A Ceramic Compositional Interpretation of Incense-Burner Trade in the Palenque Area, Mexico

1982 ◽  
pp. 411-440 ◽  
Author(s):  
RONALD L. BISHOP ◽  
ROBERT L. RANDS ◽  
GARMAN HARBOTTLE
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
Incense Burner

The Metaphysics of Representation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Robert G. Williams
Keyword(s):  
Representational Content ◽  
Physical World ◽  
Degrees Of Belief ◽  
Public Language ◽  
Language And Thought ◽  
Final Layer ◽  
The World ◽  
Interactive Relationship ◽  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
The One

What is representation? How do the more primitive aspects of our world come together to generate it? How do different kinds of representation relate to one another? This book identifies the metaphysical foundations for representational facts. The story told is in three parts. The most primitive layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of sensation/perception and intention/action, which are the two most basic modes in which an individual and the world interact. It is argued that we can understand how this kind of representation can exist in a fundamentally physical world so long as we have an independent, illuminating grip on functions and causation. The second layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of (degrees of) belief and desire, whose representational content goes far beyond the immediate perceptable and manipulable environment. It is argued that the correct belief/desire interpretation of an agent is the one which makes their action-guiding states, given their perceptual evidence, most rational. The final layer of representation is the ‘aboutness’ of words and sentences, human artefacts with representational content. It is argued that one can give an illuminating account of the conditions under which a compositional interpretation of a public language like English is correct by appeal to patterns emerging from the attitudes conventionally expressed by sentences. The three-layer metaphysics of representation resolves long-standing underdetermination puzzles, predicts and explains patterns in the way that concepts denote, and articulates a delicate interactive relationship between the foundations of language and thought.

Peasants, Democracy and Anthropology

2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Feuchtwang
Keyword(s):  
Religious Tradition ◽  
Self Organization ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Central State ◽  
Republic Of China ◽  
Democratic Tradition ◽  
The Government ◽  
Concepts Of Democracy ◽  
Elected Representatives ◽  
Incense Burner

The gulf between intellectuals and peasants, in which the latter are perceived to be a drag on the modernization led by the former, is usually selfaggrandizement. When, as in China, peasants have the ambivalent status of being the base of revolution and the drag on political reform in the direction of democracy, anthropologists are in a good position to challenge the intellectuals’ pretensions. But we don’t. This article asks why, points out the ways in which we can, and then refutes the notion that Chinese peasants have no democratic tradition with an example. It is an example of self-organization around an incense burner, a religious tradition of territorial association. I put it to the test of a number of concepts of democracy, most of which it passes. But its leaders are chosen by divine selection, raising the question whether this is a form of benign charisma rather than standard electoral democracy. The institution persists into the present of the People’s Republic of China and the government of Taiwan, where it functions as a public good, a test of local loyalty, and a moral basis by which the conduct of state officials and elected representatives are judged. It is a civil institution, but now the issue is whether it will last or be soaked up by central state cultural policies. Whatever the answer, the example also throws down a challenge to anthropologists in other regions to explore ‘peasant’ self-organization and cultural resources for democracy and civil judgement.

scholarly journals On Learning Interpreted Languages with Recurrent Models

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Denis Paperno
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Data Processing ◽  
Syntactic Structure ◽  
Neural Nets ◽  
Training Data ◽  
Sequential Data ◽  
Extensive Training ◽  
Formal Syntax ◽  
Compositional Interpretation

Abstract Can recurrent neural nets, inspired by human sequential data processing, learn to understand language? We construct simplified datasets reflecting core properties of natural language as modeled in formal syntax and semantics: recursive syntactic structure and compositionality. We find LSTM and GRU networks to generalise to compositional interpretation well, but only in the most favorable learning settings, with a well-paced curriculum, extensive training data, and left-to-right (but not right-to-left) composition.

scholarly journals A Compositional Interpretation of Biomedical Event Factuality

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Halil Kilicoglu ◽  
Graciela Rosemblat ◽  
Michael Cairelli ◽  
Thomas Rindflesch
Keyword(s):  
Compositional Interpretation ◽  
Event Factuality

scholarly journals Incense burners and altar dishes of the Sargatka Culture

2021 ◽  
pp. 66-82
Author(s):  
V.A. Zakh
Keyword(s):  
Western Siberia ◽  
Forest Steppe ◽  
Large Area ◽  
Flat Bottom ◽  
Steppe Region ◽  
Special Means ◽  
Inner Surface ◽  
Air Intake ◽  
Main Item ◽  
Incense Burner

The paper concerns the so-called incense burners and small altar dishes found in the burial complexes of the Sargatka Culture in the forest-steppe region of the Western Siberia, as well as in the burials of the Cis-Urals nomads of the 4th–2nd c. BC, which were used for burning and incensing of various substances. Compilation of materials allows forming a clearer view on the possible function of these objects, which is debatable amongst the researchers. The incense burners are small cylindrical stone or pottery vessels with considerable amount of tal-cum in the pottery clay. The altar dishes represent round, oval or subrectangular objects made of stone and clay with or without legs. The cylinder-shaped incense burners and altar dishes are, apparently, similar in function to each other. The absence of a high rim on the latter is compensated by a large area of the dish itself. The volume of the incensed substance would be nearly the same in both types of the burners, while sustaining burning on the altar-dishes would not require special means, such as wall penetrations alike those in the cylindrical incense burners. Few preserved burials contain incense burners alongside other, in our opinion related, objects — flat-bottom vessels, sometimes with stone bases, which allows econstruction of the implement in its assembled form and suggestion of a method of its application. The main item was an incense burner — a container of a cylindrical or conical shape, usually with through-holes in the wall to allow air intake inside the ware, sometimes having nip-ple-shaped protrusions on the inner surface of the bottom increasing the surface area of contact with the incense substance. The incense burner would have been placed in a flat-bottom jar filled with smoldering embers and installed on a fire-resistant base. The studied objects and their handling resemble the ceremonial described by Herodotus as a ritual purification amongst the Scythians. However, in our opinion, it cannot be ruled out that they could have been used in the rituals involving hallucinogenic substances, performed with the aim of prophesizing, divination, to communicate with gods and spirits, which were practised by people of the Sarmatian and Sargatian (at least in the western part of the area) Cultures and administered, most likely, by special, elected persons. When those persons die, the implements would be placed into their burials as a grave goods.

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