital media do and do not diverge from those conditions. In order to comprehend the novelty of digital media theoretically, we must first understand which features of ‘thought’ are conserved between different media systems. My position contrasts particularly with that of N. Katherine Hayles who, in My Mother was a Computer (2005), asserts that the novelty of digital media renders the conceptual resources of ‘traditional media’ inadequate to theorize it. Most of Hayles’s analysis and comparison is devoted to the properties of digital code and the interaction between code and hardware. I argue, by employing a semiotic division of language between syntagmatic and associative axes, that programming languages lack the semantic indeterminacy required to constitute a new worldview, as Hayles proposes. Finally, I argue that Hayles’s argument fails to articulate specifically how epiphenomena come to affect thinking. While there are differences between print and digital text, instead of looking to epiphenomenal causation, I propose a line of inquiry that would compare their histories as systems. Far from casting off traditional metaphysics, digital technology may actually better approximate some of their goals, for it enables a more thorough self-erasure of its own material which never comes into a phenomenal purview. KEYWORDS: Media eory, Digital Humanities, Metaphysics, Visual Culture

La Teoría del discurso de Laclau y su aplicación al significante “la paz”

Ernesto Laclau develops a research program that aims at explaining political phenomena as articulatory practices that structure collective identities. Discourse Theory, as social ontology and research methodology for Politics, highlights the antagonistic nature of historical-cultural processes during the production of meanings and senses that shape social field. By reviewing the sources that inspire the Argentinean philosopher to develop his proposal, it is concluded that discourses are established through a hegemonic dynamic that recognizes the contingent and antagonistic nature of every discourse. In the end, Discourse Theory is applied to the Colombian context, more precisely to the signifier “peace” during the 2014 Presidential Elections. It is argued that “peace” made possible the unification of different parties due to its semantic indeterminacy as empty signifier.

What in the World Is Semantic Indeterminacy?

What in the World Is Semantic Indeterminacy?

Vagueness: Why Do We Believe in Tolerance?

The tolerance principle, the idea that vague predicates are insensitive to sufficiently small changes, remains the main bone of contention between theories of vagueness. In this paper I examine three sources behind our ordinary belief in the tolerance principle, to establish whether any of them might give us a good reason to revise classical logic. First, I compare our understanding of tolerance in the case of precise predicates and in the case of vague predicates. While tolerance in the case of precise predicates results from approximation, tolerance in the case of vague predicates appears to originate from two more specific sources: semantic indeterminacy on the one hand, and epistemic indiscriminability on the other. Both give us good and coherent grounds to revise classical logic. Epistemic indiscriminability, it is argued, may be more fundamental than semantic indeterminacy to justify the intuition that vague predicates are tolerant.

English non-finite participial clauses as seen through their Czech counterparts

Based on the data from a parallel English-Czech corpus, the present study offers an analysis of 600 English V-ing participial clauses through their Czech translation correspondences, divisible into less and more explicit types. The less explicit Czech counterparts highlight the analytic character of English either in cases where the translation counterpart is synthetic (i.e. merging the meaning of the finite verb and the participle into one verb) or where the participle resembles, in its function, a preposition. The more explicit (i.e. finite-clause) Czech counterparts attest to the backgrounded information status and semantic indeterminacy of the English participial clause. Instead of an expected tendency to render their meaning in Czech by a similar, syntactically subordinated, structure, namely dependent clauses, it is the simple coordination that appears to represent best the semantic indeterminacy of the relation of the English participial clause to its superordinate element.

“The Ends of Homo Sacer.” A review of a Roundtable discussion on the work of Giorgio Agamben.

