Some Core Contested Concepts

Some core contested concepts.

Core concepts of language are highly contested. In some cases this is legitimate: real empirical and conceptual issues arise. In other cases, it seems that controversies are based on misunderstanding. A number of crucial cases are reviewed, and an approach to language is outlined that appears to have strong conceptual and empirical motivation, and to lead to conclusions about a number of signif...

Semantic Network Analysis of Contested Political Concepts

This work presents methods for exploring the lexical environment of political concepts using interactive network visualisations of corpus-derived grammatical relations and word associations. The conceptual relations consist of part-of-speech tagged words connected by typed, weighted, edges indicating the strength of relations between words, as measured by pointwise mutual information of differe...

Essentially Contested Concepts and Semantic Externalism

In 1956, W.B. Gallie introduced his idea of essentially contested concepts. In my paper, I offer a novel interpretation of his theory and argue that his theory, thus interpreted, is correct. The key to my interpretation lies in a condition Gallie places on essentially contested concepts that other interpreters downplay or dismiss: that the use of an essentially contested concept must be derived...

Core Concepts of Kinesiology

A re you interested in skillful movement? Do you, as a teacher, coach, or spectator, observe and evaluate movement in terms of its effortlessness or effectiveness? Do you try to elicit more skillful movement from yourself or others? If so, you probably have developed some tried and true methods of assessment and adjustment. And you probably have encountered frustration when the mover or the mov...

Core Concepts: Intraventricular Hemorrhage