Much of social life now takes place online, and records of online social interactions are available for social science research in the form of massive digital text archives. But cultural social science has contributed little to the development of machine-assisted text analysis methods. As a result few text analysis methods have been developed that link digital text data to theories about culture and discourse. This paper attempts to lay the groundwork for development of such methods by proposing metatheoretical and theoretical (...) foundations suitable for machine-assisted semantic text analysis. Metatheoretically I draw on the work of Elder-Vass, Kaidesoja and others to argue that digital text analysis methods ought to be based on a realist constructionist ontology that treats discourses as ontologically real emergent social entities that have causal relationships with non-discursive social and cognitive processes. Theoretically I follow Feldman and many others in arguing that language is fundamentally shaped by processes of embodied cognition. Researchers developing digital text analysis techniques must theoretically account for such processes if they wish to produce algorithms that can interpret texts in ways that supplement, and not only amplify, human interpretation. I critically survey contemporary text analysis methods that implicitly share these metatheoretical and theoretical positions and discuss some ways these can be further developed with newly available software. (shrink)

This e-special issue of Theory, Culture & Society showcases work published in the journal by and about the late German sociologist Ulrich Beck. Beck became known as a pioneering and inventive thinker, continuously engaged in a quest to capture the essence of the modern age, whilst simultaneously wrestling with the upcoming horizons of the future. During his career, he was responsible for developing some of the defining sociological concepts of the late 20th and early 21st century, including risk, reflexive modernization, (...) individualization and cosmopolitanism. He published many articles in Theory, Culture & Society, inspiring acolytes to mobilize his ideas and provoking critics to dispute them. Complementing articles written by Beck, this collection also includes critical commentaries, applications of his work, a selection of interviews and several reflective pieces which consider his legacy. The key aspiration of this special issue is to encourage contemplation on both the richness and the range of Ulrich Beck’s academic contribution. The contents stimulate reflection on the intricacies of Beck’s method of inquiry and flag up ways in which his work can influence the future trajectory of social theory. (shrink)

Traditional arguments against the identification of the language of thought with natural language assume a picture of natural language which is largely inconsistent with that suggested by contemporary linguistic theory. This has led certain philosophers and linguists to suggest that this identification is not as implausible as it once seemed. In this paper, I discuss the prospects for such an identification in light of these developments in linguistic theory. I raise a new challenge against the identification thesis: the existence of (...) ungrammatical but acceptable expressions seems to require a gap between thought and language. I consider what must be the case in order for this objection to be dealt with. (shrink)

Deep learning techniques have revolutionised artificial systems’ performance on myriad tasks, from playing Go to medical diagnosis. Recent developments have extended such successes to natural language processing, an area once deemed beyond such systems’ reach. Despite their different goals, these successes have suggested that such systems may be pertinent to theoretical linguistics. The competence/performance distinction presents a fundamental barrier to such inferences. While DL systems are trained on linguistic performance, linguistic theories are aimed at competence. Such a barrier has traditionally (...) been sidestepped by assuming a fairly close correspondence: performance as competence plus noise. I argue this assumption is unmotivated. Competence and performance can differ arbitrarily. Thus, we should not expect DL models to illuminate linguistic theory. (shrink)

I present a novel, collaborative, methodology for linguistics: what I call the ‘explanatory economy’. According to this picture, multiple models/theories are evaluated based on the extent to which they complement one another with respect to data coverage. I show how this model can resolve a long-standing worry about the methodology of generative linguistics: that by creating too much distance between data and theory, the empirical credentials of this research program are tarnished. I provide justifications of such methodologically central distinctions as (...) the competence/performance and core/periphery distinction, and then show how we can understand the push for simplicity in the history of generative grammar in this light. (shrink)

This article reviews the German sociologist Ulrich Beck’s final contribution, The Metamorphosis of the World. The drivers of the process of metamorphosis are appraised and the approach adopted by Beck is considered within the broader context of his oeuvre. Continuities with previous work are illuminated and novel developments identified. In order to provide a critical but sympathetic assessment of the theory of metamorphosis, Beck’s epistemological position and his sociological modus operandi are considered. It is argued that, despite elisions, the theory (...) of metamorphosis breaks new ground in social theory and offers valuable opportunities for future empirical investigation and conceptual debate. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of natural language (...) meaning. From this perspective, disparity between the scientific model and its real-world target is to be expected. I elaborate on what such an approach to semantics would look like. (shrink)

This interview with Ulrich Beck was undertaken in late August 2014. At this juncture Beck was preparing what was to be his final book, The Metamorphosis of the World. The conversation is reflective of Beck's thinking around the theory of metamorphosis at that time and represents his views on the underlying dynamics of social transformation and the mobilizing power of global risks.

