Words connecting communities: Representing the polysemy of argumentation

Abstract It has been suggested that polysemy in scientific language allows communities to engage in a common research program. However, polysemy might conflict with rules that require words to have a precise meaning. We conceptualize polysemy as a set of relationships between word senses and contexts of usage and we suggest that, to sustain interdisciplinarity, a word should display stable patterns of activation of senses in contexts. Accordingly it should be both precise and bridging across contexts. We analyzed documents in Scopus including the word “argumentation” in the title, keywords, or abstract. Our analysis displays the layered nature of polysemy, in that there is a set of distinct senses that also relate to specific contexts of usage, such as scientific disciplines, journals and communities; at the same time, we could identify a small set of shared senses that allows bridging between topics. Moreover, we provided evidence that senses are selectively combined within scientific publications and that a significant number of scholars are using the word in different senses in their scientific production. This suggests that the word “argumentation” is able to foster the exchange of concepts and the cooperation of scholars across diverse scientific domains such as philosophy, political sciences, and informatics.