General Theory Of Representation Research Articles

Recognize your audience: Stakeholders' coaptation work to improve political representation in innovation programs

AbstractManagers often exclude some stakeholders from innovation programs, believing they would be “dangerous” for the purpose and pace of new product/service development. The exclusion of “dangerous” stakeholders, however, has negative implications on innovation, as it prevents access to key knowledge and connections. Our study investigates how “dangerous” stakeholders can overturn their exclusion, and gain key decision‐making responsibilities. Theoretically, we import the “general theory of political representation” from Rehfeld (2006) to derive insight into agency of five actors: selection agents, strategic constellation and representatives (on the side of innovators), represented and “audience” (on the side of stakeholders). Empirically, we undertake a 4‐year longitudinal case study of a digital innovation program in an English public hospital. Our study highlighted that only an elite “audience” of clinical leads enacted a strategy of “coaptation work” to overturn their exclusion from the innovation program, and ascend to a role of selection agents. Through “coaptation work,” the clinical leads used their privileged access to clinical resources to first create fractures within the community of innovators, and then embed clinical stakeholders in key decision‐making roles to heal them. Our results challenge established “hub‐and‐spoke” interpretations of innovation programs, and emphasize the importance of political representation work to understand how stakeholders exert their influence.

Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White on the Politics of Historical Representation

AbstractWe do not learn from the past nor from possible analogies between the past and the present. Rather we learn from representations of the past and the insights they offer, for those insights allow us to adopt the political and moral values that we need to plan a future course of action. It follows, so Frank Ankersmit argues, that aesthetics in its sense as a general theory of representation precedes ethics. This essay is concerned with this bold and important thesis. It will do so in the context of the politics of historical representation and the fact–value and subjectivity–objectivity distinctions. The subject was also dear to the heart of Ankersmit’s late American colleague Hayden White. Ankersmit is concerned with how historical representations support a future course of action. White, by contrast, was (also) concerned with how historical representations limit a future course of action since they cannot serve as a basis for utopian politics.

“Theorizing in a Void”

This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discern a black feminist poetics that anticipates recent feminist materialism’s attentiveness to the mutually constitutive effects of discursivity and materiality. Said poetics approaches a shared worry over the problem of referentiality, not in representationalist terms, as recent materialists would suggest, but rather through a poetics attentive to the racializing and sexuating dimensions of an (anti) black sublime that conditions, exceeds, and potentially ruptures the scales of the empirical. Privileging performativity, gesture, resonance, and metaphor over the authority and purported veridicality of Western empirical science, the poetics of black feminism investigated here is instructive for a general theory of representation.

Representation in Context: Constructing Victims’ Claims in the International Criminal Court

Drawing on recent criticisms of victim representation in the International Criminal Court (ICC), I examine the challenges of claim-making in a particular institutional context. I use this case study to make three points about Michael Saward’s general theory of representation. First, I argue that Saward’s general criteria need to be modified in light of an institution’s particular norms, capacities, and directives. Second, I show that retrospective claim-reception is insufficient for guaranteeing that the appropriate constituencies will have the “ultimate say” in claim-reception. Third, I illustrate how the quality of the relationship between the representative and represented can adversely impact the managerial function of representatives. In this way, I show how an institution’s features can importantly condition the representative claim.

ANIMATION CARTOGRAPHY - ONE OF PERSPECTIVE DIRECTIONS IN CARTOGRAPHIC SCIENCE AND PRACTICE IN THE CURRENT CONDITIONS OF MAPPING THE DYNAMICS PROCESSES AND EFFECTS

Creation of animated cartographic products – a growing trend in modern domestic and foreign computer mapping. In [Lissitzky, Khoroshilov Kolesnikov, 2014], the authors explained this by saying that «... the abundance and availability of software tools, a wide practice of animation effects in the representation of space in a variety of computer games led to spontaneous activation of the general users to create a variety of map images combination with various animation elements». The estimation of the development of animation cartography based on materials of international cartographic conferences of the International Cartographic Association and the International Congress «Interexpo GEO-Siberia» for the period from 2006 to 2015. The results of calculation of the distribution of papers in international conferences and congresses are presented in the tables illustrated figures and conclusions. The article formulated definitions «animation mapping» and «two-dimensional animation map». Animation in a two-dimensional mapping provide an opportunity to take a fresh look at the general theory of cartographic representation and allows new interpretation of the three main components of semiotic principles.

