The category-theoretic representation of quantum event structures provides a canonical setting for confronting the fundamental problem of truth valuation in quantum mechanics as exemplified, in particular, by Kochen–Specker’s theorem. In the present study, this is realized on the basis of the existence of a categorical adjunction between the category of sheaves of variable local Boolean frames, constituting a topos, and the category of quantum event algebras. We show explicitly that the latter category is equipped with an object of truth values, (...) or classifying object, which constitutes the appropriate tool for assigning truth values to propositions describing the behavior of quantum systems. Effectively, this category-theoretic representation scheme circumvents consistently the semantic ambiguity with respect to truth valuation that is inherent in conventional quantum mechanics by inducing an objective contextual account of truth in the quantum domain of discourse. The philosophical implications of the resulting account are analyzed. We argue that it subscribes neither to a pragmatic instrumental nor to a relative notion of truth. Such an account essentially denies that there can be a universal context of reference or an Archimedean standpoint from which to evaluate logically the totality of facts of nature. (shrink)

A provocative ontological-cum-semantic position asserting that the right ontology is austere in its exclusion of numerous common-sense and scientific posits and that many statements employing such posits are nonetheless true. The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence (...) Horgan and Matjaz Potrc argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. (shrink)

The authors of Austere Realism describe and defend a provocative ontological-cum-semantic position, asserting that the right ontology is minimal or austere, in that it excludes numerous common-sense posits, and that statements employing such posits are nonetheless true, when truth is understood to be semantic correctness under contextually operative semantic standards. Terence Horgan and Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] argue that austere realism emerges naturally from consideration of the deep problems within the naive common-sense approach to truth and (...) ontology. They offer an account of truth that confronts these deep internal problems and is independently plausible: contextual semantics, which asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability. Under contextual semantics, much ordinary and scientific thought and discourse is true because its truth is indirect correspondence to the world. After offering further arguments for austere realism and addressing objections to it, Horgan and Potrc [hacek over c] consider various alternative austere ontologies. They advance a specific version they call "blobjectivism"--the view that the right ontology includes only one concrete particular, the entire cosmos, which, although it has enormous local spatiotemporal variability, does not have any proper parts. The arguments in Austere Realism are powerfully made and concisely and lucidly set out. The authors' contentions and their methodological approach--products of a decade-long collaboration--will generate lively debate among scholars in metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy. Terence E. Horgan is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona. Matjaz [hacek over z] Potrc [hacek over c] is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. (shrink)

In a series of papers written over the last two decades, Terence Horgan has articulated a radical position on truth and metaphysics that he calls contextual semantics. According to Horgan, we can abandon referentialism – or the idea that truth is always and everywhere understood in terms of the referential relations between words and world – while still sensibly believing in a mind-independent world. The centerpiece of contextual semantics is that it allows for some flexibility about (...) truth: statements of different sorts can be true in different ways depending on the degree to which they correspond to the world. In this paper, I explore the consequences of this position.While I believe that contextual semantics has significant advantages, there is a deep tension between Horgan'stolerance of more than one kind of truth and his belief in one type of reality – a tension that threatens to undermine the entire position. (shrink)

Terence Horgan's "contextual semantics" is supposed to be a means to avoid unwanted ontological commitments, in particular commitments to non-physical objects, such as institutions, theories and symphonies. The core of contextual semantics is the claim that truth is correct assertibility, and that there are various standards of correct assertibility, the standards of "referential semantics" being only one among others. I am investigating the notions of correct assertibility,assertibility norms and indirect reference. I argue that closer inspection (...) reveals that contextual semantics ultimately amounts – contra Horgan's intentions – to a paraphrase strategy. I defend an ontological commitment to theories and symphonies. (shrink)

Quantum physics exhibits various non-classical and paradoxical features. Among them are non-locality and contextuality (e.g. Bell’s theorem or the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox). Since they are expected to constitute a key resource in quantum computation, several approaches have been proposed to provide high-level expressions for them. In one of these approaches, Abramsky and others use the mathematics of algebraic topology and characterize non-locality and contextuality as the same type of phenomena as M. C. Escher’s impossible figures. This article expands this topological insight (...) and demonstrates that logical paradoxes arising from circular references (of the sort formalized by Gödel’s fixed-point or diagonalization lemma) share the same topological structure as the quantum paradoxes, by reformatting the topological model of contextuality into a semantics of logical paradoxes. This topological semantics indeed provides a unifying perspective from which previous approaches of philosophers and logicians to logical paradoxes can be understood as diverse ways of fine-tuning topologies to model paradoxes. (shrink)

Review of Horgan and Potrc (2008). I discuss both their linguistic and ontological theses.

