Reply in Book Symposium on James Ladyman, Don Ross: 'Everything must go: metaphysics naturalized', Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Technology for local textual inference is central to producing a next generation of intelligent yet robust human language processing systems. One can think of it as Information Retrieval++. It is needed for a search on male fertility may be affected by use of cell phones to match a document saying Startling new research into mobile phones suggests they can reduce a man’s sperm count up to 30%, despite the fact that the only word overlap is phones. But textual inference is (...) useful more broadly. It is an enabling technology for applications of document interpretation, such as customer response management, where one would like to conclude from the message My Squeezebox regularly skips during music playback that Sender has set up Squeezebox and Sender can hear music through Squeezebox, and information extraction, where from the text Jorma Ollila joined Nokia in 1985 and held a variety of key management positions before taking the helm in 1992, one wants to extract that Jorma Ollila has served as the CEO of Nokia, a relation that might be more formally denoted as role(CEO, Nokia, Jorma Ollila). Textual inference is a difficult problem (as the results from early evaluations have shown): current systems do statistically better than random guessing, but not by very much. Nevertheless, it is also an area where there is promising developing technology and a good deal of natural language community interest. In other words, it is an ideal research problem. To further this research agenda, data sets have been constructed to assess textual inference systems. This paper examines how the task of textual inference has been and should be defined and discusses what kind of evaluation data is appropriate for the task.1.. (shrink)

BENJAMIN MOFFITT, THE GLOBAL RISE OF POPULISM. PERFORMANCE, POLITICAL STYLE, AND REPRESENTATION, PALO ALTO, STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2016.Agustin Cosovschi.

This is a review essay of two books published in 2021 on the history of human heredity-genetics/genomics investigations—in the Middle East. Both books are structured comparatively. Both books grapple with the many uses of biology in nationalizing projects in the Middle East and the unavoidable tension between these particularizing projects and the scientific claim of biology to universality. Furthermore, both grapple with issues of classifications of humans and their uses in biology: the presumably biological human classifications of race, ethnos, and (...) ancestry, and the properly sociocultural ones, such as historical-traditional, by language, by religion. Combined, the two books offer a keen gaze on the complex entwinement of genetics and nationalism in the Middle East from WWI to the present. (shrink)

This book introduces a new approach to the issue of radical scientific revolutions, or "paradigm-shifts," given prominence in the work of Thomas Kuhn. The book articulates a dynamical and historicized version of the conception of scientific a priori principles first developed by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. This approach defends the Enlightenment ideal of scientific objectivity and universality while simultaneously doing justice to the revolutionary changes within the sciences that have since undermined Kant's original defense of this ideal. Through a modified (...) Kantian approach to epistemology and philosophy of science, this book opposes both Quinean naturalistic holism and the post-Kuhnian conceptual relativism that has dominated recent literature in science studies. Focussing on the development of "scientific philosophy" from Kant to Rudolf Carnap, along with the parallel developments taking place in the sciences during the same period, the author articulates a new dynamical conception of relativized a priori principles. This idea applied within the physical sciences aims to show that rational intersubjective consensus is intricately preserved across radical scientific revolutions or "paradigm-shifts and how this is achieved. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 6, September 2019, Page 682-683.

Michel Galley, Pi-Chuan Chang, Daniel Cer, Jenny R. Finkel, and Christopher D. Manning Computer Science and Linguistics Departments Stanford University..

Historienne, membre de l'Institute for Research on Women and Gender de Stanford, active au sein de l'International federation for research in women's history, Karen Offen concentre dans ce livre vingt-cinq ans de lectures et de recherches sur l'histoire du féminisme en Europe. Elle tire un grand profit de l'explosion récente des études sur l'histoire du féminisme et des colloques internationaux sur le féminisme en Europe. C'est le genre de livre que l'on lit, crayon à la main, et où l'...

Als im Jahr 1992 die Frage aufgeworfen wurde, ob der französische Philosoph Jacques Derrida den Ehrendoktortitel der University of Cambridge verliehen bekommen sollte, lehnte ein Teil der Jury-Mitglieder die Vergabe ab. Man könne nicht, so hieß es damals, einen Denker würdigen, der in seinen Schriften vormalig Gedankenspiele inszeniere und »überall seine eigenen Urteile wieder umstößt«. Die zuletzt zitierten Worte wurden so nicht geäußert, da sie aus dem dritten Jahrhundert von dem griechischen Philosophen Porphyrius stammten und gegen den 〉theoretischen Gründungsvater〈 (...) des Christentums, Paulus, gerichtet waren. Porphyrius war in seiner Kritik an Paulus nicht weniger kleinlich als die oben erwähnten Jurymitglieder. Es sei die Inkohärenz eines Denkens, das er bei Paulus kritisiere und das »jeder Bildung entbehre«. Denn »beinahe wie ein Schwert wetzt er [Paulus] seine Zunge und zerstückelt ohne Schonung die Glieder des Gesetzes, er, der an vielen Stellen den Gehorsam gegen das Gesetz eingeschärft und das Leben nach demselben für lobenswert erklärt hat.«. (shrink)

The subtitle of Kleinberg’s Haunting History proposes a ‘deconstructive approach’ to Derrida and history. This review essay poses two questions which seek to establish what this could be. First, wh...