Abstract
This paper is devoted to discuss a general tendency in contextualism which is known as “radical contextualism”. In the first part I state the well known paradox of semantic holism, as discussed in philosophy of language: if meaning is holistic there is no possibility to share any meaning. In the second part I present the different answers to this paradox, from atomism to different forms of holism. In the third part I give a criticism of the traditional interpretation of Wittgenstein as a supporter of global holism. I stress some similarities between Wittgenstein’s thought and Multi Context theories in artificial inteligence. In the last part I give some argument against a rigid interpretation of “local holism”: I claim the need to give restrictions to local holim and to develop a study of the connections between “default” properties and high level rules which are studied in Multi-Context theories.
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Penco, C. (2001). Local Holism. In: Akman, V., Bouquet, P., Thomason, R., Young, R. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2116. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44607-9_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-44607-9_22
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