scholarly journals Speaker's reference, semantic reference, sneaky reference

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eliot Michaelson
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Reference

scholarly journals Individual and Cross-Cultural Differences in Semantic Intuitions: New Experimental Findings

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 322-357 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Beebe ◽  
Ryan Undercoffer
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Experimental Philosophy ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Anchoring Effects ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
Experimental Findings ◽  
Epistemic Perspective

In 2004 Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich published what has become one of the most widely discussed papers in experimental philosophy, in which they reported that East Asian and Western participants had different intuitions about the semantic reference of proper names. A flurry of criticisms of their work has emerged, and although various replications have been performed, many critics remain unconvinced. We review the current debate over Machery et al.’s (2004) results and take note of which objections to their work have been satisfactorily answered and which ones still need to be addressed. We then report the results of studies that reveal significant cross-cultural and intra-cultural differences in semantic intuitions when we control for variables that critics allege have had a potentially distorting effect on Machery et al.’s findings. These variables include the epistemic perspective from which participants are supposed to understand the research materials, unintended anchoring effects of those materials, and pragmatic factors involved in the interpretation of speech acts within them. Our results confirm the robustness of the cross-cultural differences observed by Machery et al. and thereby strengthen the philosophical challenge they pose.

scholarly journals Intuitions on Semantic Reference

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Vignolo ◽  
Filippo Domaneschi
Keyword(s):  
Original Version ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Experimental Semantics ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
The Impact

AbstractSince Machery et al. Cognition 92, B1-B12 (2004) attacked Kripke’s refutation of classical descriptivism, their experiment has been repeated several times, in its original version or in some revised ones, by theorists with contrasting intents. Some repeated the experiment for confirming its results, others for proving them unreliable. One striking characteristic of those surveys is that they mostly replicated the data collected in Machery et al.’s Cognition 92, B1-B12, 2004 experiment: less than 60% of Westerners showed preference for the causal-historical response. We side with the critics of Machery et al.’s experiment. In this paper, we present the results of a survey that tests some hypotheses for explaining that percentage of Westerners’ preferences without taking it as evidence that more than 40% of Westerners have descriptivist intuitions on semantic reference. The aim of our paper is not merely to question the reliability of Machery et al.’s experiment. In sections 4 and 5 we assess the impact of our survey on the current debate in experimental semantics. We provide a novel account of the nature of the epistemic ambiguity that affects experiments in theory of reference and explain the consequences that our account of the epistemic ambiguity has for subsequent works trying to avoid ambiguities.

Fear and Loathing in the Anthropocene: Grief, Compassion and the Benefits of Literature

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-182
Author(s):  
Stephen Harris
Keyword(s):  
Reference Points ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Semantic Reference

Abstract This essay considers the nexus between literature and compassion in relation to the well-reported global environmental crisis and the attendant range of emotions, as signalled by the terms ‘ecocide’, ‘extinction crisis’ and ‘eco-anxiety’. While the words ‘grief’ and ‘hope’ have come to represent a range of associated emotions and feelings, there are important affective inflections occurring between these two semantic reference points, which are in themselves significant, if less amenable to debate and conversion to meaningful action. The following essay considers the nuances of these same affective extremities and emotional complexities, with particular reference to collective emotions such as anger and fear, and the implications of sustained feelings of dread, despair and collective trauma. The essay concludes by arguing for the constructive role of literature in mediating collective feeling and redirecting negative public emotions.

Matching Dynamic Demands of Mobile Users with Dynamic Service Offers

2009 ◽  
pp. 3404-3420
Author(s):  
Bernhard Holtkamp ◽  
Norbert Weißenberg ◽  
Manfred Wojciechowski
Keyword(s):  
Reference Model ◽  
Mobile Users ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Inference Engines ◽  
Application Ontology ◽  
Service Oriented ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
Upper Level

This chapter describes the use of ontologies for personalized situation-aware information and service supply of mobile users in different application domains. A modular application ontology, composed of upper-level ontologies such as location and time ontologies and of domain-specific ontologies, acts as a semantic reference model for a compatible description of user demands and service offers in a service-oriented information- logistical platform. The authors point out that the practical deployment of the platform proved the viability of the conceptual approach and exhibited the need for a more performant implementation of inference engines in mobile multi-user scenarios. Furthermore, the authors hope that understanding the underlying concepts and domain-specific application constraints will help researchers and practitioners building more sophisticated applications not only in the domains tackled in this chapter but also transferring the concepts to other domains.

The impact of semantic reference on word class: An fMRI study of action and object naming

NeuroImage ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 1865-1878 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Cristina Saccuman ◽  
Stefano F. Cappa ◽  
Elizabeth A. Bates ◽  
Analìa Arevalo ◽  
Pasquale Della Rosa ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Object Naming ◽  
Word Class ◽  
Fmri Study ◽  
Semantic Reference ◽  
The Impact

Evaluating lexical resources using SENSEVAL

2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-390 ◽  
Author(s):  
NICOLETTA CALZOLARI ◽  
CLAUDIA SORIA ◽  
FRANCESCA BERTAGNA ◽  
FRANCESCO BARSOTTI
Keyword(s):  
Significant Role ◽  
Semantic Annotation ◽  
Lexical Resources ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Semantic Reference

The aim of our paper is twofold: to introduce some general reflections on the task of lexical semantic annotation and the adequacy of existing lexical-semantic reference resources, while giving an overall description of the Italian lexical sample task for the SENSEVAL-2 experiment. We suggest how the SENSEVAL exercise (and comparison between the two editions of the experiment) can be employed to evaluate the lexical reference resources used for annotation. We conclude with a few general remarks on the gap between the lexicon, a partially decontextualised object, and the corpus, where context plays a significant role.

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