Symbolic Concepts Research Articles

Unit Testing for Concepts in Neural Networks

Abstract Many complex problems are naturally understood in terms of symbolic concepts. For example, our concept of “cat” is related to our concepts of “ears” and “whiskers” in a non-arbitrary way. Fodor (1998) proposes one theory of concepts, which emphasizes symbolic representations related via constituency structures. Whether neural networks are consistent with such a theory is open for debate. We propose unit tests for evaluating whether a system’s behavior is consistent with several key aspects of Fodor’s criteria. Using a simple visual concept learning task, we evaluate several modern neural architectures against this specification. We find that models succeed on tests of groundedness, modularity, and reusability of concepts, but that important questions about causality remain open. Resolving these will require new methods for analyzing models’ internal states.

Generating Explanations for Conceptual Validation of Graph Neural Networks: An Investigation of Symbolic Predicates Learned on Relevance-Ranked Sub-Graphs

Graph Neural Networks (GNN) show good performance in relational data classification. However, their contribution to concept learning and the validation of their output from an application domain’s and user’s perspective have not been thoroughly studied. We argue that combining symbolic learning methods, such as Inductive Logic Programming (ILP), with statistical machine learning methods, especially GNNs, is an essential forward-looking step to perform powerful and validatable relational concept learning. In this contribution, we introduce a benchmark for the conceptual validation of GNN classification outputs. It consists of the symbolic representations of symmetric and non-symmetric figures that are taken from a well-known Kandinsky Pattern data set. We further provide a novel validation framework that can be used to generate comprehensible explanations with ILP on top of the relevance output of GNN explainers and human-expected relevance for concepts learned by GNNs. Our experiments conducted on our benchmark data set demonstrate that it is possible to extract symbolic concepts from the most relevant explanations that are representative of what a GNN has learned. Our findings open up a variety of avenues for future research on validatable explanations for GNNs.

Semiology of Art and Mysticism in Persian Architecture According to Rumi’s Mystical Opinions (Case Study: Sheikh Lotf-Allah Mosque, Iran)

A glimpse of the history of Islamic art indicates that Sufism and mysticism have long been among the most important intellectual and spiritual currents influencing Persian art and architecture. Accordingly, re-reading the symbolic concepts as well as the mystical and spiritual semiotics and seeking their reflection in the body of architecture is an obligatory instruction that should be considered in the process of architectural design. In this research, the authors endeavor to investigate the semiology in the physical elements of Sheikh Lotf-Allah Mosque in Isfahan and its relationship with Rumi’s mysticism using inferential–analytical methods and based on library studies and empirical observations. This research found that the Sheikh Lotf-Allah Mosque was constructed according to the mystical opinions of Rumi in order to demonstrate the semantic values of different levels of the universe in its physical form, structure and configuration. According to the findings, the use of Rumi’s mysticism propagates a God-centered semantic spirit to the body of Persian architectural elements, which always reminds human beings of their true home, which is the heavenly world. According to Rumi, the nature of architecture is beyond the material, and it is God-centered contemplation that turns the architecture into magnificent buildings.

Multidisciplinary Intersections on Artificial-Human Vividness: Phenomenology, Representation, and the Brain.

This article will explore the expressivity and tractability of vividness, as viewed from the interdisciplinary perspective of the cognitive sciences, including the sub-disciplines of artificial intelligence, cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and phenomenology. Following the precursor work by Benussi in experimental phenomenology, seminal papers by David Marks in psychology and, later, Hector Levesque in computer science, a substantial part of the discussion has been around a symbolic approach to the concept of vividness. At the same time, a similar concept linked to semantic memory, imagery, and mental models has had a long history in cognitive psychology, with new emerging links to cognitive neuroscience. More recently, there is a push towards neural-symbolic representations which allows room for the integration of brain models of vividness to a symbolic concept of vividness. Such works lead to question the phenomenology of vividness in the context of consciousness, and the related ethical concerns. The purpose of this paper is to review the state of the art, advances, and further potential developments of artificial-human vividness while laying the ground for a shared conceptual platform for dialogue, communication, and debate across all the relevant sub-disciplines. Within such context, an important goal of the paper is to define the crucial role of vividness in grounding simulation and modeling within the psychology (and neuroscience) of human reasoning.

