scholarly journals Isomorphism in nominative models of abstract substantives with state of mind and physical state meaning

In the article, the author studies the isomorphism of nominative models of the fields of spiritual state and physical state, noting that the isomorphism is manifested at all language levels. The presence of significant number lexemes with the erased inner form that binds the nomination of person spiritual condition field with the subjects physical condition field, as well as the presence of semantically stable constructions like the ardor of character, one of which members is also a sign of a physical object, shows that the phenomenon of this isomorphism was inherent in the language over a long period of historical development. Syntactic derivatives with the meaning of a spiritual state are formed from verbs that nominate physical states and processes. Isomorphism of spiritual and physical nominative models is connected with the phenomenon of language economy. According to observations, language, if possible, tends to minimize forms despite to the wealth of meanings; when it comes about spiritual state nomination, the speaker chooses the form which describes the material visible world, what is tangible to all people. The premise of that was such a feature of human perception as synesthesia. The isomorphism of nominating the spiritual and physical state greatly contributed to the objectification and personification of abstract concepts, which affects the consciousness of speakers as well as the conceptualization of ‘state of mind’ nature. The article also notes that the active process in modern language is the expansion of the abstract substances semantics and an increase in the number of concepts with a much more extended abstraction, due to this, the field of a person's spiritual state can also be replenished. Abstraction and extended abstraction are distinguished by the author. Extended abstraction is formed on the basis of polysemicity, the main feature of the extended abstract concept is the expansion of the semantic structure and the formation of a new semantic core, different from the generating base. The article provides examples of semantic abstraction expanding in the abstract substances.

Author(s):  
Berit Ingebrethsen

It is not easy to express abstract concepts, such as time and society, in a drawing. The subject of this article is rooted in the educational issue of visually expressing themes represented by abstract concepts. However, it is possible to find means and devices to express such ideas. This article shows how metaphors can be used to express such ideas visually. Cognitive linguistic research argues that metaphors are crucial in the verbal communication of abstract concepts. This article also attempts to show that metaphors are important in visual communication. The cognitive linguistic metaphor theory of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson is used here to investigate how metaphors are used to construct meaning in the drawings of cartoonist and illustrator Finn Graff and artist Saul Steinberg. The article presents a few examples of how visual devices structure the abstract concept of time. It then proceeds to explain how symbols function as metonymies and provides an overview of the different types of metaphors and how they are used to express meaning in drawings. The article concludes by attempting to provide new insights regarding the use of visual metaphors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 1994 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rahul Sharma ◽  
Bernardete Ribeiro ◽  
Alexandre Miguel Pinto ◽  
F. Amílcar Cardoso

The term concept has been a prominent part of investigations in psychology and neurobiology where, mostly, it is mathematically or theoretically represented. Concepts are also studied in the computational domain through their symbolic, distributed and hybrid representations. The majority of these approaches focused on addressing concrete concepts notion, but the view of the abstract concept is rarely explored. Moreover, most computational approaches have a predefined structure or configurations. The proposed method, Regulated Activation Network (RAN), has an evolving topology and learns representations of abstract concepts by exploiting the geometrical view of concepts, without supervision. In the article, first, a Toy-data problem was used to demonstrate the RANs modeling. Secondly, we demonstrate the liberty of concept identifier choice in RANs modeling and deep hierarchy generation using the IRIS dataset. Thirdly, data from the IoT’s human activity recognition problem is used to show automatic identification of alike classes as abstract concepts. The evaluation of RAN with eight UCI benchmarks and the comparisons with five Machine Learning models establishes the RANs credibility as a classifier. The classification operation also proved the RANs hypothesis of abstract concept representation. The experiments demonstrate the RANs ability to simulate psychological processes (like concept creation and learning) and carry out effective classification irrespective of training data size.