Massively parallel neural circuits for stereoscopic color vision: Encoding, decoding and identification

Past work demonstrated how monochromatic visual stimuli could be faithfully encoded and decoded under Nyquist-type rate conditions. Color visual stimuli were then traditionally encoded and decoded in multiple separate monochromatic channels. The brain, however, appears to mix information about color channels at the earliest stages of the visual system, including the retina itself. If information about color is mixed and encoded by a common pool of neurons, how can colors be demixed and perceived?We present Color Video Time Encoding Machines (Color Video TEMs) for encoding color visual stimuli that take into account a variety of color representations within a single neural circuit. We then derive a Color Video Time Decoding Machine (Color Video TDM) algorithm for color demixing and reconstruction of color visual scenes from spikes produced by a population of visual neurons. In addition, we formulate Color Video Channel Identification Machines (Color Video CIMs) for functionally identifying color visual processing performed by a spiking neural circuit.Furthermore, we derive a duality between TDMs and CIMs that unifies the two and leads to a general theory of neural information representation for stereoscopic color vision. We provide examples demonstrating that a massively parallel color visual neural circuit can be first identified with arbitrary precision and its spike trains can be subsequently used to reconstruct the encoded stimuli. We argue that evaluation of the functional identification methodology can be effectively and intuitively performed in the stimulus space. In this space, a signal reconstructed from spike trains generated by the identified neural circuit can be compared to the original stimulus.

Lyric Poem as Representation: From Plato to the New Criticism

This essay treats the understanding of poetry, especially lyric poetry, as representation. The theme is developed partly as a historical survey, from the Classical Age to Romanticism and to Modernism, and through the history of aesthetics in Western terms. It offers critical scrutiny with the intention to explore a more justifiable theory of representation. Hopefully it may help to understand lyric poetry in historical contexts from Plato and Aristotle’s imitation theories, to Beardsley’s theory of illocutionary action and New Criticism. It is the image in lyric poetry that accounts for human action’s being represented. Poetic beauty is an illusionary reality, as that in painting, and the role of image has been widely appreciated in producing this beauty as verbal icon. Finally, I mention the connection between Western theorizing of poetry as representation and Chinese poetry and poetics in general. We see the possibility that the importance of lyric poetry as representation can encourage comparative literature and world literature, and a general theory of representation. These might be informative in Chinese literary studies, from a theoretical point of view.

Representation, philosophical issues about.

The concept of representation plays a central role in philosophical and scientific theorizing about the mind, and according to the representational theory of mind (RTM), a wide variety of cognitive and perceptual capacities are best explained in terms of the occurrence and processing of mental representations. The concept of representation remains elusive, however, and there is no widespread agreement among philosophers or cognitive scientists over what it is for one thing to represent another. One reason for the lack of consensus is that philosophers and scientists deploy the concept in many different ways for many different purposes. Another reason for the lack of consensus is that, while it is generally agreed that a scientifically useful notion of representation should be informed and constrained by what we know about brains, there is disagreement over what contemporary neuroscience does or does not suggest about the nature of representation. This article discusses some of the key issues involved in developing a general theory of mental representation, in light of these divergent purposes and conflicting views. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Representation Rethought: On Trustees, Delegates, and Gyroscopes in the Study of Political Representation and Democracy

