Understanding Narrative-Driven Intergroup Conflict Dynamics Using Computational Cognitive Coherence Maps

2021 ◽  
pp. 089443932110060
Author(s):  
Levent Yilmaz

Humans make sense of the world through narratives. Therefore, adversaries often use conflict-sustaining narratives to maintain dominance and delegitimize the actions of the rivals. To better understand narratives’ role and influence in such intractable conflicts, a computational framework and methodology are introduced. The computational cognitive model and its underlying inference mechanism allow analysts to simulate and analyze narratives in relation to opposing narratives. The ability to simulate the interaction of adversarial stories with a set of micronarratives shared by members of a group opens new avenues to counter conflict-sustaining narratives. The methodology and its application to a concrete conflict scenario demonstrate how to conduct simulation-driven exploratory analysis over a complex adaptive narrative space to discern how narratives are matched to unfolding events and how they can be used to facilitate favorable change.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Santos ◽  
Eunice E. Santos ◽  
John Korah ◽  
Vairavan Murugappan ◽  
Suresh Subramanian

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-98
Author(s):  
Marguerite Müller ◽  
Frans Kruger ◽  
Nthabiseng Lekoala ◽  
Nthabiseng Mokoena

This article uses performative writing to explore the pedagogical entanglement of staff, students, and matter at the University of the Free State, South Africa. It is a collaborative narrative in which different voices share the textual stage. Each author contributes to one of the voices to create a performative narrative of how our experiences occur and emerge in this messy, complex, and volatile context. Our story sketches the backgrounds, in-between spaces, and “negative spaces” that pedagogy produces as relational encounters between human and the more-than-human world. We abandon the world of the real and move into a creative collaborative performative narrative space to explore the entanglements that pedagogies produce.


Author(s):  
Martin Bicher ◽  
Claire Rippinger ◽  
Christoph Urach ◽  
Dominik Brunmeir ◽  
Uwe Siebert ◽  
...  

AbstractThe decline of active COVID-19 cases in many countries in the world has proved that lockdown policies are indeed a very effective measure to stop the exponential spread of the virus. Still, the danger of a second wave of infections is omnipresent and it is clear, that every policy of the lockdown has to be carefully evaluated and possibly replaced by a different, less restrictive policy, before it can be lifted. Tracing of contacts and consequential tracing and breaking of infection-chains is a promising and comparably straightforward strategy to help containing the disease, although its precise impact on the epidemic is unknown. In order to quantify the benefits of tracing and similar policies we developed an agent-based model that not only validly depicts the spread of the disease, but allows for exploratory analysis of containment policies. We will describe our model and perform case studies in which we use the model to quantify impact of contact tracing in different characteristics and draw valuable conclusions about contact tracing policies in general.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Schwartenbeck ◽  
Johannes Passecker ◽  
Tobias U Hauser ◽  
Thomas H B FitzGerald ◽  
Martin Kronbichler ◽  
...  

AbstractSuccessful behaviour depends on the right balance between maximising reward and soliciting information about the world. Here, we show how different types of information-gain emerge when casting behaviour as surprise minimisation. We present two distinct mechanisms for goal-directed exploration that express separable profiles of active sampling to reduce uncertainty. ‘Hidden state’ exploration motivates agents to sample unambiguous observations to accurately infer the (hidden) state of the world. Conversely, ‘model parameter’ exploration, compels agents to sample outcomes associated with high uncertainty, if they are informative for their representation of the task structure. We illustrate the emergence of these types of information-gain, termed active inference and active learning, and show how these forms of exploration induce distinct patterns of ‘Bayes-optimal’ behaviour. Our findings provide a computational framework to understand how distinct levels of uncertainty induce different modes of information-gain in decision-making.