This paper addresses the problem of Twitter sentiment analysis through a hybrid approach in which SentiWordNet (SWN)-based feature vector acts as input to the classification model Support Vector Machine. Our main focus is to handle lexical modifier negation during SWN score calculation for the improvement of classification performance. Thus, we present naive and novel shift approach in which negation acts as both sentiment-bearing word and modifier, and then we shift the score of words from SWN based on their contextual (...) semantic, inferred from neighbouring words. Additionally, we augment negation accounting procedure with a few heuristics for handling the cases in which negation presence does not necessarily mean negation. Experimental results show that the contextual-based SWN feature vector obtained through shift polarity approach alone led to an improved Twitter sentiment analysis system that outperforms the traditional reverse polarity approach by 2–6%. We validate the effectiveness of our hybrid approach considering negation on benchmark Twitter corpus from SemEval-2013 Task 2 competition. (shrink)

Keyword extraction refers to the process of selecting most significant, relevant, and descriptive terms as keywords, which are present inside a single document. Keyword extraction has major applications in the information retrieval domain, such as analysis, summarization, indexing, and search, of documents. In this paper, we present a novel supervised technique for extraction of keywords from medium-sized documents, namely Corpus-based Contextual Semantic Smoothing. CCSS extends the concept of Contextual Semantic Smoothing, which considers term usage patterns in similar texts (...) to improve term relevance information. We introduce four more features beyond CSS as our novel contributions in this work. We systematically compare the performance of CCSS with other techniques, when implemented over INSPEC dataset, where CCSS outperforms all state-of-the-art keyphrase extraction techniques presented in the literature. (shrink)

It is widely believed by historians of linguistics that the 19th-century was largely devoted to historical and comparative studies, with the main emphasis on the discovery of soundlaws. Syntax is typically portrayed as a mere sideline of these studies, while semantics is seldom even mentioned. If it comes into view at all, it is usually assumed to have been confined to diachronic lexical semantics and the construction of some (mostly ill-conceived) typologies of semantic change. This book aims to (...) destroy some of these prejudices and to show that in Europe semantics was an important, although controversial, area at that time. Synchronic mechanisms of semantic change were discovered and increasing attention was paid to the context of the sentence, to the speech situation and the users of the language. From being a semantics of transformations', a child of the biological-geological paradigm of historical linguistics with its close links to etymology and lexicography, the field matured into a semantics of comprehension and communication, set within a general linguistics and closely related to the emerging fields of psychology and sociology. (shrink)

This thesis argues for two main points concerning the philosophy of natural language semantics. Firstly, that the objects of assertion are distinct from the entities appealed to in the compositional rules of natural language semantics. Secondly, natural languages contain context-shifting operators known as "monsters". In fact, it will be shown that these theses are simply two sides of the same coin.

The paper aims at providing an argument for a deflationary treatment of the notion of public language meaning. The argument is based on the notion of standards of correctness; I will try to show that as correctness assessments are context-involving, the notion of public language meaning cannot be treated as an explanatory one. An elaboration of the argument, using the notion of ground is provided. Finally, I will consider some limitations of the reasoning presented.

Increasing computational power and improving deep learning methods have made computer vision technologies pervasively common in urban environments. Their applications in policing, traffic management, and documenting public spaces are increasingly common (Ridgeway 2018, Coifman et al. 1998, Sun et al. 2020). Despite the often-discussed biases in the algorithms' training and unequally borne benefits (Khosla et al. 2012), almost all applications similarly reduce urban experiences to simplistic, reductive, and mechanistic measures. There is a lack of context, depth, and specificity in these (...) practices that enables semantic knowledge or analysis within urban contexts, especially within the context of using and occupying urban space. This paper will critique existing uses of artificial intelligence and computer vision in urban practices to propose a new framework for understanding people, action, and public space. This paper revisits Geertz's (1973) use of thick descriptions in generating interpretive theories of culture and activity and uses this lens to establish a framework to approach evaluating the varied uses of computer vision technologies that weigh meaning. By discussing cases of implemented examples of urban computer vision—from LinkNYC and Numina's urban measurements to the Detroit Police's use of DataWorks Plus's facial recognition technology—it proposes a framework for evaluating the thickness of the algorithm's conclusions against the computational method's complexity required to produce that outcome. Further, we discuss how the framework's positioning may differ (and conflict) between different users of the technology, from engineer to urban planner and policymaker, to citizen. This paper also discusses how the current use and training of deep learning algorithms and how this process limits semantic learning and proposes three potential methodologies toward gaining a more contextually specific, urban-semantic, description of urban space relevant to urbanists. This paper contributes to the critical conversations regarding the proliferation of artificial intelligence by challenging the current applications of these technologies in the urban environment by highlighting their failures within this context while also proposing an evolution of these algorithms that may ultimately make them sensitive and useful within this spatial and cultural milieu. (shrink)

