Online research in philosophy

This paper deals with some of the issues raised about the use of context in language, that is,the pragmatic side of the problem; morespecifically it aims to stress the significanceand complexity of context. In real life context is exploited both in production and in comprehension.I will deal here mainly with comprehension:after briefly referring to cognitive contextsand their interaction with knowledge andcomprehension, and touching on the relationbetween language and context, I will analyzethe uses of an indexical pronoun, we,which may both include and exclude speaker/sand/or interlocutor/s, and cannot beinterpreted without referring to an`integrated'' view of context.

The aim of this paper is to describe a simple extension of semantic nets. In this formulation we have labelled nodes with directed arcs, but the directed arcs can lead to other arcs as well as nodes. In this model contexts are not differentiated as special objects, but rather that some nodes to a greater or lesser extent have roles as encoders of contextual information. This formulation is shown to be expressive enough to capture several aspects of context, namely: context-dependent inference, context specific learning, the selection of a relevant context and the generalisation of knowledge. Its strengths are its simplicity, the fact that it can relate and integrate several aspects of context and its connections with formal logic. It is not claimed that this is a model of any type of context found in human activity.

In Hubert Dreyfus’s critique of artificial intelligence1, considerable importance is given to the matter of context –used here as a blanket term covering an immense and possibly heterogeneous phenomenon, which includes situation, background, circumstances, occasion and possibly more. Perhaps the best way to point to context in this most general sense is to proceed dialectically, and take as a first approximation context to be whatever is revealed as an obstacle whenever one attempts to account for mental dynamics on the formal model of a combinatorial game over families of interchangeable, fixed, self-standing – context-free as it were– elements. Dreyfus has argued persuasively that the human mind always ‘operates’, if that is the right word, within a setting which permeates whatever it is it operates on. Dreyfus’s thought on these matters was shaped during the years when artificial intelligence (AI) was at the height of early hopes and initial successes. This was also a period during which what was to become known as ‘cognitive science’ was little more than a ray of light falling on psychology..

This paper will argue that while traditional accounts of word meaning have problems accounting for how the referent of a non-ambiguous/non-indexical term can shift from context to context, a moderate version of semantic holism can do so by understanding the comparative weight of the extension-determining beliefs as itself something which can vary from context to context. The view will then be used to give an account of some of the more problematic cases in the literature associated with semantic externalism.

The use of context can considerably facilitate reasoning by restricting the beliefs reasoned upon to those relevant and providing extra information specific to the context. Despite the use and formalization of context being extensively studied both in AI and ML, context has not been much utilized in agents. This may be because many agents are only applied in a single context, and so these aspects are implicit in their design, or it may be that the need to explicitly encode information about various contexts is onerous. An algorithm to learn the appropriate context along with knowledge relevant to that context gets around these difficulties and opens the way for the exploitation of context in agent design. The algorithm is described and the agents compared with agents that learn and apply knowledge in a generic way within an artificial stock market. The potential for context as a principled manner of closely integrating crisp reasoning and fuzzy learning is discussed.

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.

Although context-processing deficits may be core features of schizophrenia, context remains a poorly defined concept. To test Phillips & Silverstein's model, we need to operationalize context more precisely. We offer several useful ways of framing context and discuss enhancing or facilitating schizophrenic patients' performance under different contextual situations. Furthermore, creativity may be a byproduct of cognitive uncoordination.

All sorts of things are context-dependent in one way or another. What it is appropriate to wear, to give, or to reveal depends on the context. Whether or not it is all right to lie, harm, or even kill depends on the context. If you google the phrase ‘depends on the context’, you’ll get several hundred million results. This chapter aims to narrow that down. In this context the topic is context dependence in language and its use. It is commonly observed that the same sentence can be used to convey different things in different contexts. That is why people complain when something they say is ‘taken out of context’ and insist that it be ‘put into context’, because ‘context makes it clear’ what they meant. Indeed, it is practically a platitude that what a speaker means in uttering a certain sentence, as well as how her audience understands her, ‘depends on the context’. But just what does that amount to, and to what extent is it true?

An organism's individual act may apparently be placed in three kinds of context: overt behavior occurring before and after the act (Context OB); the internal mental state of the actor (Context M); the internal cognitive/physiological state of the actor (Context CP). But contexts OB and CP are sufficient to describe the organism's mental state (if any). Context M is superfluous. Contexts OB and CP are contrasted with respect to their views of pigeons' and people's concepts of probability, delay and rate of environmental events. Focus on Context OB leads to theories of the long-term patterns of behavioral/environmental interaction while focus on Context CP leads to theories of internal mechanisms. This dichotomy of theoretical interest is extended from probability to other abstract and mentalistic concepts, to the function of language as an expander of context hence as an aid to self-control and to Ainslie's (1992) analogy between the relationship of a particular person to other people (social context) and the relationship of a person's particular act either to a pattern of acts by that person extended in time (Context OB) or to that person's internal state (Context CP).

The main point of the paper is the claim that a strong notion of cognitive context can answer the needs of a representation of dialogue context, with a higher generality than the "normative" notion suggested by Gauker. I will discuss some well known claims in the literature about communication and context, and I will suggest giving a central role to the notion of contract or semantic bargaining and to the normative constraints of indexicals and anaphora.