Author(s):  
Oksana Aleksandrova

Background. Under the new conditions in Ukraine, a new wave of interest in the work of the classic of the music culture of the 20th century Georgiy Sviridov is being observed, and it actualizes the search for the methods of scientific cognition corresponding to the spiritual depth of creativity. The artistic and aesthetic content of his vocal and choral compositions reveals the biblical image of the “inner man” and through it awareness of culture as a universe, where the man and God coexist in synergy. In the post-secular period, the world of music created by the outstanding artist was marked by the document of the individual and artistic experience of overcoming the crisis phenomena in society. The urgency of the present article is due to the need to find analysis methods appropriate for the style of vocal and choral compositions by G. Sviridov and for the upgrade process of methodology knowledge of the philosophical principles of composing activities of the 20th century as a whole. Objectives. The object of research is a musical composition; its subject is presented by the principles of the spiritual-semantic approach, determined by the worldview and style of the composer’s thinking. The purpose of the article is to substantiate the spiritual-semantic approach as a cognitive model of cognition of musical compositions on the material of vocalchoral genres by G. Sviridov. Methodology. The basis of the spiritual-semantic analysis is the concept of spiritual analysis of music by V. Medushevsky. A. Belonenko was the first to express the opinion that religious themes penetrated the entire creative work of the composer. L. Shapovalova offered methods of cognition of the spiritual reality of a musical composition and defined the liturgy as an “archetype” of the creativity of the believing man (homo credens). N. Varavkina-Tarasova highlighted the issues of the symbolic meaning of the spiritual content of G. Sviridov’s creative work on the example of “Three Choirs to the Tragedy by O. Tolstoy "Tsar Fodor Ioannovich"”. O. Tevosyan revealed a numerical symbolism of certain compositions by the composer. The development of the predecessors’ ideas is the author’s definition: the spiritual-semantic approach is a way of scientific cognition of the ontology of creativity. The “style of thinking” is evident through the system connections of the composer’s text with ideological traditions and the cultural environment. Presenting the main material. One of the criteria of the spiritual-semantic approach is the adequacy of thinking and language: the semantic function of the sign, multiplied by its presence in the material and spiritual plane of the composition, becomes a meaning-creating factor. The first level of the spiritual-semantic analysis of a musical composition is the first-element signs as an expression of the manifestation of the Being: preintonation, rhythm-intonation, harmonic tunes, timbre-complexes, in which the generalized archetypes of culture are contained in the concentrated (“curtailed”) form. The second level reveals a compositionally-designed meaningful image that originates from the first element (motive, theme). Since the symbol is a dynamic phenomenon, its further “germination” in the musical form is connected not only with the immanent-musical syntax. The symbolization of the sound-image is most clearly manifested in the third level of the spiritual-semantic analysis, which characterizes the type of musical dramaturgy (taking into account the world attitude of homo animus – the lyrical universe, according to M. Arkadyev). The fourth, metaphysical, level characterizes the complete meaningful image. The immanent-musical quality of the sound of a composition does not simply create a holistic gestalt, but with its help point to the invisible world (the Bible, the Life of the Saints, the Liturgy). At the highest fifth level, there is the outcome of consciousness, that perceives a musical composition, into the broad context of the existence: music creates spiritual values of a universal human meaning, "bridges" its meaning with the civilizational processes of the mankind (hence it gets the definition of “culture creating one”). We indicated the methodological role of the philosophical category of “the picture of the world”, the content of which synthesizes the deep ideas about the Universe. In the national picture of the world, the most significant laws of the existence of culture are recorded. Results. The category of the “composer’s style” contains such components as the creator’s worldview and the system of principles of his artistic thinking, expressed in the semiotic structure, the laws of composition and dramaturgy of compositions. The phenomenon of G. Sviridov is that from the sphere of the secular interpretation of the poetry by A. Pushkin, S. Yesenin, A. Blok, which corresponded to anthropocentrism of musical and poetic thinking, he implemented “modulation” to the Orthodox spirituality. The spiritual-semantic approach has a general methodological value, since it broadens the theoretical concepts of the cognitive science of stylistic phenomena in music. Its content, constituents, and objectives provide the perspective of the further substantiation of ideological positions; serve as tools for improving the methodology for analysing liturgical compositions (through signs and symbols of the spiritual time space). Conclusion. The three groups of semantic signs of the vocal-choral style by G. Svyrydov have been distinguished: anthropocentric, sound-imaging (nature, native land) associated with them, metaphysical (time, eternity, way of spiritual ascension), liturgical (Christ, Gate of the Lord, pure Thursday, bell-sound, prayer songs).


