Online research in philosophy

It is argued in this article that human actions may be said to be socially constituted : as being behavior that is constituted as human action by social relations and by participant agent and collective representations of behavior. In contrast to recent social constructionist accounts, it is argued that the social constitution of action does not pose any threat to the objectivity of classification or explanation in social psychological science. It does mark some significant ontological differences between natural and social psychological phenomena that have implications for the university and generality, but not the adequacy, of explanations of socially constituted human actions.

How does social organization persist? How does social organization transform? This article proposes that social scientists can begin to answer these questions by considering social organization as the intermittent construction and decay of patterned action, and social actors as centers of organization with the capacity to exert force within some social scene. From this perspective, contexts that shape the dynamics of both actors and scenes could be imagined as turbulent flows that push and pull action into temporary patterns. By viewing social organization as temporary vortexes of involvement within turbulent flows of action, social scientists can focus their attention on the processes at play in the creation, stabilization, and collapse of social organization. Such a perspective corrects some of the limitations in network and field approaches for investigating the fluidity of social organization. Key Words: social organization • timing • stability • cycles • social patterns.

Abstract The goal of social explanation is to understand human action, both individual and collective. To do so successfully we must explain action on three distinct (but intertwined) levels: the actors? intentions, the meaning that actors and interpreters ascribe to action, and the structural ideals that govern action. Each level of explanation has certain types of rationality associated with it. Only on the level of intentionality does instrumental rationality assume a prime importance, yet even there it must compete with normative and expressive accounts of action.

This position paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in AI to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to `interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Harris (1988), enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two thought-provoking papers in interpretation, (Barwise 1989) and (Hobbs 1990), are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context.

Collective action is a widespread social phenomenon, ranging from intricate duets to routinized, hierarchical cooperation within bureaucratic structures. Standard accounts of collective action (such as those offered by Bratman, Gilbert, Searle, and Tuomela and Miller) have attempted to explain cooperation in the context of small-scale, inter-dependent, egalitarian activities. Because the resulting analyses focus on the intricate networks of reciprocal expectation present in these contexts, they are less useful in explaining the nature of collective action in larger or more diffuse social contexts. I argue here instead for a minimalist account of collective action, which explains collective action across a broad range of contexts by reference to individuals' overlapping "participatory intentions," i.e., intentions to do one's part in a collective act. Participatory intentions are, formally, simply species of individual instrumental intentions, although their objects make irreducible reference to collective acts.

At the heart of natural language processing is the understanding of context dependent meanings. This paper presents a preliminary model of formal contexts based on situation theory. It also gives a worked-out example to show the use of contexts in lifting, i.e., how propositions holding in a particular context transform when they are moved to another context. This is useful in NLP applications where preserving meaning is a desideratum.

This book departs from the premise that context represents a complex relational configuration which can no longer be conceived as an analytic prime but rather requires a parts-whole perspective to capture its inherent dynamism. The edited volume presents a collection of papers which examine the connectedness between context, contextualization and entextualization. They address the questions how meaning and speech acts are situated in context, how both are influenced by context, how context influences speech acts and meaning, how context is imported into the discourse, and how context is entextualized in discourse. The papers cover institutional and non-institutional contexts, the language of Greek laws, political discourse, confrontational media discourse and task-oriented face-to-face and back-to-back interactions. They reflect current moves in pragmatics and discourse analysis to cross disciplinary and methodological boundaries by integrating relevant premises and insights, in particular cognition, adaptive action, negotiation of meaning, sequentiality, recipient design and genre.

Social action is central to social thought. This centrality reflects the overwhelming causal significance of action for social life, the centrality of action to any account of social phenomena, and the fact that conventions and normativity are features of human activity. This book provides philosophical analyses of fundamental categories of human social action, including cooperative action, conventional action, social norm governed action, and the actions of the occupants of organizational roles. A distinctive feature of the book is that it applies these theories of social action categories to some important moral issues that arise in social contexts such as the collective responsibility for environmental pollution, humanitarian intervention, and dealing with the rights of minority groups. Avoiding both the excessively atomistic individualism of rational choice theorists and implausible collectivist assumptions, this important book will be widely read by philosophers of the social sciences, political scientists and sociologists.

In our routine communicative activities, context is exploited both in production and in comprehension, and is strictly related to another problematic notion, viz. meaning. Thus Bateson (1979: 15): ‘‘Without context, words and actions have no meaning at all. This is true not only of human communication in words but also of all communication whatsoever, of all mental process, of all mind, including that which tells the sea anemone how to grow and the amoeba what he should do next.’’.