A Philosophical Investigation of the Context Sensitivity of Know: Contextualism versus Semantic Minimalism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A common and important question about context sensitivity is its extent in ordinary language. While words such as “I,” “this,” and “now” are known to be contextually sensitive, whether words such as know are context sensitive is debated. Contextualists believe that know is a context-sensitive word, while semantic minimalists insist it is not. The two groups have been engaged in a persistent debate on this issue and have not yet reached a consensus. Centering on this debate, this paper first briefly reviews contextualism and semantic minimalism’s debate over know, and then test whether it is context sensitive. This paper finds that the content of know displays some hierarchy, and to answer the question of whether it is context sensitive, logical inference must be distinguished from pragmatic inference. When expressing logical inference, know describes some state of affairs and factually certifies that the content of know is a fact; therefore, it involves no context sensitivity. While expressing pragmatic inference, however, know causes different pragmatic effects and indicates different levels of context sensitivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".