essay · 2026-09-25
Philosophy of language and meaning
The provided sources indicate that Contextualized Word Embeddings (CWEs) offer a robust method for analyzing how the meanings of scientific concepts evolve within specific fields, moving beyond arbitrary conventions to capture contextual nuances effectively. Research utilizing CWEs has demonstrated their utility in studying history and sociology of science by training models on extensive datasets, such as one containing 21.84 million paragraphs from astrophysics articles. This technique allows systems to differentiate between the "arbitrary convention" aspect of definitions and attempts to clarify pre-existing words with spontaneous preconceptions found in philosophical discourse. By employing domain-specific pretraining, these models can handle complex semantic shifts that static dictionaries or general-purpose embeddings might miss when dealing with specialized terminology like "Planck." The significance lies in providing a tool capable of handling the dual nature of definition: distinguishing between established conventions and evolving essences within specific academic contexts.
Sources
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- Meaning at the Planck scale? Contextualized word embeddings for doing history, philosophy, and sociology of science — 2024-11-21T12:38:23Z
- Conceptual Preconditions of Overcoming of Relativistic Intentions in Modern Philosophy of Science — 2014-07-14T09:43:56Z
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