Aboutness
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Aboutness
Aboutness is a term used in library and information science (LIS), linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. In LIS, it is often considered synonymous with subject (documents). In the philosophy of mind it has been often considered synonymous with intentionality, perhaps since John Searle (1983). In the philosophy of logic and language it is understood as the way a piece of text relates to a subject matter or topic. In general, the term refers to the concept that a text, utterance, image, or action is ''on'' or ''of'' something. R. A. Fairthorne (1969) is credited with coining the exact term "aboutness", which became popular in LIS since the late 1970s, perhaps due to arguments put forward by William John Hutchins (1975, 1977, 1978). Hutchins argued that "aboutness" was to be preferred to "subject" because it removed some epistemological problems. Birger Hjørland (1992, 1997) argued, however, that the same epistemological problems also were present in Hutchins' p ...
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Subject (documents)
In library and information science documents (such as books, articles and pictures) are classified and searched by subject – as well as by other attributes such as author, genre and document type. This makes "subject" a fundamental term in this field. Library and information specialists assign subject labels to documents to make them findable. There are many ways to do this and in general there is not always consensus about which subject should be assigned to a given document. To optimize subject indexing and searching, we need to have a deeper understanding of what a subject is. The question: "what is to be understood by the statement 'document A belongs to subject category X'?" has been debated in the field for more than 100 years (see below) Theoretical view Charles Ammi Cutter (1837–1903) For Cutter the stability of subjects depends on a social process in which their meaning is stabilized in a name or a designation. A subject "referred ..to those intellections ..that ...
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Intentionality
''Intentionality'' is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, properties and states of affairs. Intentionality is primarily ascribed to mental states, like perceptions, beliefs or desires, which is why it has been regarded as the characteristic ''mark of the mental'' by many philosophers. A central issue for theories of intentionality has been the problem of ''intentional inexistence'': to determine the ontological status of the entities which are the objects of intentional states. An early theory of intentionality is associated with Anselm of Canterbury's ontological argument for the existence of God, and with his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in the understanding and objects that exist in reality. The idea fell out of discussion with the end of the medieval scholastic period, but in recent times was resurrected by empirical psychologist Franz Brentano and later adopted by contemporary phenomenological philosopher Edmu ...
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William John Hutchins
William John Hutchins (27 January 1939 – 9 January 2021) was an English linguist and information scientist specialized in machine translation. He graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in French and German at the University of Nottingham in 1960 and obtained a diploma in librarianship at University College London in 1962. He worked as assistant librarian at Durham University (1962–1965) and at the University of Sheffield (1965–1971), and then as assistant librarian (1971–1980) and sub-librarian (1980–1998) at the University of East Anglia. In 2000 he obtained his PhD degree at the University of East Anglia. In addition to authoring numerous articles in journals and conferences about machine translation since 1963, he is particularly well known by the book ''An Introduction to Machine Translation'' (1992) which he co-authored with Harold Somers. John's service to the machine translation community, most of it after retirement, has been outstanding. After serving as editor ...
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Library And Information Science
Library and information science(s) or studies (LIS) is an interdisciplinary field of study that deals generally with organization, access, collection, and protection/regulation of information, whether in physical (e.g. art, legal proceedings, etc.) or digital forms. In spite of various trends to merge the two fields, some consider the two original disciplines, library science and information science, to be separate. However, it is common today to use the terms synonymously or to drop the term "library" and to speak about ''information departments'' or ''I-schools''. There have also been attempts to revive the concept of documentation and to speak of Library, information and documentation studies (or science). History By the late 1960s, mainly due to the meteoric rise of human computing power and the new academic disciplines formed therefrom, academic institutions began to add the term "information science" to their names. The first school to do this was at the University ...
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Content Analysis
Content analysis is the study of documents and communication artifacts, which might be texts of various formats, pictures, audio or video. Social scientists use content analysis to examine patterns in communication in a replicable and systematic manner. One of the key advantages of using content analysis to analyse social phenomena is its non-invasive nature, in contrast to simulating social experiences or collecting survey answers. Practices and philosophies of content analysis vary between academic disciplines. They all involve systematic reading or observation of texts or artifacts which are assigned labels (sometimes called codes) to indicate the presence of interesting, meaningful pieces of content. By systematically labeling the content of a set of texts, researchers can analyse patterns of content quantitatively using statistical methods, or use qualitative methods to analyse meanings of content within texts. Computers are increasingly used in content analysis to aut ...
