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Contextual vocabulary acquisition as computational philosophy and as philosophical computation

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the active, deliberate acquisition of a meaning for an unknown word in a text by reasoning from textual clues, prior knowledge, and hypotheses developed from prior encounters with the word, but without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. Published strategies for CVA vaguely and unhelpfully tell the reader to ‘guess’. Artificial intelligence algorithms for CVA can fill in the details that replace ‘guessing’ by ‘computing’; these details can then be converted to a curriculum that can be taught to students to improve their reading comprehension. Such algorithms also suggest a way out of the Chinese Room and show how holistic semantics can withstand certain objections. † This paper is based in part on a talk given by Rapaport at the North American Computing and Philosophy Conference (NA-CAP 2006), Rensselaer Polytechnic University, August 2006. In this paper, ‘I’, ‘my’, etc. refer to Rapaport, and ‘we’, ‘our’, etc. usually refer to Rapaport and Kibby.