Moderate Holism: Answering to Criticism and Explaining Linguistic Phenomena

In this paper I present a version of meaning holism proposed by Henry Jackman (1999a, 1999b, 2005 and 2015) entitled "moderate holism". I will argue that this moderate version of holism, in addition to responding to much of the criticism attributed to traditional semantic holism (such as translation, disagreement, change of mind and communication), is also extremely useful to explain the occurrence of several, such as vagueness and polysemy

A defense of the ambiguity theory of \u27knows\u27

In recent years, questions regarding the truth conditions of knowledge ascriptions (sentences of the form ‘S knows that P’ where S is a subject and P a proposition) and knowledge denials (sentences of the form ‘S doesn’t know that P’) have been at the fore of a certain sector of analytic epistemology and philosophy of language. These questions include “How do we determine the truth conditions of a particular knowledge ascription or denial?”, “What sorts of factors are relevant in this determination?”, and “Is context among the relevant factors in a non-trivial way, and if so, how?” A variety of proposals have been generated in order to answer these questions—including proposals that offer a primarily semantic response. However, very little attention has been given to the possibility that part of the best answer to these questions about the truth conditions for knowledge ascriptions and denials is to posit that ‘knowledge’, ‘knows’, and their cognate terms are ambiguous. This dissertation offers a defense of a proposal along these lines. More specifically this dissertation is a defense of the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’. The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one propositional sense (i.e. a sense that can properly be used in ‘knows that’ constructions) and that which sense of ‘knows’ is being employed in a knowledge ascription or denial plays a role in fixing the truth conditions of a knowledge ascription (in virtue of contributing to the meaning of the claim). In this dissertation, this claim is defended first by making clear how the ambiguity theory differs from others proposals on offer, second, by comparing the ambiguity theory to other leading proposals and arguing that the ambiguity theory fares as well if not better, and third, by providing other independent arguments in favor of the view. My hope is that the work done here will give the ambiguity theory a more prominent presence in the relevant philosophical debates

Hearing meanings: the revenge of context

According to the perceptual view of language comprehension, listeners typically recover high-level linguistic properties such as utterance meaning without inferential work. The perceptual view is subject to the Objection from Context: since utterance meaning is massively context-sensitive, and context-sensitivity requires cognitive inference, the perceptual view is false. In recent work, Berit Brogaard provides a challenging reply to this objection. She argues that in language comprehension context-sensitivity is typically exercised not through inferences, but rather through top-down perceptual modulations or perceptual learning. This paper provides a complete formulation of the Objection from Context and evaluates Brogaards reply to it. Drawing on conceptual considerations and empirical examples, we argue that the exercise of context-sensitivity in language comprehension does, in fact, typically involve inference

Constructing concepts and word meanings: the role of context and memory traces

The main aim of this thesis is to develop a new account of concepts and word meaning which provides a fully adequate basis for inferential accounts of linguistic communication, while both respecting philosophical insights into the nature of concepts and cohering with empirical findings in psychology on memory processes. In accord with the ‘action’ tradition in linguistic theorising, I maintain that utterance/speaker meaning is more basic than sentence meaning and that the approach to word meaning that naturally follows from this is ‘contextualism’. Contextualism challenges two assumptions of the traditional ‘minimalist’ approach to semantics: (i) that semantics (rather than pragmatics) is the appropriate locus of propositional content (hence truth-conditions); and, (ii) that words contribute stable, context-independent meanings to the sentences in which they appear. I set out two stages in the development of an adequate contextualist account of utterance content. The first provides an essential reformulation of the early insights of Paul Grice by demonstrating the unavoidability of pragmatic contributions to truth-conditional content. The second argues that the ubiquity of context-dependence justifies a radically different view of word meaning from that employed in all current pragmatic theorising, including relevance theory: rather than words expressing concepts or encoding stable meanings of any sort, both concepts and word meanings are constructed ad hoc in the process of on-line communication/interpretation, that is, in their situations of use. Finally, I show how my account of word meaning is supported by recent research in psychology: context-dependence is also rampant in category and concept formation, and multiple-trace memory models show how information distributed in memory across a multitude of previous occasions of language use can come together to build an occasion-specific word meaning, thereby bypassing the need for fixed word meanings