LANDSCAPE ELEMENTS SYMBOLISM IN MUSEUM PURNA BHAKTI PERTIWI, JAKARTA

Purna Bhakti Pertiwi Museum is a museum that was established as a manifestation of the gratitude of Soeharto and his family to God Almighty, as well as appreciation for the support given by the Indonesian people and abroad. The form of gratitude is depicted through the concept of symbolism applied to the museum area, one of which is through landscape elements. Symbolism is a concept of human thought that is realized through symbols. Collecting data in this study using the interview method and identifying the symbolism contained in the elements of the museum landscape using Symbolism in Javanese culture which is classified into Symbolism in Religion, Symbolism in Culture, and Symbolism in Science. Based on this research, it was revealed that the landscape element was used as a way for him to be grateful for the blessings and safety bestowed by the Creator, an effort to respect and preserve the culture of his ancestors as a Javanese person, and as a medium of education for the Indonesian people.

СМИ КАК ИНСТРУМЕНТ ВЛИЯНИЯ НА ФОРМИРОВАНИЕ В МАССОВОМ СОЗНАНИИ БЛАГОПРИЯТНОГО ИМИДЖА ГОСУДАРСТВА

The article is devoted to the actual problem of forming a positive image of the state through the use of the media. Foreign policy processes demonstrate the importance of a high-quality collective image of the state as a tool for protecting and promoting one's own interests for the country. The mechanism of influence on the mass consciousness by means of a "symbolic concept" is described, which makes it possible to cover the subjective component of the image of the state, which is inaccessible to the PR-maker.

On the Algebra of Operators Corresponding to the Union of Smooth Submanifolds

For a pair of smooth transversally intersecting submanifolds in some enveloping smooth manifold, we study the algebra generated by pseudodifferential operators and (co)boundary operators corresponding to submanifolds. We establish that such an algebra has 18 types of generating elements. For operators from this algebra, we define the concept of symbol and obtain the composition formula.

Drawing as a Process of Psychic Mediation Along the Child´s Developmental Trajectory

INTRODUCTION: The intrapsychic process of resorting to the symbolic is innate and prepares the child for the organization of his internal world. Throughout the child's developmental trajectory, its playful projective expression, allows us to assess the psychographically internalized stages of development. The present study aims to evaluate the mental representation of the concept of symbolism, size, and perspective of designed percepts along the developmental trajectory (age range from 4 to 12 years). 
 
 METHODS: Patients were invited to produce two drawings depicting a Healthy Tooth and an Unhealthy Tooth. The qualitative content grid for the analysis of the drawings was originally designed to study the pictorial representations found in the sample. However, in this article, we only intend to present the results obtained regarding Symbolism, Size and Perspective categories that are part of the content analysis grid. 
 
 RESULTS: Regarding the Symbolism Category, most respondents between 4 and 6 years of age, pictorially represented an Unrealistic Tooth, and from 10 years onwards there is a marked decrease in this pictorial (Un)Realism. Regarding the Size of Teeth Category, from 8 years old onwards the drawings seem to increase in terms of their dimension. When it comes to Perspective Category, the percept drawn in a 2D perspective clearly prevails, regardless of age. 
 
 CONCLUSION: Results obtained in this study show that the mental representation of (Un)Healthy teeth are early internalized during childhood and the stages of psychographic development seem to be reliable indicators of the development of the mental representation of the child´s symbolism.

Symbolicity, language, and mediality

Abstract This article demonstrates the broad applicability of the concept of symbol in human communication, beyond but including verbal language. The starting point is Charles Sanders Peirce’s understanding of symbolicity as signification grounded on habits. The goal is to be able to conceptualize mediality in general and media interrelations, particularly in relation to symbolicity. Informed by a multimodal view on media, the author provides a systematic overview of symbolicity within the context of communication among human minds structured around two crossing parameters: symbols being limited or widespread among people and symbols not being part of or being part of systems – languages. Based on this overview, I clarify the role of culture in language notions and conceptualize language in relation to mediality. I also suggest a way of more precisely describing similarities and differences between languages and media types, without either conflating or totally separating the two concepts. Finally, I investigate how the dependence of language and media type conceptions on culture affects the idea of intermediality. Together, these investigations and conceptualizations promote a more comprehensive understanding of symbolicity in general and a deeper knowledge of the role of symbolicity in human communication, including verbal language, and intermedial relations involving all kinds of different media types.