“The Ends of Homo Sacer.” A review of a Roundtable discussion on the work of Giorgio Agamben. Christopher Law (bio) Jessica Whyte, Benjamin Noys, Jason E. Smith and Alberto Toscano. “The Ends of Homo Sacer.” Roundtable discussion on the work of Giorgio Agamben. Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought, Goldsmiths, University of London, 10 November 2015. On November 10, 2015 a group of four scholars of Giorgio Agamben’s work gathered at Goldsmiths, University of London for a roundtable organized by the college’s recently formed Centre for Philosophy and Critical Thought (CPCT). Contributing to the event, and representing a diverse array of interests in Agamben’s work, were Jessica Whyte, Benjamin Noys, Jason E. Smith and Alberto Toscano (who, alongside the roundtable chair Julia Ng, acts as co-director of the CPCT). The event was dubbed “The Ends of Homo Sacer,” a title whose most obvious motivation was the recent publication of Agamben’s Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm and of L’uso dei corpi (recently published in English as The Use of Bodies). The former book, originally delivered as two lectures in October 2001, slots into an earlier position in Agamben’s nine-book Homo Sacer series, whilst the latter marks its ostensible termination, if not its completion. As is well known, the series has been published out of the order envisioned by Agamben himself (a confusion to which the delayed publication of Stasis adds, since it displaces a spot previously accorded to The Kingdom and the Glory). Both the elusive ordering of the project and the question of its conclusion provided food for thought throughout the evening; neither problem, needless to say, attained definitive closure. Though all panelists addressed the appearance of Stasis and The Use of Bodies—and with them, Homo Sacer’s curious publication history as a whole—only Smith drew direct attention to the plurality of “ends” in the event’s title. There are, as Smith pointed out, at least two levels at which this title is productively ambiguous. It poses the challenge that there might exist more than one conclusion to Homo Sacer and, moreover, suggests a multiplicity of meanings in such “ends” themselves (a semantic indeterminacy to which the plurality of ends is related but not necessarily reducible). What other meanings might Homo Sacer’s multiplicity of ends hold? As well as termini, ends can point to purposes, whether those of Agamben himself, or those of his readers and interlocutors. A panoramic glance reveals homo sacer as a concept that has (especially in its canonical formulation in the opening pages of the series’ first and eponymous volume) detached itself from its immediate context, in order to function as a tool for almost all disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Much of this event’s relevance hinged on a critical reflection on the concept’s exile into other disciplines, a phenomenon seemingly matched by the intensification of the contemporary political crises to which Agamben has always accorded a structural significance. This nomadic quality of homo sacer illuminates another equivocal element in the event’s title: the separability of the research project and book series Homo Sacer not only from the philosophical concept, but also from the historically specific legal figure (and its textual inscription) and, furthermore, from contemporary or historical homines sacri. Jessica Whyte’s paper, the most expressly concerned with contemporary crises of sovereignty, raised similar questions concerning the displacement of technical terms onto a generalized register. She was less preoccupied with the figure of homo sacer, however, than with the term “collateral damage” and its contemporary use as a justification for acts and ideologies of military and socio-economic ruination. The loss of human (and specifically civilian) life that military intervention requires, Whyte’s talk made clear, necessitates for its ideologues an appeal to higher sources in order to justify the suffering it causes. The term’s elasticity, as Whyte demonstrated, also allows it to be redeployed as a metaphor in the discourse of free markets and their enforcement upon indebted countries (Whyte referred to Yanis Varoufakis’s description of Greece as the “collateral damage” of the European Central Bank’s strategy to save the Eurozone by encouraging...

Borel on the Heap

In 1907 Borel published a remarkable essay on the paradox of the Heap (“Un paradoxe economique: le sophisme du tas de ble et les verites statistiques”), in which Borel proposes what is likely the first statistical account of vagueness ever written, and where he discusses the practical implications of the sorites paradox, including in economics. Borel’s paper was integrated in his book Le Hasard, published 1914, but has gone mostly unnoticed since its publication. One of the originalities of Borel’s essay is that it puts forward a model of vagueness as imprecision, making particular use of the Gaussian law of measurement errors to model categorization. The aim of our paper is to give a presentation of the historical context of Borel’s essay, to spell out the mathematical details of his model, and to provide a critical assessment of his theory. Three aspects of Borel’s account are particularly discussed: the first concerns the comparison between Borel’s statistical account and posterior degree-theoretic accounts of vagueness. The second concerns the anti-epistemicist flavor of Borel’s approach, whereby the idea of statistical fluctuation is used to undermine the notion of sharp boundary for vague predicates. The third concerns the problematic link between Borel’s model of vagueness as imprecision and the notion of semantic indeterminacy. An English translation of Borel’s original essay is appended to this paper (Erkenntnis, this issue).