The trustee/delegate problem purportedly expresses how closely a representative's votes in the legislature should correspond to their constituents' preferences. In this article, I argue that the usual formulation of this debate collapses three distinctions—aims, source of judgment, andresponsiveness—and thus obscures the underlying complexity of the phenomenon. Given its tripartite formulation, the collapse of these distinctions into a binary “trustee/delegate” formulation obscures a more complex political landscape with eight—rather than two—ideal types. Furthermore, once unpacked, we can see that the distinctions operate entirely independent of the location of authority, leading to the seemingly paradoxicalinstructedtrustees andindependentdelegates. I also claim that the three distinctions apply to any decision maker, and thus, the attribution of this problem as distinctive of democratic political representation is an important overstatement. The article thus contributes to a more general theory of political representation that can be applied in nonelectoral and nondemocratic contexts increasingly relevant to global politics.

Towards a general theory of geographic representation in GIS

Geographic representation has become more complex through time as researchers have added new concepts, leading to apparently endless proliferation and creating a need for simplification. We show that many of these concepts can be derived from a single foundation that we term the atomic form of geographic information. The familiar concepts of continuous fields and discrete objects can be derived under suitable rules applied to the properties and values of the atomic form. Fields and objects are further integrated through the concept of phase space, and in the form of field objects. A second atomic concept is introduced, termed the geo‐dipole, and shown to provide a foundation for object fields, metamaps, and the association classes of object‐oriented data modelling. Geographic dynamics are synthesized in a three‐dimensional space defined by static or dynamic object shape, the possibility of movement, and the possibility of dynamic internal structure. The atomic form also provides a tentative argument that discrete objects and continuous fields are the only possible bases for geographic representation.

Towards a General Theory of Political Representation

Nondemocratic “representatives” increasingly act on the global stage, as “representatives” of their dictatorships to the United Nations, or when an NGO represents prisoners of war. Standard accounts of political representation depend upon democratic institutions (like elections) and a certain kind of proper activity (like deliberation and constituent accountability) and thus cannot explain how these people are representatives at all. I argue that the standard account of political representation is thus inadequate to explain political representation throughout the globe. I offer a general theory of political representation which explains representation simply by reference to a relevant audience accepting a person as such. When audiences use democratic rules of recognition, the familiar cases arise. When audiences use nondemocratic rules of recognition, nondemocratic cases arise. The result is that political representation, per se, is not a democratic phenomenon at all. The account offers a more parsimoniou...

A Double Content Theory of Artistic Representation

On the face of it, not all artistic meaning and communication can be explained in representational terms. In addition to the subject matter of artworks, which constitutes their normal meaningful representational content, there are various other components of meaning involved in artistic communication. These presumably involve at least expressive, stylistic, mediumrelated, formal, and intentional factors-collectively to be referred to as aspectual factors. Thus there is a concern that a general theory of representation, applying to any signs or symbols whatsoever (such as that of Nelson Goodman), will be unable to capture what is specifically artistic about artworks as such.1 For this reason too, it would seem that artistic meaning outruns any standard view of representational content. To be sure, Kendall Walton is able to explain some aspects of artworks on the basis of a nonstandard concept of representation-where representation is equated with fictionality-that makes integral appeals to interactions of artworks with human imaginative make-believe cognition.2 However, this view has little to say about artistic intentions and expression, and even less to say about the concepts of artistic style, medium, and form. There is another option that deserves to be tried. Instead of settling for irreducibly nonrepresentational meaning factors in artworks, or ignoring or downplaying the role of such factors, one could postulate that artworks involve two rather than just one kind of representational content, and then try to develop an approach in which all aspects of artistic meaning would be explained in terms of appropriate combinations of the two kinds of content. It is this option, a double content theory or approach to artworks, which I shall investigate and argue for in the curre t essay. I shall concentrate on visual artworks, such as paintings or drawings, but the points made will be general enough to potentially apply to other art forms as well.3 There are additional reasons that a double

