What does knowledge look like? Interpreting diagrams as contemporary hieroglyphics

2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-505 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracey Bowen ◽  
M Max Evans
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Reference Points ◽  
Graphic Representation ◽  
Spatial Proximity ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
Socially Constructed ◽  
Graphic Representations ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Many ◽  
Representation Types

A significant challenge in interpreting and analyzing graphic representations is to understand the many reference points a graphically depicted object may have across its producer’s personal and cultural experiences. An individual’s exposure to socially constructed representations drives his or her propensity to use specific shared graphic objects, especially when attempting to articulate complex or abstract concepts. This multidisciplinary research study focuses on interpreting graphic representation types and analyzing the graphic objects individuals use to depict the abstract concept of knowledge. A sample of 833 individuals aged 5–65 participated in the study by constructing a drawing to answer the question, ‘What does knowledge look like?’. Engelhardt’s Language of Graphics (2002) graphic representation taxonomy was used to identify grouping and linking diagrams in the drawings. Next, graphic objects were coded and categorized within the drawings to identify the common representations, shared symbols, and non-depictive elements used to group and link. Using drawings fitting Engelhardt’s grouping and linking graphic representation types, and Tversky’s theories for constructing meaning through diagrams, this article examines how study participants combine and arrange common graphic objects to depict the concept of ‘knowledge’. The results illustrate that individuals organize and arrange common graphic objects into groupings to communicate taxonomies or hierarchies based on spatial proximity; or connect and link them together using glyphs (e.g. arrows, dotted or straight lines) to communicate causal relationships. The findings also demonstrate how individuals employ common socially constructed graphic representations (or objects) as a visual communication tool and, through the exercise of drawing, as a tool for meaning or sense making. The graphic objects possess a shared meaning that the participants have seen circulating within their culture. The common ground that emerges from sharing graphic objects suggests a form of contemporary hieroglyphics that communicates meaning both inside and outside the community.

DARCY RIBEIRO UNIVERSITY CAMPUS MAP – 2017- TECHNICAL NOTE

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rafael Sanzio Araújo dos Anjos ◽  
Jose Leandro de Araujo Conceição ◽  
Jõao Emanuel ◽  
Matheus Nunes
Keyword(s):  
Spatial Data ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Technical Note ◽  
University Campus ◽  
Communication Tool ◽  
Sources Of Information ◽  
Data Manipulation ◽  
Geographic Space ◽  
The Many ◽  
New Generation

The spatial information regarding the use of territory is one of the many strategies used to answer and to inform about what happened, what is happening and what may happen in geographic space. Therefore, the mapping of land use as a communication tool for the spatial data made significant progress in improving sources of information, especially over the last few decades, with new generation remote sensing products for data manipulation.

The Many Faces of Leftism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balázs Trencsényi ◽  
Michal Kopeček ◽  
Luka Lisjak Gabrijelčič ◽  
Maria Falina ◽  
Mónika Baár ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Great Depression ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Socialist Realism ◽  
Popular Front ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Right Wing Authoritarianism ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
The Many

The success of the Bolshevik Revolution confirmed that economic backwardness was not necessarily an obstacle for socialism, as it triggered the radicalization of leftist movements in the region. Yet this also led to polarization of the left on questions of Soviet-Russian developments and possible cooperation with non-socialist parties, as well as agrarian and national questions. While in many countries social democracy entered the political mainstream in the 1920s, its position was undermined by the rise of right-wing authoritarianism. In turn, the Great Depression made the communist position more plausible, but the Stalinization of communist parties and the imposition of socialist realism alienated most intellectual supporters. Eventually, some radical leftists turned against the communist movement attacking its dogmatism and the Stalinist show trials. At the same time, the rise of Nazism forced leftist groups to seek a common ground, first in the form of “Popular Front” ideology, and, during the war, in the form of armed partisan movements.

The Semantics of Evidentials

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray
Keyword(s):  
Recent Work ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Formal Semantics ◽  
Empirical Support ◽  
Propositional Content ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Truth Conditional ◽  
The Common ◽  
Issue Content

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.

Can Groups Assert That P?