This article offers a critical appraisal of Ulrich Beck’s A God of One’s Own. Connecting the trajectory of the book with the conceptual anchors set down in preceding work on reflexive modernization and cosmopolitanism, areas of empirical imprecision are identified and obstacles to the widespread adoption of personalized forms of faith are considered. Concentrating on issues around configurations of power, the formation of identity and filters of cultural difference, points of critique are developed and areas ripe for future investigation are (...) suggested. (shrink)

The dominant tradition in analytic philosophy of language views reference as paradigmatically enabled by the acquisition of words from other speakers. Via chains of transmission, these words connect the referrer to the referent. Such a picture assumes the notion of a word as a stable mapping between sound and meaning. Utterances are constructed out of such stable mappings. While this picture of language is both intuitive and historically distinguished, various trends and programs that have developed over the last few decades (...) in theoretical linguistics suggest an alternative. According to these approaches, the word, conceived of as a linguistic ‘building block’, has no special theoretical significance. While natural language systems generate structures mapping sounds onto meanings, they need not do so by composing elements which themselves specify such mappings. I shall describe some of these developments, and show how they pose a problem for traditional philosophical views of language and communication, before identifying an alternative approach to reference which does not rely on this common-sense picture of words. (shrink)

Generative grammarians typically advocate for a rationalist understanding of language acquisition, according to which the structure of a developed language faculty reflects innate guidance rather than environmental influence. This proposal is developed in developmental linguistics by triggering models of language acquisition. Opposing this tradition, various theorists have advocated for empiricist views of language acquisition, according to which the structure of a developed linguistic competence reflects the linguistic environment in which this competence developed. On this picture, linguistic development is accounted for (...) by general statistical learning mechanisms. In this article I shall precisify the debate, provide a clearer picture of what is at stake, and show why an intermediate picture is needed. (shrink)

Sociological propositions about the workings of cognition are rarely specified or tested, but are of central relevance to studies of culture, social judgment, and social movements. This paper draws out lessons of recent work from sociological theory, cognitive science, psychology, and neuroscience on the embodied nature of knowledge and thought, and develops implications of these lessons for cultural and cognitive sociology. Knowledge ought to be conceived of as fundamentally embodied, because sensory information is a fundamental component of experience as it (...) is stored in long-term memory, and because bodily responses and intuitions often precede reflexive or strategic thought. I argue that the challenge of embodied knowledge for cultural sociology is threefold: to develop cultural theories of motivation; to specify the ways in which the body structures discourses endogenously; and to specify how embodied motivations and embodied discourses interact. (shrink)

Quilty-Dunn et al. adopt a methodology for psychology connecting behavioral capacities to the format of the mental systems underlying them. This methodology opens up avenues connecting linguistic theory to comparative psychology. On the assumption that language structures thought, identifying the formal structure of human language can generate hypotheses connecting distinctively human cognitive traits to the distinctive structures of human language.

Language has long been a problem‐case for subsymbolic theories of mind. The reason for this is obvious: Language seems essentially symbolic. However, recent work has developed a potential solution to this problem, arguing that linguistic symbols are public objects which augment a fundamentally subsymbolic mind, rather than components of cognitive symbol‐processing. I shall argue that this strategy cannot work, on the grounds that human language acquisition consists in projecting linguistic structure onto environmental entities, rather than extracting this structure from them.

In this paper, I shall provide a novel response to the argument from context-sensitivity against truth-conditional semantics. It is often argued that the contextual influences on truth-conditions outstrip the resources of standard truth-conditional accounts, and so truth-conditional semantics rests on a mistake. The argument assumes that truth-conditional semantics is legitimate if and only if natural language sentences have truth-conditions. I shall argue that this assumption is mistaken. Truth-conditional analyses should be viewed as idealised approximations of the complexities of natural language (...) meaning. From this perspective, disparity between the scientific model and its real-world target is to be expected. I elaborate on what such an approach to semantics would look like. (shrink)

Standard proposals of scientific anti-realism assume that the methodology of a scientific research program can be endorsed without accepting its metaphysical commitments. I argue that the distinction between competence, the rules governing one’s language faculty, and performance, or linguistic behavior, precludes this. Linguistic theories aim to describe competence, not performance, and so must be able to distinguish observations reflective of the former from those reflective of the latter. This classification of data makes sense only against the background of a psychologically (...) realistic view of linguistic theory. So the very methodology of the science commits one to its realistic interpretation. (shrink)

Although a certain mature historicism in contemporary philosophy takes dialogue with past writers to be the “ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood,” the problem of truth must persist for it—if only in the form of the question concerning the validity of interpretation. If there is no progress in philosophy toward a more precise and established body of true propositions, still there must be some sort of movement to conversation and some reference point by means of which the (...) movement can be gauged. The reference point for traditional metaphysics is presence and presentation —both as method and as subject matter. But our goal now is simply to understand the special philosophical senses of truth and presence in their historical reality. (shrink)

