Beyond the Hoax: A Response to Emily A. Schultz

I am grateful to the editors of Reviews in Anthropology for giving me the opportunity to respond to Emily Schultz’s review (2010) of my book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture (2008). I shall begin by briefly correcting several of Schultz’s misrepresentations of my ideas. I shall then endeavor to address the intellectually interesting issues that she raises

Mixed Quotation

The central challenge posed by mixed quotation is that it exhibits both regular semantic use and metalinguistic reference, simultaneously. Semanticists disagree considerably on how to capture the interplay between these two meaning aspects. In this case study I present the various semantic approaches to mixed quotation and compare their predictions with respect to empirical phenomena like indexical shifting, projection, and non‐constituent mixed quotation

Syntactic microvariation and methodology: problems and perspectives

Variation in empirical data has been a perseverant problem for theoretical linguistics, especially syntax. Data inconsistencies among authors allegedly analyzing the same phenomenon are ubiquitous in the syntactic literature (e.g., literature on focus-raising in Hungarian; É. Kiss 1987 vs. Lipták 1998), and partly result from the highly informal methodology of data collection. However, even if adequate controls are used to exclude potential biases, variation might remain. The general practice in syntactic research has been to ignore these „microvariations”-mainly in the lack of any systematic empirical method to detect them. The present paper shows that this practice leads to serious theoretical problems and proposes a new empirical method, cluster analysis, to discover, explore and systematize these variations. It also illustrates how this richer empirical basis gives rise to a more fine-grained theoretical analysis

Considering agency and data granularity in the design of visualization tools

The Ecuadorian Government supports Gonzalo Gabriel Méndez through a SENESCYT scholarship.Previous research has identified trade-offs when it comes to designing visualization tools. While constructive “bottom-up” tools promote a hands-on, user-driven design process that enables a deep understanding and control of the visual mapping, automated tools are more efficient and allow people to rapidly explore complex alternative designs, often at the cost of transparency. We investigate how to design visualization tools that support a user-driven, transparent design process while enabling efficiency and automation, through a series of design workshops that looked at how both visualization experts and novices approach this problem. Participants produced a variety of solutions that range from example-based approaches expanding constructive visualization to solutions in which the visualization tool infers solutions on behalf of the designer, e.g., based on data attributes. On a higher level, these findings highlight agency and granularity as dimensions that can guide the design of visualization tools in this space.Postprin

Il naturalismo oggi. Abbozzo di una mappa e alcune riflessioni

This paper tries to draw a map of the various versions of naturalism to which the current philosophical debate aims – from the most radical, or ‘hard’ ones, to the mild-est, or liberal ones – and of the different projects of naturalization that are associated to them. In particular, in the first paragraphs, the present article will consider Timothy Williamson’s and Penelope Maddy’s attempts to inherit the demands of naturalism with-out declaring to be a naturalist (Williamson), or without making naturalism an empty slogan or a kind of masked first philosophy (Maddy). In the second part, the connec-tions between epistemological naturalism and ontological or metaphysical naturalism will be analysed. The questions will be: (1) is it possible to be naturalist with regard to epistemology without being naturalist with regard to ontology?; (2) is it possible to be ontologically naturalist without being epistemologically naturalist