Subjects classified visible 2-digit numbers as larger or smaller than 55. Target numbers were preceded by masked 2-digit primes that were either congruent (same relation to 55) or incongruent. Experiments 1 and 2 showed prime congruency effects for stimuli never included in the set of classified visible targets, indicating subliminal priming based on long-term semantic memory. Experiments 2 and 3 went further to demonstrate paradoxical unconscious priming effects resulting from task context. For example, after repeated practice classifying 73 as larger (...) than 55, the novel masked prime 37 paradoxically facilitated the “larger” response. In these experiments task context could induce subjects to unconsciously process only the leftmost masked prime digit, only the rightmost digit, or both independently. Across 3 experiments, subliminal priming was governed by both task context and long-term semantic memory. (shrink)

The paper proposes a semantics for contextual (i.e., Temporal and Locative) Prepositional Phrases (CPPs) like during every meeting, in the garden, when Harry met Sally and where I’m calling from. The semantics is embodied in a multi-modal extension of Combinatory Categoral Grammar (CCG). The grammar allows the strictly monotonic compositional derivation of multiple correct interpretations for “stacked” or multiple CPPs, including interpretations whose scope relations are not what would be expected on standard assumptions about surfacesyntactic command and (...) monotonic derivation. A type-hierarchy of functional modalities plays a crucial role in the specification of the fragment. (shrink)

This book argues that contextually sensitive expressions have felicitous uses in which they lack unique semantic values in context. It formulates a rule for updating the Stalnakerian common ground in cases in which an accepted sentence contains an expression lacking a unique semantic value in context.

A ‘multiple-proposition phenomenon’ is a putative counterexample to the widespread implicit assumption that a simple indicative sentence semantically expresses at most one proposition. Several philosophers and linguists have recently developed hypotheses concerning this notion. The guiding questions motivating this research are: Is there an interesting and homogenous semantic category of MP phenomena? If so, what is the import? Do MP theories have any relevance to important current questions in the study of language? I motivate an affirmative answer to, and then (...) argue that MP theorizing is quite relevant to debates at the semantics/ pragmatics interface. (shrink)

Causal claims are context sensitive. According to the old orthodoxy (Mackie 1974, Lewis 1986, inter alia), the context sensitivity of causal claims is all due to conversational pragmatics. According to the new contextualists (Hitchcock 1996, Woodward 2003, Maslen 2004, Menzies 2004, Schaffer 2005, and Hall ms), at least some of the context sensitivity of causal claims is semantic in nature. I want to discuss the prospects for causal contextualism, by asking why causal claims are context sensitive, what they are sensitive (...) to, and where they are sensitive to it. (shrink)

We sketch the view we call contextual semantics. It asserts that truth is semantically correct affirmability under contextually variable semantic standards, that truth is frequently an indirect form of correspondence between thought/language and the world, and that many Quinean commitments are not genuine ontological commitments. We argue that contextualist semantics fits very naturally with the view that the pertinent semantic standards are particularist rather than being systematizable as exceptionless general principles.