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Concepts In The Philosophy Of Language
Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by several disciplines, such as linguistics, psychology, and philosophy, and these disciplines are interested in the logical and psychological structure of concepts, and how they are put together to form thoughts and sentences. The study of concepts has served as an important flagship of an emerging interdisciplinary approach called cognitive science. In contemporary philosophy, there are at least three prevailing ways to understand what a concept is: * Concepts as mental representations, where concepts are entities that exist in the mind (mental objects) * Concepts as abilities, where concepts are abilities peculiar to cognitive agents (mental states) * Concepts as Fregean senses, where concepts are abstract objects, as opposed to mental o ...
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Information Science
Information science (also known as information studies) is an academic field which is primarily concerned with analysis, collection, Categorization, classification, manipulation, storage, information retrieval, retrieval, movement, dissemination, and protection of information. Practitioners within and outside the field study the application and the usage of knowledge in organizations in addition to the interaction between people, organizations, and any existing information systems with the aim of creating, replacing, improving, or understanding the information systems. Historically, information science (informatics) is associated with computer science, data science, psychology, technology, library science, healthcare, and intelligence agency, intelligence agencies. However, information science also incorporates aspects of diverse fields such as archival science, cognitive science, commerce, law, linguistics, museology, management, mathematics, philosophy, Policy, public po ...
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Library Science Terminology
A library is a collection of materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a physical location or a virtual space, or both. A library's collection can include printed materials and other physical resources in many formats such as DVD, CD and cassette as well as access to information, music or other content held on bibliographic databases. A library, which may vary widely in size, may be organized for use and maintained by a public body such as a government; an institution such as a school or museum; a corporation; or a private individual. In addition to providing materials, libraries also provide the services of librarians who are trained and experts at finding, selecting, circulating and organizing information and at interpreting information needs, navigating and analyzing very large amounts of information with a variety of resources. L ...
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Clare Beghtol
Clare Beghtol (15 February 1942 – 3 March 2018) was an American-born classification theorist. Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, she studied English at the University of Chicago and American civilization at Brown University. Beghtol began teaching at what became Concordia University in 1967, then became an editor and writer. Beghtol received a master's degree in library science from the University of Toronto in 1979. She joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and continued working there while earning a doctoral degree. From 1987 to 1992, Beghtol was director of research at Ketchum Canada. She taught at the University of Toronto from 1991 to 2009. In 1999, Beghtol was editor of the journal ''Knowledge Organization Knowledge organization (KO), organization of knowledge, organization of information, or information organization is an intellectual discipline concerned with activities such as document description, indexing, and classification that serve to ...''. She died on 3 ...
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Theme And Rheme
In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases the boundary between them depends on which specific grammatical theory is being used to analyze the sentence. Topic, which is defined by pragmatic considerations, is a distinct concept from grammatical subject, which is defined by syntax. In any given sentence these may be the same, but they need not be. For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog" but the topic is "the little girl". Topic and subject are also distinct concepts from agent (or actor)—the "doer", which is defined by semantics. In English clauses with a verb in the passive voice, for instance, the topic is typically the subject, while the agent ma ...
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Intentional Stance
The intentional stance is a term coined by philosopher Daniel Dennett for the level of abstraction in which we view the behavior of an entity in terms of mental properties. It is part of a theory of mental content proposed by Dennett, which provides the underpinnings of his later works on free will, consciousness, folk psychology, and evolution. Dennett and intentionality Dennett (1971, p. 87) states that he took the concept of "intentionality" from the work of the German philosopher Franz Brentano. When clarifying the distinction between mental phenomena (viz., mental activity) and physical phenomena, Brentano (p. 97) argued that, in contrast with physical phenomena, the "distinguishing characteristic of all mental phenomena" was "the reference to something as an object" – a characteristic he called "''intentional inexistence''". Dennett constantly speaks of the "''aboutness''" of ''intentionality''; for example: "the aboutness of the pencil marks composing a shopp ...
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Semantic Externalism
In the philosophy of language, semantic externalism (the opposite of semantic internalism) is the view that the meaning of a term is determined, in whole or in part, by factors external to the speaker. According to an externalist position, one can claim without contradiction that two speakers could be in exactly the same brain state at the time of an utterance, and yet mean different things by that utterance, that is, the term picks out a different extension. Overview The philosopher Hilary Putnam (1975/1985) proposed this position and summarized it with the statement "meanings just ain't in the head!" Although he did not use the term "externalism" at the time, Putnam is thought to have pioneered semantic externalism in his 1975 paper "The Meaning of 'Meaning. His Twin Earth thought experiment, from the aforementioned paper, is widely cited to illustrate his argument for externalism to this day. Alongside Putnam, credit also goes to Saul Kripke and Tyler Burge, both of whom attack ...
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