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This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to `interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in which the author assumed the reader would place the text. An important contribution here comes from Wendell Harris, enumerating the seven crucial dimensions of context: knowledge of reality, knowledge of language, and the authorial, generic, collective, specific, and textual dimensions. Finally, two recent approaches to interpretation, due to Jon Barwise and Jerry Hobbs, are analyzed as useful attempts which also come to grips with the notion of context. It must be noted that there has been a considerable body of contributions connecting linguistic structure with social context. For example, anthropological linguistics, from Bronislaw Malinowski onwards, has underlined the cultural context of discourse as essential to meaning. This viewpoint became prominent with the emergence of the ethnography of speaking in anthropology. Thus, conversation analysis represents a consistent formal effort to contribute to an analysis of the nature of context. While this paper emphasizes and reviews the literary theory approach, it makes various contacts with works of the latter kind (e.g., the landmark contributions of Erving Goffman, John Gumperz, William Hanks, John Heritage, Dell Hymes, et al.) in order to deliver a more balanced and complete study of the dimensions of context.

We take a parable (told by Ken Kesey) and exhibit how it achieves its sublime effect through a sequence of weak implicatures. Interestingly, the implicatures turn out to allude to Richard Rorty's renowned distinction between metaphysicians and ironists.

Groundwater drawn daily from shallow alluvial sands by millions of wells over large areas of south and southeast Asia exposes an estimated population of over a hundred million people to toxic levels of arsenic (1). Holocene aquifers are the source of widespread arsenic poisoning across the region (2,3). In contrast, Pleistocene sands deposited in this region more than 12,000 years ago mostly do not host groundwater with high levels of arsenic. Pleistocene aquifers are increasingly used as a safe source of drinking water (4) and it is therefore important to understand under what conditions low levels of arsenic can be maintained. Here we reconstruct the initial phase of contamination of a Pleistocene aquifer near Hanoi, Vietnam. We demonstrate that changes in groundwater flow conditions and the redox state of the aquifer sands induced by groundwater pumping caused the lateral intrusion of arsenic contamination more than 120 metres from a Holocene aquifer into a previously uncontaminated Pleistocene aquifer. We also find that arsenic adsorbs onto the aquifer sands and that there is a 16-20-fold retardation in the extent of the contamination relative to the reconstructed lateral movement of groundwater over the same period. Our findings suggest that arsenic contamination of Pleistocene aquifers in south and southeast Asia as a consequence of increasing levels of groundwater pumping may have been delayed by the retardation of arsenic transport., This study reconstructs the initial phase of contamination of an aquifer containing low levels of arsenic (low-As) in the village of Van Phuc, located 10 km southeast of Hanoi on [...]

Baseado no trabalho de Bourdieu e outros, este artigo estende o uso da metáfora da voz para o discurso da sociedade, em que as vozes individuais representam as formações sociais e os seus sub-discursos específicos. O discurso do letramento, em particular, é focalizado como um exemplo de tal formação, no sentido de que a sua presença versus a sua ausência é concebido como sendo o que define os que estão dentro ou fora do discurso próprio - uma voz iletrada não é percebida como sendo uma voz apropriada. A tensão dialética entre o fenômeno do iletramento e os esforços remediais do letrado de dar voz àqueles que não a têm, reflete as dificuldades enfrentadas pelos discursos emergentes e ressalta a importância de uma luta que é dos oprimidos e não de educadores bem intencionados e ativistas políticos. São focalizadas no artigo as exigências e as limitações inerentes aos esforços recentemente feitos para inserir o discurso do iletrado dentro de um discurso social próprio e são também sugeridas novas maneiras para se entender e se lidar com o problema do letramento em um país em desenvolvimento.