Varieties of reference and realism

This is a collection of excellent papers which cover a wide range of issues, as the union of the items listed in the title suggests. But it is not an easy collection for a reader to navigate or a reviewer to review. The editors do not provide a summary of the papers, and some authors do not provide a ready summary of what they are going to argue. Readers are left to plunge in—but they may be none the worse for that. The editors set out a number of standard challenges for realism. Do our perceptual systems bring us into contact with the real world as it is, or do they present the world in ways which are dependent on these systems? Do our perceptual acts pick out real objects or features of the world? This last question can be rephrased semantically for our contact with the unobservables of science; do the theoretical terms of our science mange to refer to unobservable objects, events and properties out there in the world (despite the fact that there is a history of our sciences being wrong about these in the past)? And then, there is the hoary old issue with which the correspondence theory of truth is confronted (from Spinoza to Davidson and Rorty): is it possible to perform the trick of standing outside the deliverances of our perceptual systems and sciences to compare the veracity of these with how the world is in some unmediated fashion? The bugbear for the realist is said to be a triumphant epistemological constructivism which claims that it is not possible to perform this trick. Such a constructivism adds to the herculean tasks facing the realist since it embraces issues to do with the theory ladenness of perception, semantic indeterminacy of meaning, reference and translation, the collapse of the seeing and seeing as distinction, and much else as well. These and other problems would seem to make the life of a realist a tough one; solving these problems sets out a philosophical agenda for realism’s survival. Just how well does

Metaphysically indeterminate existence

Sider (Four-dimensionalism 2001; Philos Stud 114:135–146, 2003; Nous 43:557–567, 2009) has developed an influential argument against indeterminacy in existence. In what follows, I argue that the defender of metaphysical forms of indeterminate existence has a unique way of responding to Sider’s argument. The response I’ll offer is interesting not only for its applicability to Sider’s argument, but also for its broader implications; responding to Sider helps to show both how we should think about precisification in the context of metaphysical indeterminacy and how we should understand commitment to metaphysically indeterminate existence. And if I’m right that metaphysical indeterminacy can allow for indeterminate existence in a way that semantic indeterminacy can’t, indeterminate existence might actually give us a reason to accept metaphysical indeterminacy (rather than a reason to reject it, as is commonly assumed).

Drawing Our Fish in the Sand: Secret Biblical Allusions in the Music of U2

AbstractConfronted with a popular music subculture which is predominantly antipathetic to Christianity, the charismatic-evangelical members of rock band U2 double code their lyrics in such a manner that Christian references are hidden from mainstream listeners and media while being readily recognizable to their Christian fans. The device of allusion is especially amenable to this end, as the meaning of an allusion can only be considered by a reader or listener who possesses the requisite competency in respect of the evoked text(s). Through their utilization of biblical allusions, U2 therefore construct two different, perhaps even irreconcilable, groups of listeners—a knowledgeable Christian in-group and an unknowledgeable non-Christian out-group. With detailed reference to U2's songs, this paper examines the covert tendencies of allusion and the manner by which it is able to engage the listener's intertextual imagination. The paper also distinguishes a secret or hidden allusion from a generic allusion on pragmatic and socio-cultural grounds, and demonstrates the potential of secret allusions to increase semantic indeterminacy. Lastly, the paper examines some examples of the reception of the U2 song 'Magnificent' which demonstrate the effectiveness of U2's secret biblical allusions in creating two largely discrete groups of listeners.