**Section 2**

**Queries, Predicates, and Semantic Cache** 

26 Will-be-set-by-IN-TECH

42 Semantics – Advances in Theories and Mathematical Models

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**3** 

*Italy*

Savina Raynaud

*Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore – Milan* 

**Queries and Predicate – Argument Relationship** 

Queries are essential for retrieving information. For those who surf the net they can play a crucial role. But the relationship between questions and answers involves many classical topics, not only in the language sciences, especially in pragmatics, but also in philosophy. It would be surprising if the results of such an old, even ancient, inquiry did not inspire

In fact, semantics was born at the beginning of philosophical enquiry, for its own sake. Philosophy, conceived as a demand of wisdom and truth requesting the exercise of thought (and good will), has the *logos* as its specific resource. Given that *logos* is both uttered thought and thoughtful word, the mood of reflecting upon speeches and their role in finding and telling the truth, asking questions and giving answers, has been present since the beginning. As is often the case, an important motivation to meditate and speculate upon logos came out of a crisis, with its attacks and instrumental claims about language and human discourse. We could identify the Sophist movement, during the development of democracy in the

Plato and Aristotle are the obvious significant responses to the Sophists' extraordinary argumentation skills, resting upon relativistic claims. Dialogue between master and disciple as well as an inspection of *organon* structures emerged as conditions which granted a

What was Aristotelic Organon about? The name, meaning instrument, designated, according to Andronicus of Rhodes (40 B.C.), Aristotle's works on logic, philosophy of language and of sciences, valid arguments and fallacies. These treatises were so specifically designed as *praeambula* to assuring a self-conscious and self-controlled intellectual activity, that they constituted a basic *corpus* providing safe methodological – deontological premises to those who wanted to cultivate philosophy, or simply true knowledge, concerning good and happiness in personal and socio-political life, moral virtues or human skills such as art, persuasion, the creation of laws and cathartic tragedies. Even more fundamentally, however, they concerned being in the physical world and beyond it: through living beings

positive and safe attitude towards truth, knowledge, virtue… in short, a good life.

(animals and humans) and celestial bodies, up to their first causes to their final end.

How could this huge scenario disclose its secrets and reveal its hidden structure without a self-confident appeal to human powers, and above all to the capacities of human knowledge? How was it possible to observe the human way of proceeding from thought to

**1. Introduction** 

interesting solutions to present-day research.

Greek *poleis*, in the fifth century B.C., as such a factor.