Linguistic images in A.S. Pushkin’s travelogue «Journey to Arzrum»

The discursive-cognitive nature of the linguistic image includes: (a) a subject-sensory representation (the cognitive substrate of the phenomenon), (b) a figurative word acting as its verbal exponent (c) a discursive-associative architectonics of the communicative-event meanings of the concept projecting the corresponding linguistic image. Narrative discourse plays a special role in creating a linguistic image. In this speech-thinking environment, an image-generating context is formed with the effect of the presence of the narrator. The main idea is that narrative discourse provides the ability to convey a subjective vision of the experienced fragments of a communicative event with the help of a linguistic image. Discursive expansion fills symbolic concepts with autochthonous images and reveals in travel essays a rich and multifaceted palette of the eastern worldview. The extraction of ethno-cultural meanings is based on the selected components of the linguistic image. Ethnocultural meanings serve to create a picturesque exotic flavor in A.S. Pushkins travelogue Journey to Arzrum.

СЕМАНТИЧЕСКАЯ ВОЙНА В ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ КЛЮЧЕВОГО СИМВОЛА: К ТЕОРИИ АКТУАЛЬНОГО ФЕНОМЕНА

The purpose of the article is to clarify the concept of semantic war as a special kind of symbolic politics, which should not be confused with the broader concept of propaganda (information) wars. Placing semantic wars on the lower levels of cognitive legitimation of power (according to the typology of P. Berger and T. Luckmann), the authors interpret them as a kind of semantic struggle waged in the space of the same key symbol (concept) (H. Lasswell). The article emphasizes that the main cognitive strategy of the semantic war is the management of polysemy/multivaluedness of the key concepts of public discourse, because of which the interpretation of the concept desired by a given political actor is «naturalized» as part of common sense. The authors point out that semantic wars are conducted both for separate lexical concepts and for conceptual metaphors. This thesis is illustrated in the article by the experience of studying the concept of «the West» in the discourse of the German parliamentary debates, as well as by the interpretation of the metaphor «the third world war without powder smoke» in the Chinese blogosphere during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Formation of Ecological and Patriotic Culture in youth through the Project “Green Memory Alley”

The paper substantiates the necessity of forming ecological and patriotic culture in the younger generation at the present stage of society development. The purpose of the article is to search for effective forms and methods of formation of ecological and patriotic culture among the representatives of the younger generation. It describes the experience of team work at Saratov regional educational institutions of different levels (schools and universities) in the implementation of the regional project “Green Memory Alley “ for the period 2005-2021. The project includes the following stages: 1. Development of environmental awareness and patriotic feelings and emotions in the interacting participants based on value preferences; 2. Guidance of the project participants to the ecological and patriotic perception of reality; 3. Participants’ awareness of the interaction between the personal and social meaning of environmental and patriotic activities; 4. Interaction of participants in the ecological-patriotic educational space. A significant basis for participants’ work on the project “Green Alley of Memory” is modeling and arrangement of the green alley in memory of the soldiers who died during the Great Patriotic War by means of the artistic, aesthetic, environmental, spiritual, moral and symbolic value of plants. Сonclusion. It has been revealed that the symbolic concepts ‘Social memory of the war’ and ‘Living organisms and plants’ proposed in the project can be system-forming elements of the value bases of ecological and patriotic culture in the younger generation. It is aimed at developing insights into preservation and maintenance of life on a planetary scale. On the basis of the research, ecological and patriotic culture is presented as a personal phenomenon that expresses the essential relationship of such categories as culture, patriotism, ecology and values reflecting involvement in the traditions of civic duty, service to the Motherland and love for nature, life, and the universe. The research singled out, described and validated the cognitive-content, motivational-value, organizational-activity components and the stages that form the structure of ecological-patriotic culture.

Pay (to pay) to play: drillable immersion at transmedia theme parks

AbstractWeaving together analyses of theme park industry discourses, park experiences, ride architectures, and ticket-price data, this article extends Mittell’s (2013) work on “drillable” textuality to outline three distinct ways in which drillable immersion is being built into the experience of transmedia theme parks. In addition to being a set of forensic-minded exploratory practices and a spatially-layered arena of play, drillable immersion is also being used as an industry strategy to encourage additional capitalistic consumption and to further entrench symbolic conceptions of awe and wonder into commercialized experiences. By outlining how new media and convergence logics are being extended and mapped onto physical spaces, the article opens up new ways of thinking about the relationships between media industries and fans, adjacent cultural sites of experience, tourism, and broader histories of immersive culture.

RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM IN THE WORKS OF GRAPHIC ARTIST-NARENDRA SRIVASTAVA

Religious symbolism implies the use of unique symbols by a particular religion, that describe anything pertaining to its culture and psyche, including archetypes, events, natural phenomena or even the art that evolved in that land over a period of time. All religions of the world, irrespective of how ancient or modern they are, use symbols to help create a resonant ethos, which in turn, reflects the moral values, teachings and culture of that society. The concept of religious symbolism is very ancient and may well have had its roots from the start of mankind itself. This can be seen in the series of paintings with the word ‘DHARMA’ painted in 1984, done basically for calendar, depicting six great religions of world Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Confucianism, and Judaism by renowned graphic designer, eminent artist, and art educationist, Narendra Srivastava. By seeing these drawings it seems that artist must be highly religious which is not true because he had used the word graphically only. He did it for his pleasure of creating something new out of it, which makes his artworks very creative. These paintings do have some religious symbolism in it, which the artist had graphically depicted in a very innovative and impressive style.

Symbolic versus material concerns of rural consciousness in the United States

A potential explanation for the U.S. urban-rural political divide is a definition of rural consciousness comprised of three subdimensions: a feeling that ruralites are underrepresented in decision-making (“Representation”) and that their way of life is disrespected (“Way of Life”) – both symbolic concerns – and a more materialistic concern that rural areas receive less resources (“Resources”). However, it is unclear whether these different aspects of rural consciousness predict expected political preferences nationally, or whether they uniquely explain these preferences when evaluated alongside similar symbolic concepts like rural identity and moral traditionalism. We expect symbolic concerns (especially Way of Life) to particularly predict rural support for Donald Trump, Republican partisanship, and conservative ideology. Using a novel survey measure developed and tested across three original survey data sets, we find that only the symbolic subdimensions of rural consciousness positively and significantly correlate with Trump support, while the material subdimension either negatively correlates with Trump support or is not statistically significant. A similar tendency occurs when predicting symbolic ideology, except when controlling for moral traditionalism. Rural consciousness and its subdimensions do not significantly predict partisanship. These relationships hold for all respondents and for rural-only respondents. We conclude that rural consciousness may matter politically along symbolic dimensions, rather than materialistic grievances, for recent anti-establishment political support as opposed to standard left-right measures. We recommend that survey analyses of rural consciousness should separately analyze symbolic and materialistic aspects. Future studies should further investigate traditionalism vis-a-vis rural consciousness and explore non-rural people high in rural consciousness.

Moving towards critical democracy: democratic spaces in the Portuguese early years classroom

ABSTRACT In societies where authoritarian and populist perspectives are on the rise, a focus on the concept of democracy within education can provide a meaningful space to reflect critically on, and disrupt, the status quo. In post-dictatorship Portugal, democracy has become a central symbolic concept within education policy and, in particular, Early Childhood Education (ECE) policy emphasises the importance of democratic citizenship within children’s personal and social development. Through a lens of critical pedagogy, we examine the diverse enactments of democracy at the classroom level within ECE settings in Portugal. By analysing interviews with twenty early years educators in three kindergartens, we identified ten concepts of democratic educational practice. Through observation of their classrooms, we explored divergent applications of these concepts in practice which embodied three distinct pedagogical approaches, which we termed instructive, responsive, and synergetic. These respectively enacted three styles of classroom democracy, which we described as procedural, interactive and critical democracy. We found that “critical democracy” was most evident where collaborative democratic spaces were created by educators who emphasised and enacted the values of listening, critical thinking, freedom, and respect.