Minimal Semantics asks what a theory of literal linguistic meaning is for - if you were to be given a working theory of meaning for a language right now, what would you be able to do with it? Emma Borg sets out to defend a formal approach to semantic theorising from a relatively new type of opponent - advocates of what she call 'dual pragmatics'. According to dual pragmatists, rich pragmatic processes play two distinct roles in linguistic comprehension: as (...) well as operating in a post-semantic capacity to determine the implicatures of an utterance, they also operate prior to the determination of truth-conditional content for a sentence. That is to say, they have an integral role to play within what is usually thought of as the semantic realm. Borg believes dual pragmatic accounts constitute the strongest contemporary challenge to standard formal approaches to semantics since they challenge the formal theorist to show not merely that there is some role for formal processes on route to determination of semantic content, but that such processes are sufficient for determining content. Minimal Semantics provides a detailed examination of this school of thought, introducing readers who are unfamiliar with the topic to key ideas like relevance theory and contextualism, and looking in detail at where these accounts diverge from the formal approach. Borg's defence of formal semantics has two main parts: first, she argues that the formal approach is most naturally compatible with an important and well-grounded psychological theory, namely the Fodorian modular picture of the mind. Then she argues that the main arguments adduced by dual pragmatists against formal semantics - concerning apparent contextual intrusions into semantic content - can in fact be countered by a formal theory. The defence holds, however, only if we are sensitive to the proper conditions of success for a semantic theory. Specifically, we should reject a range of onerous constraints on semantic theorizing (e.g., that it answer epistemic or metaphysical questions, or that it explain our communicative skills) and instead adopt a quite minimal picture of semantics. (shrink)

The problem of truth and the liar paradox is one of the most extensive problems of philosophy. The liar paradox can be avoided by assuming a so-called theory of partial truth instead of a classical theory of truth. Theories of partial truth, however, cannot solve the so-called strengthened liar paradox, which is the problem that many semantic statements about the so-called strengthened liar cannot be true in a theory of partial truth. If such semantic statements were true in the theory, (...) another paradox would emerge. To proponents of contextual accounts, which assume that the concept of truth is context-dependent, the strengthened liar paradox is the core of the liar problem. This book provides an overview of current contextual approaches to the strengthened liar paradox. For this purpose, the author investigates formal theories of truth that result from formal reconstructions of such contextual approaches. (shrink)

This article is concerned with the concept of ambiguity in argumentation. Ambiguity in linguistics lies on the coexistence of two possibly interpretations of an utterance, while the role of contextual factors and background/encyclopedic knowledge within a specific society seems to be crucial. From a systemic point of view, Halliday has proposed three main language functions (meta-functions): a) ideational function, b) interpersonal function, c) textual function. Language could reflect speaker’s experience of his external and internal world, interpersonal relationships and organization (...) of text, respectively. Lexico-grammatical choices under a micro-level perspective and context (the environment of language) may lead to inconsistent interpretations through semantic or syntactic ambiguities. In philosophy and argumentation logic, strategies of ambiguity have been investigated by Aristotle, since the first sophistic movement. In his Topics, Metaphysics and Rhetoric, has pointed out the notion of “τὸ διττῶς / διχῶς λεγόμενον”, meaning that a term can have different senses and double interpretation. In this paper we discuss how we reconstruct the meaning of an utterance in dialogue through the mechanism of interpretation and how we analyze and construe ambiguities, combining the insights of argumentation theory and text linguistics. Research results show that in case of misunderstanding, the “best interpretation” is the less defeasible one according to contextual presumptions. (shrink)

Semantic Leaps explores how people combine knowledge from different domains in order to understand and express new ideas. Concentrating on dynamic aspects of on-line meaning construction, Coulson identifies two related sets of processes: frame-shifting and conceptual blending. Frame-shifting is semantic reanalysis in which existing elements in the contextual representation are reorganized into a new frame. Conceptual blending is a set of cognitive operations for combining partial cognitive models. By addressing linguistic phenomena often ignored in traditional meaning research, Coulson explains (...) how processes of cross-domain mapping, frame-shifting, and conceptual blending enhance the explanatory adequacy of traditional frame-based systems for natural language processing. The focus is on how the constructive processes speakers use to assemble, link, and adapt simple cognitive models underlie a broad range of productive language behavior. (shrink)

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in context for them (...) to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to a (...) new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

According to the theory of contextual integrity (CI), privacy norms prescribe information flows with reference to five parameters — sender, recipient, subject, information type, and transmission principle. Because privacy is grasped contextually (e.g., health, education, civic life, etc.), the values of these parameters range over contextually meaningful ontologies — of information types (or topics) and actors (subjects, senders, and recipients), in contextually defined capacities. As an alternative to predominant approaches to privacy, which were ineffective against novel information practices enabled (...) by IT, CI was able both to pinpoint sources of disruption and provide grounds for either accepting or rejecting them. Mounting challenges from a burgeoning array of networked, sensor-enabled devices (IoT) and data-ravenous machine learning systems, similar in form though magnified in scope, call for renewed attention to theory. This Article introduces the metaphor of a data (food) chain to capture the nature of these challenges. With motion up the chain, where data of higher order is inferred from lower-order data, the crucial question is whether privacy norms governing lower-order data are sufficient for the inferred higher-order data. While CI has a response to this question, a greater challenge comes from data primitives, such as digital impulses of mouse clicks, motion detectors, and bare GPS coordinates, because they appear to have no meaning. Absent a semantics, they escape CI’s privacy norms entirely. (shrink)