Although a certain mature historicism in contemporary philosophy takes dialogue with past writers to be the “ultimate context within which knowledge is to be understood,” the problem of truth must persist for it—if only in the form of the question concerning the validity of interpretation. If there is no progress in philosophy toward a more precise and established body of true propositions, still there must be some sort of movement to conversation and some reference point by means of which the (...) movement can be gauged. The reference point for traditional metaphysics is presence and presentation —both as method and as subject matter. But our goal now is simply to understand the special philosophical senses of truth and presence in their historical reality. (shrink)

Although the bulk of this paper takes the form of an interpretation of the story of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, it is intended as an exploration of what I take to be a new nexus of assumptions about the objects and practice of philosophy. This new configuration might be designated the narrative paradigm. Here one treats philosophical statements about the world as speech acts in a context few of whose disparate dimensions -- psychological, political, economic, scientific, aesthetic or moral (...) -- can be mastered with the precision of a logical calculus, but which nevertheless exhibits structures and motifs that may let us make sense of philosophical strategies we can neither evade nor forego. Most philosophers from classical times on have been interested in some version of a complete.. (shrink)

The Myth of the Lost Tribes and the Ambiguity of “Israel” 23 Conversion and Return: The Yerushalmi’s Discussion 24 When is “this day”? (Deut. 29:28) 25 The Metaphysics of the Day 27 Hermeneutics in the Covenant of Moab 29..

The purpose of this article is to clarify some basic features of historical materialism insofar as it is a philosophic conception of history. Every serious philosophy of history must give an answer to at least three questions: What is the nature of historical reality? How is historical change being accomplished? What are the possibilities, the scope and the limits of historical knowledge?In historical materialism not one of these questions is sufficiently resolved. Contrary to Marxist-Leninist assertions, there is no necessary and (...) inseparable connection between dialectical and historical materialism. A materialist conception of history is compatible with many non-materialist metaphysical views. Further, historical materialism uses a superseded monocausal model of historical flux. Moreover, it is based upon a notion of historical causality which simply reproduces mechanical causality; but mechanical causality is inapplicable to historical events. Finally, the critique of historical knowledge isterra incognita for historical materialism. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to clarify some basic features of historical materialism insofar as it is a philosophic conception of history. Every serious philosophy of history must give an answer to at least three questions: What is the nature of historical reality? How is historical change being accomplished? What are the possibilities, the scope and the limits of historical knowledge? In historical materialism not one of these questions is sufficiently resolved. Contrary to Marxist-Leninist assertions, there is no "necessary" (...) and "inseparable" connection between dialectical and historical materialism. A materialist conception of history is compatible with non-materialist metaphysical views. Further, historical materialism uses a superseded monocausal model of historical flux. Moreover, it is based upon a notion of historical causality which simply reproduces mechanical causality; but mechanical causality is inapplicable to historical events. Finally, the critique of historical knowledge is terra incognita for historical materialism. (shrink)

Im Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts unterzog eine Reihe von jungen, später berühmt gewordenen Philosophen den Marxismus einer tiefen Kritik. Ihnen ist es gelungen, wichtige Defekte der revolutionären Doktrinen aufzudecken und ihre verhängnivsollen Konsequenzen vorwegzunehmen. Diese Kritik ist auch für die gegenwärtige geistig-politische Situation aktuell.

Im Anfang des 20.Jahrhunderts unterzog eine Reihe von jungen, später berühmt gewordenen Philosophen den Marxismus einer tiefen Kritik. Ihnen ist es gelungen, wichtige Defekte der revolutionären Doktrinen aufzudecken und ihre verhängnivsollen Konsequenzen vorwegzunehmen. Diese Kritik ist auch für die gegenwärtige geistig-politische Situation aktuell.

Sehr früh machte sich die russischeintellektuelle und literarischeÖffentlichkeit mit den Ideen von Nietzschevertraut, und bald entbrannten – nach gutrussischer Art – heftige Kontroversen, in derenZentrum die russische religiöse Philosophiestand. Mit Ausnahme von Solov'ëv, der eineunwiderlegbare Kritik an Nietzsches Atheismusausübte, aber sich damit begnügte,versuchten Berdjaev, estov und Frank dieinneren Widersprüche und Ambivalenzen desPredigers des ``Übermenschen aufzudecken.''Diese Denker waren geneigt neben dem``Antichrist'' auch dem Gottsucher Rechnung zutragen, der, obschon Gott leugnet, dennoch umihn ringt und durch die Aufrichtigkeit undLeidenschaftlichkeit seines Erlebens derGottesfrage zu (...) ihrem besseren und tieferenVerständnis beitragen kann. (shrink)