Africana Slave Religious Thought and the Philosophy of Education

INTRODUCTION In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Richard Rorty argues that Western philosophy as a discipline attempts to be the ground of all claims to knowledge made by science, morality, art or religion. As such, philosophy perceives itself as having a special understanding of the nature of knowledge and mind, making it an epistemologically centered philosophy. In which case, explains Rorty, “its central concern is to be a general theory of representation, a theory which will divide culture up into the areas which represent reality well, those which represent it less well, and those which do not represent it at all.” Philosophy of education also embraces this overemphasis on epistemology, and as such is preoccupied with education as a problem of knowing, which is less of a core concern for Africana thought. This is illustrated by Africana thought’s focus not simply on racist epistemologies or beliefs but on their ontological content. It is with this in mind that Africana people, says Lewis Gordon, are a “black people” and hence are significantly impacted by race and racism. Frantz Fanon, too, implies this focus of Africana thought in his comment: “I came into the world imbued with the will to find meanings in things. My spirit filled with the desire to attain to the source of the world, and then found that I was an object in the midst of other objects.”

The meanings of "meaning" and "meaning": Dimensions of the sciences of mind

The naturalization of intentionality requires explaining the supervenience of the normative upon the descriptive. Proper function theory provides an account of the semantics of natural representations, but not of that of signs that require the observance of norms. I therefore distinguish two senses of "meaning" and two correlative senses of "representation" and explain their relationship to one another. I distinguish between indicative signs and semiotic devices. The former are indicators of the presence of some phenomenon. The latter are rule-governed devices whose content derives from a set of recognized conventions for their use in the context of a system of other such signs. Each of these kinds of signs has its own kind of meaning, and each of these senses of meaning and representation has an important place in cognitive science. The indicative sign is fundamental and grounds the intentionality of semiotic devices. But the theory of indicative signs is insufficient for a general theory of intentionality and representation. Cognitive science must therefore comprise both a biological program aimed at understanding representation in the indicative sense and a social/ecological/linguistic program aimed at understanding the relational phenomena that allow semiotic meaning.

A Representational Reconstruction of Carnap's Quasianalysis

According to general wisdom, quasianalysis belongs to the large family of Carnap's ingenious, but finally failed contributions to epistemology and philosophy of science. In this paper I want to show that this is not the case. Rather, Carnapian quasianalysis is to be considered as a promising theory of a representational constitution of scientific objects. That is to say, I intend to embed Carnap's approach of quasianalytical constitution in the framework of a general theory of meaningful representation (cf. Mundy (1986)).The outline of this paper is as follows: In section 2 I recall the basics of the quasianalytical approach, taking into consideration not only the well-known account in “Der Logische Aufbau der Welt”(Aufbau)but also a rather unknown first version of quasianalysis (“Quasizerlegung”) which Carnap developed in an unpublished manuscript written in 1923. This paper deserves attention not only for philosophicohistorical reasons, rather it contains quite a lot of interesting features of the quasianalytical approach which do not appear in theAufbauaccount.

Foliated semantic networks: Concepts, facts, qualities

This paper suggests a general perception-based theory of representation within the framework of the phenomenology of C. S. Peirce (named by him “phaneroscopy”) by means of the generalization of R. Wille's basic lattice-concepts theory of objects and their attributes. We first summarize Peirce's main categorization of all n-adic relations into three fundamental kinds: Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness (i.e., relations requiring monads, dyads and triads, respectively, in their definitions). His “reduction thesis” reduces all relations of higher adicity into these three kinds. We then use elementary Category Theory to develop “relation-structures” of concepts, relations and higher order relations, based entirely on experienced simple “qualities of feeling”. A relational algebra results which includes semantic nets as relation-structures. In terms of this algebra we use Peirce's “reduction theorem” in order to build a “foliation” of all conceptual/relational-structures by means of levels (“sheets”) algebraically defined. This provides a canonical “normal form” for networks of n-adic relations. This can be done to existing semantic network formalisms to help make sense of phenomenologically confused components. Analogously to Wille's lattice-concepts theory connecting objects and attributes, we define “representation-contexts” connecting two corresponding classes of phenomena formalized in terms of Category Theory by diagrams in a category we call relational structures provided with natural transformations as morphisms. This leads us to a foliated conception of semantic networks with each concept and relation assigned to a particular phenomenological level. Thus a foliated network represents not only a state of things but also the mode of connection of the network with the state of things. One consequence of foliation is that we now have a method for relational subsumption using the generalization-hierarchy of relations. In addition to the insight afforded by this formal analysis, we also obtain a lattice of representation-relations which may be computationally used as an IS-A hierarchy sub-element for the purpose of automatic inference, in all subject-domains involving representation.