Author(s):  
Peter Lugosi

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to conceptualise and examine the processes through which abstract concepts, or abstractions, can be utilised in co-creating knowledge within “impact-focussed” organisational and business research, i.e. applied research that primarily seeks to promote change in practice rather than principally aiming to make theoretical contributions to academic debates. The paper uses the abstraction “hospitality” as an empirical example and discusses the techniques used to “operationalise” this concept, i.e. make it understandable for research participants enabling researchers to use it within data generation and the creation of practical insights in organisational enquiry. Design/methodology/approach The study employed two methods: first, participant-generated photos; and second, two interactive workshops with 38 practitioners where the abstract concept “hospitality” was used to generate practical organisational insights. Findings The paper distinguishes between four stages: the elaboration of abstraction, concretisation of abstraction, probing perspectives on abstraction and exploring experiences of abstraction. It is argued that utilising specific techniques within these four stages facilitates: recognisability: the extent to which organisational stakeholders understand the content and meanings of the abstraction; and relatability: the extent to which stakeholders appreciate how the abstract concepts are relevant to interpreting their own practices and experiences. Research limitations/implications This is an exploratory study, used to develop and refine elicitation techniques, rather than to draw definitive conclusions about the applicability of specific abstract concepts. Nevertheless, reflecting on the processes and techniques used in the utilisation of abstractions here can help to operationalise them in future impact-focussed research. Originality/value The paper conceptualises the processes through which abstract concepts can be made apprehendable for non-specialist, non-academic practitioners. In doing so, it discusses how various elicitation techniques support the utilisation of abstractions in generating insights that can support the development of constructive, context-specific practices in organisations and businesses.


2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giancarlo La Camera ◽  
Sebastien Bouret ◽  
Barry J. Richmond

AbstractThe ability to learn and follow abstract rules relies on intact prefrontal regions including the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC). Here, we investigate the specific roles of these brain regions in learning rules that depend critically on the formation of abstract concepts as opposed to simpler input-output associations. To this aim, we tested monkeys with bilateral removals of either LPFC or OFC on a rapidly learned task requiring the formation of the abstract concept of same vs. different. While monkeys with OFC removals were significantly slower than controls at both acquiring and reversing the concept-based rule, monkeys with LPFC removals were not impaired in acquiring the task, but were significantly slower at rule reversal. Neither group was impaired in the acquisition or reversal of a delayed visual cue-outcome association task without a concept-based rule. These results suggest that OFC is essential for the implementation of a concept-based rule, whereas LPFC seems essential for its modification once established.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex J. Cope ◽  
Eleni Vasilaki ◽  
Dorian Minors ◽  
Chelsea Sabo ◽  
James A.R. Marshall ◽  
...  

AbstractThe capacity to learn abstract concepts such as ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ is considered a higher-order cognitive function, typically thought to be dependent on top-down neocortical processing. It is therefore surprising that honey bees apparantly have this capacity. Here we report a model of the structures of the honey bee brain that can learn same-ness and difference, as well as a range of complex and simple associative learning tasks. Our model is constrained by the known connections and properties of the mushroom body, including the protocerebral tract, and provides a good fit to the learning rates and performances of real bees in all tasks, including learning sameness and difference. The model proposes a novel mechanism for learning the abstract concepts of ‘sameness’ and ‘difference’ that is compatible with the insect brain, and is not dependent on top-down or executive control processing.


2018 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-383 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fabian Horn

Homer'sIliadis an epic poem full of war and battles, but scholars have noted that ‘[t]he Homeric poems are interested in death far more than they are in fighting’. Even though long passages of the poem, particularly the so-called ‘battle books’ (Il.Books 5–8, 11–17, 20–2), consist of little other than fighting, individual battles are often very short with hardly ever a longer exchange of blows. Usually, one strike is all it takes for the superior warrior to dispatch his opponent, and death occurs swiftly. The prominence of death in Homeric battle scenes raises the question of how and in which terms dying in battle is being depicted in theIliad: for while fighting can be described in a straightforward fashion, death is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to grasp. Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have ascertained that, when coping with difficult and abstract concepts, such as emotions, the human mind is likely to resort to figurative language and particularly to metaphors.