EVOLUTION OF STRUCTURAL CONCEPTUAL SIGNS OF THE CROWN IN THE XX–XXI CENTURIES

The purpose of the article is to describe the conceptual signs of the crown borrowed concept of the XX–XXI centuries period.
 Objectives of the article: 1. Determine the list of conceptual signs of the crown concept in a time period; 2. To correlate the motivating signs and conceptual signs of the period XVII–XIX of this concept with the highlighted conceptual ones of the new period.
 The relevance of the work lies in understanding the role of borrowed concepts that have entered Russian linguoculture at different stages of language development.
 The research material. Eleven explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language of the period of the XX–XXI centuries became the material of the research.
 The main research methods include descriptive, conceptual, interpretive, component analysis of dictionary definitions.
 Analysis of dictionary entries of the XX–XXI period centuries made it possible to identify 55 conceptual signs of the crown concept: ‘theotokos’, ‘crown’, ‘wreath’, ‘upper part / surface’, ‘sovereign person’, ‘power’, ‘outer part of the atmosphere of a celestial body (Sun / Earth)’, ‘outer part of a cluster of low stellar density’, ‘higher clergy’, ‘head’, ‘(newest) state / country’, ‘state’, ‘sovereign / empress: reigning persons’, ‘dignity (county, baronial, princely, noble)’, ‘precious’, ‘women’s headband’, ‘title (world champion)’, ‘sign’, ‘for merit’, ‘toothed hoop / tiara / hat’, ‘image’, ‘imperial’, ‘(state) treasury’, ‘rim (arched at the crown)’, ‘designation’, ‘of gold’, ‘of metal’, ‘of silver’, ‘royal’, ‘kingdom’, ‘edge’, ‘crown’, ‘monarch’, ‘monarchical / royal’, ‘on coats of arms / orders’, ‘award’, ‘worn on top’, ‘(visible light) halo (around the sun during an eclipse)’, ‘with precious stones’, ‘with carving’, ‘victory (in sport)’, ‘ruler’, ‘government’, ‘object’, ‘affiliation’, ‘regalia’, ‘symbol’, ‘constellation (Northern crown and Southern crown)’, ‘inflorescence in the form of a crown’, ‘dress’, ‘pattern’, ‘decoration’, ‘royal’, ‘kingdom’, ‘ceremony / wedding to the kingdom’. All motivating signs have passed into the category of conceptual ones, i.e. retained their relevance during the XX–XXI centuries. The conceptual signs of the crown symbolic concept of the XX–XXI centuries period are combined into 13 blocks: 1. Headdress (6 signs); 2. Dignity / title (12 signs); 3. Substance of manufacture (3 signs); 4. Form (4 signs); 5. State (7 signs); 6. Ornament (1 sign); 7. Value (1 sign); 8. Ruler (7 signs); 9. Award (2 signs); 10. Decoration (4 signs); 11. Successor of the Great Mother Goddess (1 sign); 12. Plant (2 signs); 13. Astronomical phenomenon (4 signs).

Singular Green operators in the edge algebra formalism

We give a new description of the class of singular Green operators introduced by Grubb in the study of parameter-dependent boundary value problems, employing the concept of operator-valued symbols introduced by Schulze in the framework of pseudodifferential operators on manifolds with edges.

Лингвоцентричная поэзия в США и в России: траектории взаимодействия

To date, it becomes obvious that “language writing” is one of the largest trends in American literature and poetic thought of the last decades, and among the avant-garde trends, it is probably the most significant, extensive and innovative. American literature has spawned several significant schools and communities over the 20th century, from Imagists and beatniks to the San Francisco Renaissance and the New York school. Language poetry in this row, on the one hand, is an equally powerful literary movement (in the number of authors, published books, magazines, etc.), but on the other hand it is marked not so much by collectively shared aesthetic principles (as in the case of objectivists or Black Mountain poets), as by the general ideology of poetic work with language as a social institution and an aesthetic medium. The paper analyzes the points of divergencies and convergencies in American and Russian “language-centered writing.” The linguistic concepts of Russian Futurism (“the word as such,” “language breeding,” etc.) and Russian Symbolism (A. Bely’s “poetry of language”) have made their way — through the theory of Russian Formalism — to the theories of American language poets of the 1970s. The study looks more closely into how this cultural transfer exactly happened. Apart from that, this study juxtaposes the language-related concepts in the theory and practice of Russian Conceptualists and Metarealists, on the one hand, and the conceptual writing of American language poetry. These literary movements, as this paper claims, are part of the general linguistic turn which manifested itself in poetic theory and experiment in several phases over the 20th century.

Camera-Based Light Emitter Localization Using Correlation of Optical Pilot Sequences

Visual identification of objects using cameras requires precise detection, localization, and recognition of the objects in the field-of-view. The visual identification problem is very challenging when the objects look identical and features between distinct objects are indistinguishable, even with state-of-the-art computer vision techniques. The problem becomes significantly more challenging when the objects themselves do not carry rich geometric and photometric features, for example, in visual identification and tracking of light emitting diodes (LED) for visible light communication (VLC) applications. In this paper, we present a camera based visual identification solution where objects or regions of interest are tagged with an actively transmitting LED. Motivated by the concept of pilot symbols, typically used for synchronization and channel estimation in radio communication systems, the LED actively transmits unique pilot symbols which are detected by the camera across a series of image frames using our proposed spatio-temporal correlation based algorithm. We setup the visual identification as a problem of localization of the LED on the camera image, which involves identifying the (<i>pixels</i>) and the <i>unique ID</i> corresponding to the LED. In this paper, we present the algorithm and trace-based evaluation of the identification accuracy under real-world conditions including indoor, outdoor, static and mobile scenarios. In addition to micro-benchmarking the localization accuracy of our technique across different parameter configurations, we show that our technique outperforms comparative techniques, including, color based detection, support-vector machine based (SVM) machine learning, and you only look once (YOLO), which is a state-of-the-art convolutional neural network (CNN) deep learning based object identification tool.