Related papers: Toward an Ecological Theory of Concepts
Graph theory provides a language for studying the structure of relations, and it is often used to study interactions over time too. However, it poorly captures the both temporal and structural nature of interactions, that calls for a…
Human knowledge is made up of the conceptual structures of many communities of interest. In order to establish coherence in human knowledge representation, it is important to enable communication between the conceptual structures of…
Neural network models of language have long been used as a tool for developing hypotheses about conceptual representation in the mind and brain. For many years, such use involved extracting vector-space representations of words and using…
In the concluding remarks of Ontological Promiscuity Hobbs (1985) made what we believe to be a very insightful observation: given that semantics is an attempt at specifying the relation between language and the world, if "one can assume a…
Analogies between quantum mechanics and sociology lead to the hypothesis that quantum objects are complex products of evolution. Like biological objects they are able to receive, to work on, and to spread semantic information. In general…
Quantum mechanics emerged as the result of a successful resolution of stringent empirical and profound conceptual conflicts within the development of atomic physics at the beginning of the last century. At first glance, it seems to be…
This paper describes a new technique, called "knowledge patterns", for helping construct axiom-rich, formal ontologies, based on identifying and explicitly representing recurring patterns of knowledge (theory schemata) in the ontology, and…
Contemporary perspectivism is viewed as a framework of scientific inquiry concerning the origin, generation and systematization of scientific knowledge of nature by focusing on the conditions under which such knowledge may arise in…
Emergent patterns in complex systems are related to many intriguing phenomena in modern science and philosophy. Several conceptions such as weak, strong and robust emergence have been proposed to emphasize different epistemological and…
Understanding the semantic relationships between terms is a fundamental task in natural language processing applications. While structured resources that can express those relationships in a formal way, such as ontologies, are still scarce,…
As the field of quantum physics evolves, researchers naturally form subgroups focusing on specialized problems. While this encourages in-depth exploration, it can limit the exchange of ideas across structurally similar problems in different…
In this contribution I give a brief introduction to the essential concepts and mechanisms of decoherence by the environment. The emphasis will be not so much on technical details but rather on conceptual issues and the impact on the…
Categories such as animal or furniture are acquired at an early age and play an important role in processing, organizing, and communicating world knowledge. Categories exist across cultures: they allow to efficiently represent the…
This paper presents the principles of ontology-supported and ontology-driven conceptual navigation. Conceptual navigation realizes the independence between resources and links to facilitate interoperability and reusability. An engine builds…
The observation of the nature and world represents the main source of human knowledge on the basis of our reason. At the present it is also the use of precise measurement approaches, which may contribute significantly to the knowledge of…
This paper describes a tentative model for how discrete memories transform into an interconnected conceptual network, or worldview, wherein relationships between memories are forged by way of abstractions. The model draws on Kauffman's…
Human cognition is profoundly shaped by the environments in which it unfolds. Yet, it remains an open question whether learning and decision making can be explained as a principled adaptation to the statistical structure of real-world…
Scientific studies of consciousness rely on objects whose existence is assumed to be independent of any consciousness. On the contrary, we assume consciousness to be fundamental, and that one of the main features of consciousness is…
Norbert Wiener and J.B.S. Haldane suggested during the early thirties that the profound changes in our conception of matter entailed by quantum theory opens the way for our thoughts, and other experiential or mind-like qualities, to play a…
The broader scope of our investigations is the search for the way in which concepts and their combinations carry and influence meaning and what this implies for human thought. More specifically, we examine the use of the mathematical…