Part I: Theoretical considerations from the beginnings to the present day -- Chapter 1: Delexicalisation, relexicalisation and classroom application -- Chapter 2: collocation, interpretation, and context of situation -- Chapter 3: Semantic prosodies, irony, insincerity and literary analysis -- Chapter 4: Data-assisted negotiating -- Chapter 5: The analysis and creation of humour -- Chapter 6: Events in the context of culture, language events, subtext -- PART II: New applications -- Chapter 7: Alexander Pushkin and authorial intention -- Chapter 8: Translating (...) Pushkin: a case in point -- Chapter 11 : Contextualprosodic theory in the stylistics classroom --Chapter 12: Student-centred stylistics: does subtext read text?. (shrink)

The book is about logical analysis of natural language. Since we humans communicate by means of natural language, we need a tool that helps us to understand in a precise manner how the logical and formal mechanisms of natural language work. Moreover, in the age of computers, we need to communicate both with and through computers as well. Transparent Intensional Logic is a tool that is helpful in making our communication and reasoning smooth and precise. It deals with all kinds (...) of linguistic context in a fully compositional and anti-contextual way. (shrink)

Abstract -/- Quantifier domain restriction (QDR) and two versions of nominal restriction (NR) are implemented as restrictions that depend on a previously introduced interpreter and interpretation time in a two-dimensional semantic framework on the basis of simple type theory and categorial grammar. Against Stanley (2002) it is argued that a suitable version of QDR can deal with superlatives like tallest. However, it is shown that NR is needed to account for utterances when the speaker intends to convey different restrictions for (...) multiple uses of the same quantifying determiner. We argue that NR generally fares better with such examples but also observe that examples like Every sailor waves at every sailor might be pragmatically anomalous. An account of contextual domain restriction is proposed that (i) excludes these anomalous readings (but it is shown how they could be included), (ii) makes it possible to express different contextual domain restrictions as long-range dependencies on an interpreter and an interpretation time, and (iii) additionally models restrictions based on locative constructions as general mereological constraints introduced by shifting the index. (shrink)

According to semantic minimalism, context-invariant minimal semantic propositions play an essential role in linguistic communication. This claim is key to minimalists’ argument against semantic contextualism: if there were no such minimal semantic propositions, and semantic content varied widely with shifts in context, then it would be “miraculous” if communication were ever to occur. This paper offers a critical examination of the minimalist account of communication, focusing on a series of examples where communication occurs without a minimal semantic proposition shared between (...) speaker and hearer. The only way for minimalists to respond to these examples is by restricting the scope of their account to intra-lingual communication. It can then be shown that the minimalist’s notion of a language shrinks to a point, such that practically no instances of communication will fall under that account, and that the retreat to intra-lingual communication is in any case self-defeating, since the only way for minimalists to account for the individuation of languages is by resort to precisely the kinds of contextual considerations they abjured in the first place. In short, if, as minimalists allege, contextualism founders because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a context, it can now be seen that minimalism faces a parallel problem because it renders communication contingent on speaker and hearer sharing a language. I end by arguing that the possibility of communication cannot, as minimalists assume, be grounded in shared semantic conventions; rather, successful communication must precede the establishment of any particular set of semantic conventions. (shrink)

According to the standard analysis of degree questions, the logical form of a degree question contains a variable that ranges over individual degrees and is bound by the degree question operator how. In contrast with this, we claim that the variable bound by the degree question operator how does not range over individual degrees but over intervals of degrees, by analogy with Schwarzschild and Wilkinson's proposal regarding the semantics of comparative clauses. Not only does the interval-based semantics predict (...) the existence of certain readings that are not predicted under the standard view, it is also able, together with other natural assumptions, to account for the sensitivity of degree questions to negative islands, as well as for the fact, uncovered by Fox and Hackl, that negative islands can be obviated by some properly placed modals. Like Fox and Hackl, we characterize negative island effects as arising from the fact that the relevant question, due to its meaning alone, can never have a maximally informative answer. Contrary to Fox and Hackl, however, we do not need to assume that scales are universally dense, nor that the notion of maximal informativity responsible for negative islands is blind to contextual parameters. (shrink)