Distributional techniques for philosophical enquiry

This paper illustrates the use of distributional techniques, as investigated in computational semantics, for supplying data from large-scale corpora to areas of the humanities which focus on the analysis of concepts. We suggest that the distributional notion of ‘characteristic context’ can be seen as evidence for some representative tendencies of general discourse. We present a case study where distributional data is used by philosophers working in the areas of gender studies and intersectionality as confirmation of certain trends described in previous work. Further, we highlight that different models of phrasal distributions can be compared to support the claim of intersectionality theory that ‘there is more to a phrase than the intersection of its parts’.