Concepts, Frames and Cascades in Semantics, Cognition and Ontology

A Functional Contextual Account of Background Knowledge in Categorization: Implications for Artificial General Intelligence and Cognitive Accounts of General Knowledge

“…The related field of semantics refers to the study of cognitive structures in the brain from a variety of perspectives including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy, and AI ( Löbner et al, 2021 ). There are several branches in semantics.…”

“…Formal semantics is particularly relevant to the study of background knowledge in categorization, and can offer some useful perspectives. For example, it does not focus directly on cognition, and instead it focuses on natural language, such as the logical relations within sentence structures (e.g., equivalence) which give meaning to the language being expressed ( Löbner et al, 2021 ). As such, one very important observation made in some seminal work of the formal semantics domain ( Montague, 1970 ; Lewis, 1976 ) is that meaning embedded in some linguistic content is context dependent.…”

“…Influenced from this early work, most semantic theories now adopt some form of pluralism about linguistic content and its attributed meaning based on this context-dependency ( Potts, 2004 ; Zimmermann, 2012 ; Ciardelli and Roelofsen, 2017 ). Context here can relate to the objective and subjective meaning of a given linguistic sentence, epistemic content, intentional content, etc., in order to assign truth-values to linguistic utterances ( Löbner et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Semantic memory can be regarded as a category of long-term memory which involves the recollection of ideas, concepts, and facts commonly regarded as general knowledge ( Zesch et al, 2008 ; Paradis, 2012 ; Russo et al, 2021 ). However, the focus within semantics has primarily been on natural language, such as the logical relations within sentence structures which give meaning to the language being expressed ( Löbner et al, 2021 ) (however there is modest overlap – see the section on “The limited success of semantics” for a more in depth overview). Crucially, background knowledge in categorization, does not specifically and primarily explore logical relations within linguistics (as semantics does), but instead, focuses primarily on the category structure developed because of prior learning which helps form some general knowledge about some concept, and facilitates some category decision in the present moment.…”

Technical frames used for the online reporting of lesbian killings in South Africa

“…The secondary purpose of this study is to conceptualise 'queercide' as the deliberate killing of LGBTIQ+ people, which includes the murder of lesbians, to aid future research in this field, as it is important to name a phenomenon that is on the increase (Balani, 2018;Mabuza, 2021) to identify, describe, organise, and tame it. Although there is no clear intersection of technical frames and queercide in terms of how identifying frames is key to defining 'queercide' , according to Löbner et al (2021), frames such as "Length of an online article" or the "Share" or "Comments" function included in online reports, can have a strong impact on the exploration of new knowledge representations in linguistics and has utility in creating concepts, for example, 'queercide' as a neologism. This idea is further supported by Edwards et al (2022), who also state that frames used in the philosophical perspective of functional contextualism can result in the emergence of new concepts, such as 'queercide' , from contextual cues presented in background knowledge.…”