Towards a general theory of representation

The models of science are representations of a part of reality. Every science has its own specific rules of constructing models, but there are many common rules that must be followed. These rules are to be part of what may be called a general theory of representation. This paper discusses some general aspects of representation that must be considered before such a general theory can be created. There are five sections: (1) an introduction to the topic of representation in general; (2) an overview of some general types of representation, such as goal-directed and self-organizational representations; (3) a short discussion of representation in some specific disciplines; (4) some formal aspects of representations; and (5) a discussion of epistemological aspects of representation, especially scientific reduction and mental causation.

Sequence influence on the organization of meaningless serial stimuli: economy after all.

This article provides evidence for an extension of structural information theory, a theory which describes perceptual organization formally, into a more general theory of representation that takes the role of organizations obtained earlier into account. In eight experiments, subjects study series of colored dots. Each series contained 6-8 dots of different colors, and viewing time was between 400 ms and 60 s. In several experimental procedures, subjects recalled the series presented. The experiments systematically varied the economy of the organizations of the series as described by structural information theory as well as a number of aspects of the context in which the series were presented, like order of presentation of a series, order between the series, viewing span, viewing time, and recall procedure. Recall was influenced both by the economy as well as by the context. It is shown how the context influences the relative strength of the most economical organization as compared with rival, local organizations. A structured network model is presented that accounts for the influence of both the economy and the context.

On the general theory of meaningful representation

The numerical representations of measurement, geometry and kinematics are here subsumed under a general theory of representation. The standard theories of meaningfulness of representational propositions in these three areas are shown to be special cases of two theories of meaningfulness for arbitrary representational propositions: the theories based on unstructured and on structured representation respectively. The foundations of the standard theories of meaningfulness are critically analyzed and two basic assumptions are isolated which do not seem to have received adequate justification: the assumption that a proposition invariant under the appropriate group is therefore meaningful, and the assumption that representations should be unique up to a transformation of the appropriate group. A general theory of representational meaningfulness is offered, based on a semantic and syntactic analysis of representational propositions. Two neglected features of representational propositions are formalized and made use of: (a) that such propositions are induced by more general propositions defined for other structures than the one being represented, and (b) that the true purpose of representation is the application of the theory of the representing system to the represented system. On the basis of these developments, justifications are offered for the two problematic assumptions made by the existing theories.

Social Environment, Public Opinion, and Judicial Policymaking a Search for Judicial Representation

An important theme in research on judicial policymaking is a search for the role of courts as representative political institutions. The most general way that courts represent the public is through the relationship of patterns of judicial decisions to local public opinion and values. Most previous research provides only indirect evidence that courts represent public opinion. We examine the separate and combined effects of public opinion and social environments on criminal court sentencing as a way of isolating the effect of public opinion and progressing toward a general theory of judicial representation. The article examines patterns of sentencing in all 20 Florida judicial circuits. The findings are that courts do not respond to public opinion but they are sensitive to various social contexts surrounding the courts, particularly urban crime environments and the size of the nonwhite population. High crime rates and large nonwhite populations do stimulate public concern with crime, but public opinion does not relate to sentencing. High crime rates actually reduce sentencing severity. The article concludes that judicial representation does not occur and that it is incorrect for researchers to substitute crime rates for direct measures of public opinion in the mistaken belief that courts will respond to crime rates in the same way the public does.