On Polysemy: A Philosophical, Psycholinguistic, and Computational Study

Most words in natural languages are polysemous, that is they have related but different meanings in different contexts. These polysemous meanings (senses) are marked by their structuredness, flexibility, productivity, and regularity. Previous theories have focused on some of these features but not all of them together. Thus, I propose a new theory of polysemy, which has two components. First, word meaning is actively modulated by broad contexts in a continuous fashion. Second, clustering arises from contextual modulations of a word and is then entrenched in our long term memory to facilitate future production and processing. Hence, polysemous senses are entrenched clusters in contextual modulation of word meaning and a word is polysemous if and only if it has entrenched clustering in its contextual modulation. I argue that this theory explains all the features of polysemous senses. In order to demonstrate more thoroughly how clusters emerge from meaning modulation during processing and provide evidence for this new theory, I implement the theory by training a recurrent neural network (RNN) that learns distributional information through exposure to a large corpus of English. Clusters of contextually modulated meanings emerge from how the model processes individual words in sentences. This trained model is validated against a human-annotated corpus of polysemy, focusing on the gradedness and flexibility of polysemous sense individuation, a human-annotated corpus of regular polysemy, focusing on the regularity of polysemy, and behavioral findings of offline sense relatedness ratings and online sentence processing. Last, the implication to philosophy of this new theory of polysemy is discussed. I focus on the debate between semantic minimalism and semantic contextualism. I argue that the phenomenon of polysemy poses a severe challenge to semantic minimalism. No solution is foreseeable if the minimalist thesis is kept, and the existence of contextual modulation is denied within the literal truth condition of an utterance

Cultural practices of the reception and appropriation of films from the standpoint of a praxeological sociology of knowledge

Der Autor untersucht aus der Perspektive einer praxeologischen Wissenssoziologie und mittels der dokumentarischen Methode die Aneignung und Rezeption von Filmen. Anhand des Spielfilms "The Others (2001) entwickelt er verschiedene Typen der Rezeption durch Jugendliche. Er befasst sich vor allem mit dem Typus der "produktiven Aneignung", bei dem sich habituelle Orientierungen der Jugendlichen in wichtigen Komponenten verändern. In einem empirischen Forschungsprojekt wurden hierzu 14 Jugendliche im Alter von 18 bis 22 Jahren nicht nur zum genannten Film, sondern auch zu ihrem Umgang mit Filmen allgemein befragt. Den Film "The Others" haben die Jugendlichen zudem schriftlich nacherzählt, ergänzt um den persönlichen Eindruck und das eigene Urteil. Der Autor bezieht die Nacherzählungen und die Interviews bei der Auswertung jeweils aufeinander und analysiert sie mit Hilfe der dokumentarischen Methode. Seine Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, dass Filme einerseits als Ressource für Gruppeninteraktion und soziale Beziehungen und andererseits als Ressource zur Welterfahrung dienen. Die letztere wird z. B. wirksam, wenn die von einem Film inszenierte Realität von Jugendlichen mit ihrer Alltagspraxis und ihren eigenen Orientierungen verknüpft wird. Der Autor diskutiert ferner Konzepte zur Zuschaueraktivität, vor allem sozialkonstruktivistische Ansätze aus der kognitiven Filmpsychologie, der systemtheoretischen Rezeptionsforschung und den Cultural Studies. (ICI

Multiverse Ethnography : A replication and recontextualization as an audience study

This study is a conceptual replication of an exploratory study introducing a new method for the study of interactive media (Karhulahti et al. 2022). Multiverse Ethnography tasks a team of researchers to write fieldwork journals that are coded and subsequently analysed to create a design of thematic structures presenting the findings of the study. The original study concerned Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt RED, 2020) and Among Us (Innersloth, 2018), tasking a class studying game studies-methodology with the fieldwork and a co-operative coding process. As a more contained study with a single researcher, this replication excludes Cyberpunk 2077. The participants writing fieldwork journals did not have an academic role in the study, as it lacked the classroom context. The contextual differences of the data collection seemed to lead to fewer hours of interaction, possibly causing players to write down less observations of emergent meta-strategies or changes in the form of updates and customization. This would identify such themes as increasing in relevance relative to player’s experience. Comparative applications of the method are encouraged, as differences between different language game servers were identified. All elements of the thematic clusters emerging in the original study were identified in the data for the replication, though some themes lost relevance possibly because of these contextual factors. Applying the method as a solo researcher is not recommended, due to the large workload of data collection and the increased validity offered by co-operative coding and analysis

Analogical cognition and understanding a word

Gentner describes a notion of ‘analogical cognition’ that could play a significant role in elucidating what is involved in understanding a word. Gentner’s work has not, though, had much or any impact in linguistics or the philosophy of language. I explain key features of Gentner’s notion, and I argue that it explains how word understanding can be stable, specific, and shared, and how words can contribute to cognition as opposed to just being a means of conveying thoughts