Evolution of Symbolisation: Signposts to a Bridge between Connectionist and Symbolic Systems

Numerical symbols as explanations of human perceptual experience

10.31234/osf.io/d4jca ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

David Barner

Keyword(s):

Perceptual Experience ◽

Number Words ◽

The World ◽

Symbolic Systems ◽

Perceptual Systems

Why did humans develop precise systems for measuring experience, like numbers, clocks, andcalendars? I argue that precise representational systems were constructed by earlier generationsof humans because they recognized that their noisy perceptual systems were not capturingdistinctions that existed in the world. Abstract symbolic systems did not arise from perceptualrepresentations, but instead were constructed to describe and explain perceptual experience. Byanalogy, I argue that when children learn number words, they do not rely on noisy perceptualsystems, but instead acquire these words as units in a broader system of procedures, whosemeanings are ultimately defined by logical relations to one another, not perception.

Download Full-text

Beyond the Fife and Drum: Northern Protestant Working Class Cultures

Public Voices ◽

10.22140/pv.204 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 73

Author(s):

Paul Burgess

Keyword(s):

Northern Ireland ◽

Working Class ◽

World Order ◽

Cultural Traditions ◽

One Dimensional ◽

Dimensional Image ◽

The Troubles ◽

Meaning Systems ◽

The World ◽

Symbolic Systems

The author contends that throughout the duration of the present conflict in NorthernIreland, the world has been repeatedly given a one-dimensional image of this culture depicting it as mainly a product of ethnicity and also a reflection of class sentiment and lived experience.As drummer and songwriter of Ruefrex, a musical band internationally renowned for its songs about the Troubles conflict in Northern Ireland, Burgess discusses the need to express Protestant cultural traditions and identity through words and music. Citing Weber’s argument that individuals need to understand the world and their environment and that this understanding is influenced by perceptions of world order and attitudes and interpretations of symbolic systems or structures, the author argues that losing the importance of symbolic structures in relation to actual events will result in failure to understand why communities embrace meaning systems that are centrally informed by symbol and ritual. In his mind, rather than seeking to promote an understanding of Protestant or Catholic reality, it is important to speculate how the practice of difference might be used in developing any kind of reality of co-operation and co-ordination

Download Full-text

Algebra

10.1093/oso/9780198809982.003.0003 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Andrea Henderson

Keyword(s):

Euclidean Geometry ◽

Symbolic Logic ◽

Associative Networks ◽

Aristotelian Logic ◽

Modern Algebra ◽

Symbolic Systems ◽

The Difference ◽

Founding Principle ◽

Conventional Symbol

The difference between the transcendent Coleridgean symbol and the unreliable conventional symbol was of explicit concern in Victorian mathematics, where the former was aligned with Euclidean geometry and the latter with algebra. Rather than trying to bridge this divide, practitioners of modern algebra and the pioneers of symbolic logic made it the founding principle of their work. Regarding the content of claims as a matter of “indifference,” they concerned themselves solely with the formal interrelations of the symbolic systems devised to represent those claims. In its celebration of artificial algorithmic structures, symbolic logician Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno dramatizes the power of this new formalist ideal not only to revitalize the moribund field of Aristotelian logic but also to redeem symbolism itself, conceived by Carroll and his mathematical, philosophical, and symbolist contemporaries as a set of harmonious associative networks rather than singular organic correspondences.

Download Full-text