RContext · Radical Contextualism and the Science of Meaning
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-09-01 → 2017-12-16
- EU contribution
- €177,599
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-CAR
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Results in brief
Radical Contextualism and the Science of Meaning
The project RContext investigated a challenge that ‘radical contextualism’ (RC) poses to certain mainstream accounts in the philosophy of language, formal semantics, and philosophy of mind. Main problems addressed concerned: (i) the role of context in successful communication and reasoning, and (ii) the extent to which this role generalises to other forms of representation besides natural language. The key objective was to devise a theory which can make the interaction of meaning and context more tractable and precise by using formal semantic tools. The proposed solution to the challenge posed by RC is twofold: first, that knowing the meaning of a sentence leaves room for a great deal of variation among the situations in which the sentence is true; and, second, that contexts be understood in terms of practical goals which create preferences for (or biases against) some of these situations based on how conducive they are to the contextually salient goal. It has been shown that both of these factors (i.e. conventional meaning and contextual goals) are equally important for understanding and interpreting utterances (and other forms of non-linguistic representation). A goal-sensitive theory of interpretation developed during this project has a wide range of application in natural language semantics and beyond: it can be straightforwardly extended to the interpretation of other sentential forms besides declarative sentences (questions, imperatives) and it can be easily embedded in existing discourse and planning theories. Additionally, we foresee useful applications in computational linguistics and machine learning, especially with tackling one of the oldest problems in this field: the word sense disambiguation problem.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project investigates the impact that ‘radical contextualism’ (RC) has upon certain foundational issues in the philosophy of language, formal semantics, and philosophy of science. What motivates RC is the idea that our interpretation of a word, and what we refer to by using it, might be very different on different occasions of use. This suggests that our ability to interpret words, or to understand what they mean, depends in part on our being familiar with certain features of the occasions on which words are actually put to use. However, since communicative occasions are not systematically tractable, this seems to render systematic theories of meaning impossible. My chief objective is to think of a way out of this difficulty whilst taking the intuition behind RC seriously. The key proposal I aim to develop and defend is that RC does not militate against the possibility of constructing theories of meaning, as is commonly assumed. Instead, what RC does challenge are the ontological commitments typically inherited by such theories; e.g. commitment to the existence of objects that are supposed to play the role of stable semantic values of open-class linguistic expressions. My novel response to the challenge from RC will be to propose two ontologically neutral metasemantic frameworks: dynamic content externalism and methodological internalism. I shall assess main hypotheses on the case of natural kind terms.The project is interdisciplinary, combining insights and techniques from philosophy and formal semantics. I have a background in philosophy of language but I have no training in formal semantics or theoretical linguistics. Hence, this project, supervised by Prof. Martin Stokhof (ILLC) who specialises in dynamic semantics, represents a remarkable opportunity for me to acquire new formal skills, which will not only be necessary for carrying out the proposed research, but also very important for my future career development.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union