Author(s):  
Yingxu Wang

Concepts are the most fundamental unit of cognition that carries certain meanings in expression, thinking, reasoning, and system modeling. In denotational mathematics, a concept is formally modeled as an abstract and dynamic mathematical structure that encapsulates attributes, objects, and relations. The most important property of an abstract concept is its adaptive capability to autonomously interrelate itself to other concepts. This article presents a formal theory for abstract concepts and knowledge manipulation known as “concept algebra.” The mathematical models of concepts and knowledge are developed based on the object-attribute-relation (OAR) theory. The formal methodology for manipulating knowledge as a concept network is described. Case studies demonstrate that concept algebra provides a generic and formal knowledge manipulation means, which is capable to deal with complex knowledge and software structures as well as their algebraic operations.


Author(s):  
Alessandro Di Nuovo ◽  
Angelo Cangelosi

Abstract Purpose of Review Understanding and manipulating abstract concepts is a fundamental characteristic of human intelligence that is currently missing in artificial agents. Without it, the ability of these robots to interact socially with humans while performing their tasks would be hindered. However, what is needed to empower our robots with such a capability? In this article, we discuss some recent attempts on cognitive robot modeling of these concepts underpinned by some neurophysiological principles. Recent Findings For advanced learning of abstract concepts, an artificial agent needs a (robotic) body, because abstract and concrete concepts are considered a continuum, and abstract concepts can be learned by linking them to concrete embodied perceptions. Pioneering studies provided valuable information about the simulation of artificial learning and demonstrated the value of the cognitive robotics approach to study aspects of abstract cognition. Summary There are a few successful examples of cognitive models of abstract knowledge based on connectionist and probabilistic modeling techniques. However, the modeling of abstract concept learning in robots is currently limited at narrow tasks. To make further progress, we argue that closer collaboration among multiple disciplines is required to share expertise and co-design future studies. Particularly important is to create and share benchmark datasets of human learning behavior.


2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaoshuai Lei ◽  
Gang Xie ◽  
Gaowei Yan

Existing key-frame extraction methods are basically video summary oriented; yet the index task of key-frames is ignored. This paper presents a novel key-frame extraction approach which can be available for both video summary and video index. First a dynamic distance separability algorithm is advanced to divide a shot into subshots based on semantic structure, and then appropriate key-frames are extracted in each subshot by SVD decomposition. Finally, three evaluation indicators are proposed to evaluate the performance of the new approach. Experimental results show that the proposed approach achieves good semantic structure for semantics-based video index and meanwhile produces video summary consistent with human perception.


2011 ◽  
Vol 26 (S2) ◽  
pp. 287-287
Author(s):  
J.A. García

Basic situation16-year-old male, physical state inside normal parameters, diagnosed of high functioning autism. Normalized life up to 14 years.At present not educated, he remains isolated in the familiar hearth fleeing of the situations and stimulus that seem aversive to him. He asks for help repeatedly to go out of his situation.Symptomatology:(A) If the exhibition to the situation, person or stimulus, has not exceeded his threshold of tolerance:- Gradually he relaxes- Gradually he recovers his basic situation(B) If the exhibition to the situation, person or stimulus, has exceeded his threshold of tolerance:- Increase of internal tension- Increase of observable behavioural agitation- Increase of request of help to unload the internal tension Effects:(A) If there is tension discharge:- Considerable increase of the availability and positive attitude- Considerable increase of the state of mind(B) If there is no tension discharge:- Movement increase and he even escapes- Aggressiveness against objects and people- Conducts of high risk for his and others’ lifeDetonators: Incapability for the confrontation to the stress, especially before:- Environmental tension- Different acoustic stimulus and every time more generalized in the everyday life: crying of babies and children, whistles, coffee pots, engines …- Powerlessness before the impossibility of flight and/or avoidance of the aversive stimulus Its cognitive level allows him to realize and suffer the consistent emotional impact, as well as wishing to die.He asks for help repeatedly to go out of his situation!


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