Discourse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (5) ◽  
pp. 112-125
Author(s):  
K. Yu. Kazantsev ◽  
S. I. Chernykh

Introduction. The period of active global cybernetization and business automation was marked by a problem for Russian employers in the form of a shortage of qualified personnel capable of ensuring the development and competitiveness of business in the world markets.Methodology and sources. Sociology of education as a social institution has been developing since 1970 s. Its current theoretical foundation is based on two principles: 1) The principle of mutual convergence of social institutions (education – business, education – state, education – family); 2) Variety of educational practices as a factual manifestation of the phenomenon of continuous education. Today corporative learning is one of such practices that radically change the ecosystem of traditional education.Results and discussion. There was a problem of forming a system of training new human resources that meet the changing economic realities. Until the 1990s, before the collapse of the country and the beginning of political and economic reforms, the Russian Federation had a system of higher education as one of the most stable and well-established mechanisms for training personnel for all sectors of the economy. An indicator of the effectiveness of this system was that graduates of Russian universities were invited to work by well-known corporations from many countries of the world.Over the years of reforms, Russia has lost its previous model of education, which today significantly affects the quality of training. Many Russian enterprises are forced to follow the path of independent training and retraining of specialists. Development of corporative is necessary to compensate for the limitations of traditional higher education. At first, the training was organized locally and had a haphazard character, but over time, Russian entrepreneurs began to adopt foreign experience in forming a knowledge system in the company and even create corporate universities.Conclusion. The study examines the prerequisites for the formation of the system and the development of the corporate education market, provides current models of knowledge accumulation and suggests the author's cognitive model of professional development of personnel.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 29-56
Author(s):  
Rocío Martínez ◽  
Sara Siyavoshi ◽  
Sherman Wilcox

In this paper we describe a cognitive grammar approach to the study of signed language grammar. Using data from different signed languages, we explore three broad topics. First, we examine pointing, Place, and placing. We analyze pointing as a construction consisting of a pointing device, a symbolic structure which directs the interlocutor’s conceptual attention, and a Place, a symbolic structure consisting of a spatial location and a meaning, the focus of attention. Placing is a construction in which non-body anchored signs are placed at a location in space, thereby creating or recruiting a Place structure which can be used in subsequent discourse. We examine how these structures work in nominal grounding and in extended discourse. Second, we examine a cognitive grammar approach to grammatical modality. Our analysis is based on the cognitive model called the control cycle, which posits two types of control: effective, which describes our striving to influence what happens in the world, and epistemic, which concerns how we make sense of the world. We explore how effective and epistemic modality are expressed in facial displays, focusing on the brow furrow and a display with down-turned corners of the mouth we call the horseshoe mouth. Finally, we offer a brief account of a cognitive grammar approach to the relation between sign and gesture.


Author(s):  
Ismael Rodríguez ◽  
Manuel Núñez ◽  
Fernando Rubio

Finite State Machines (FSM) are formalisms that have been used for decades to describe the behavior of systems. They can also provide an intelligent agent with a suitable formalism for describing its own beliefs about the behavior of the world surrounding it. In fact, FSMs are the suitable acceptors for right linear languages, which are the simplest languages considered in Chomsky’s classification of languages. Since Chomsky proposes that the generation of language (and, indirectly, any mental process) can be expressed through a kind of formal language, it can be assumed that cognitive processes can be formulated by means of the formalisms that can express those languages. Hence, we will use FSMs as a suitable formalism for representing (simple) cognitive models. We present an algorithm that, given an observation of the environment, produces an FSM describing an environment behavior that is capable to produce that observation. Since an infinite number of different FSMs could have produced that observation, we have to choose the most feasible one. When a phenomenon can be explained with several theories, Occam’s razor principle, which is basic in science, encourages choosing the simplest explanation. Applying this criterion to our problem, we choose the simplest (smallest) FSM that could have produced that observation. An algorithm is presented to solve this problem. In conclusion, our framework provides a cognitive model that is the most preferable theory for the observer, according to the Occam’s razor criterion.


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