2019 ◽  
pp. 326-344
Author(s):  
Deborah Tollefsen
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Single Individual ◽  
Constitutive Rule ◽  
The Past ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Common ◽  
Declarative Statement ◽  
John Macfarlane

When a group or institution issues a declarative statement, what sort of speech act is this? Is it the assertion of a single individual (perhaps the group’s spokesperson or leader) or the assertion of all or most of the group members? Or is there a sense in which the group itself asserts that p? If assertion is a speech act, then who is the actor in the case of group assertion? These are the questions this chapter aims to address. Whether groups themselves can make assertions or whether a group of individuals can jointly assert that p depends, in part, on what sort of speech act assertion is. The literature on assertion has burgeoned over the past few years, and there is a great deal of debate regarding the nature of assertion. John MacFarlane has helpfully identified four theories of assertion. Following Sandy Goldberg, we can call these the attitudinal account, the constitutive rule account, the common-ground account, and the commitment account. I shall consider what group assertion might look like under each of these accounts and doing so will help us to examine some of the accounts of group assertion (often presented as theories of group testimony) on offer. I shall argue that, of the four accounts, the commitment account can best be extended to make sense of group assertion in all its various forms.

scholarly journals Across the Divide: Looking for the common ground of Hindustani

2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (6) ◽  
pp. 2056-2079 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID LUNN
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
Literary Journals ◽  
The Common

AbstractThis article investigates some of the institutional and poetic practices around the idea of Hindustani in the period 1900–47. It charts the establishment of the Hindustani Academy in 1927 and explores some of its publishing activities as it attempted to make a positive institutional intervention in the Hindi–Urdu debate and cultural field more broadly. It then considers some aspects of poetic production in literary journals, including those associated with the Academy. Ultimately, it is an attempt to explore the grey areas that existed between Hindi/Hindu and Urdu/Muslim in the pre-Independence decades, and to make the case for studying the literature of both traditions simultaneously, along with emphasizing that attempts at compromise—including the perennially contested term ‘Hindustani’ itself—must be taken on their own terms.

Heart failure in an elderly population

2001 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
DN Carmichael ◽  
Michael Lye
Keyword(s):  
Heart Failure ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Clinical Syndrome ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Diagnostic Challenge ◽  
The Common ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
The Many ◽  
Neuroendocrine Activation ◽  
Symptoms And Signs

Heart failure has been defined in many ways and definitions change over time. The multiplicity of definitions reflect the paucity of our understanding of the primary underlying physiology of heart failure and the many diseases for which heart failure is the common end-point. Fundamentally, heart failure represents a failure of the heart to meet the body’s requirement for blood supply for whatever reason. It is thus a clinical syndrome with characteristic features – not a single disease in its own right. The syndrome includes symptoms and signs of organ underperfusion, fluid retention and neuroendocrine activation. The syndrome arises from a range of possible causes of which ischaemic heart disease is the commonest. From the point of view of a clinician, the underlying pathology will determine treatment options and prognosis. The extensive range of possible aetiologies present a diagnostic challenge both to correctly identify the syndrome amongst all other causes of dyspnoea and to identify the aetiology, allowing optimization of treatment.

Linguistic influences on gesture’s form

Gesture ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Gerwing ◽  
Janet Bavelas
Keyword(s):  
Common Ground ◽  
Symbolic Form ◽  
Communicative Function ◽  
Face To Face ◽  
Original Action ◽  
New Information ◽  
Physical Form ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Given ◽  
Linguistic Influences

Hand gestures in face-to-face dialogue are symbolic acts, integrated with speech. Little is known about the factors that determine the physical form of these gestures. When the gesture depicts a previous nonsymbolic action, it obviously resembles this action; however, such gestures are not only noticeably different from the original action but, when they occur in a series, are different from each other. This paper presents an experiment with two separate analyses (one quantitative, one qualitative) testing the hypothesis that the immediate communicative function is a determinant of the symbolic form of the gesture. First, we manipulated whether the speaker was describing the previous action to an addressee who had done the same actions and therefore shared common ground or to one who had done different actions and therefore did not share common ground. The common ground gestures were judged to be significantly less complex, precise, or informative than the latter, a finding similar to the effects of common ground on words. In the qualitative analysis, we used the given versus new principle to analyze a series of gestures about the same actions by the same speaker. The speaker emphasized the new information in each gesture by making it larger, clearer, etc. When this information became given, a gesture for the same action became smaller or less precise, which is similar to findings for given versus new information in words. Thus the immediate communicative function (e.g., to convey information that is common ground or that is new) played a major role in determining the physical form of the gestures.

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