What is context? Context is a concept used in many fields of inquiry, from linguistics to artificial intelligence. Therefore we do not have a single well defined concept of context. However philosophers have been discussing the concept of context at least since Frege's remarks on the dependence of the meaning of the words from the context of a sentence. We use often the concept of context in a vague way. For instance: - "make it clear the context of the discussion!" or - "your behaviour is not appropriate for this context!", or -"the historical context needed to understand the importance of this fact is..." and so on. In the lectures we will try to have a better grasp on the notion of context, using the work done in recent years mainly by philosophers. Actually it is only in the last years of the XX century that the concept of context has become a subject matter of philosophical inquiry, starting with the difficulty of a logical treatment of context-dependent expressions such as "here", "you", "now". The discussion has been enriched by different examples and remarks which are not only devoted to logics, but touch different aspects of our culture and worldview.
You may find in this page a very general program of the course and a tentative list of papers, some of which will be discussed. There is some backgrounfd knowledge that I would like to take for granted, especially dealing with the main ideas of Frege and Wittgenstein. I list below some links where you may check your basic knowledge on the matter. I list also some papers on advanced topics that will be possibly discussed during the last part of the course.
PROGRAM OF THE COURSE
Main topics to be presented
The following is a map of the topics I would like to develop in the lectures. Students have to participate to the discussion with questions and short talks, decided during the first week. Each student is strongly suggested to deepen a single topic among the ones given below. Depending on the level of participation, I would like to treat (some of) the following topics:
1. Introduction: lecture of Plato
2. Frege's Context Principle
3. Contextuality and Compositionality (Frege and Carnap)
4. Frege and two directions of Contextualism
5. Kaplan and Lewis : the logic of Demonstratives
6. Wittgenstein: Radical Contextualism
7. Context and Holism (Quine vs. Dummett)
8. The concept of Backgrund (Searle)
9. Context, presupposition and background (Perry and Stalnaker)
10 The concept of Context in artificial intelligence (McCarthy)
11. Developments of radical contextualism (Recanati; a.i. again)
12. Expressing the context
Papers to be discussed: (long provisional list; a smaller list and details will be given later
Some quotations from Frege's writings
John Perry "Frege on indexicals"
David Kaplan "Afterthoughts"
Some part of Stalnaler's Context and Content
John Perry Indexicals and Demonstratives in Bob Hale-Crispin Wright
John Searle's discussion on Background in Intentionality
John Searle "Literal Meaning", in Expression and Meaning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Kent Bach "Conversational Implicature" in Mind and Language, 9, 1994.
Kent Bach, "The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction: what it is and why it matters", in Linguistische Berichte, 1996.
Robyn Carston "Implicature, Explicature, and Truth-Theoretic Semantics", in Kempson, Mental Representations. The interface between language and reality, Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Francois Recanati "The Pragmatics of What is Said", in Mind and Language, 4, 1989.
Francois Recanati, "The Alleged Priority of Literal Interpretation", Cognitive Science, 19, 1995.
V.Akman, M.Surav , "Step toward formalizing Context", in AI Magazine 3, 1996.
A VERY short page for total beginners, and an elementary introduction From this last link see expecially the paragraph "Frege's Ontology and Philosophy of Language"
If you want to go some somewhat deeper see some notes on Frege's Logic.
If you want more links on Frege (mainly biographical) check here
A BASIC Knowledge in Wittgenstein's ideas
You may find a basic presentation of Wittgenstein's ideas in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. See expecially the paragraph "conception of philosophy". an "meaning".
For more links and information (mainly biographical) see here .
ADVANCED TOPICS:
Varol Akman & Mehmet Surav (1996) Steps toward Formalizing Context. AI Magazine 17 (3) 55-72 PDF format