How parts make up wholes
نویسندگان
چکیده
We propose a schema that characterizes how parts constitute wholes at diverse levels of organization, ranging from the atomic to the biological to the social. This schema of tags, organizers, attachers, and communicators provides a unified understanding of the structure, function, and dynamics of organization in physics, biology, and the cognitive and social sciences. We use this schema to identify and describe structures and processes at many levels of organization, and discuss its relevance for understanding the nature of constitution and emergence, especially the relation between individual humans and the social groups they constitute.
منابع مشابه
Statistical learning of parts and wholes: A neural network approach.
Statistical learning is often considered to be a means of discovering the units of perception, such as words and objects, and representing them as explicit "chunks." However, entities are not undifferentiated wholes but often contain parts that contribute systematically to their meanings. Studies of incidental auditory or visual statistical learning suggest that, as participants learn about who...
متن کاملThe Role of Begriffsschrift in the Striving for Truth
My aim is to understand the practice of mathematics in a way that sheds light on the fact that it is at once a priori and capable of extending our knowledge. The account that is sketched draws first on the idea, derived from Kant, that a calculation or demonstration can yield new knowledge in virtue of the fact that the system of signs it employs involves primitive parts (e.g., the ten digits o...
متن کاملSoft Wholes in the Management Practice
Decomposition is a way to reduce complexity. After all a problem split up into manageable parts will be easier to understand than a complex whole problem. It is however a tricky, sometimes even impossible task to reconstitute these parts back to the whole. Within Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) we are advised to think in ‘wholes’. Within the (broader) systems approach the idea of ‘wholes’ relate...
متن کاملPerceptual wholes can reduce the conscious accessibility of their parts.
Humans can rapidly extract object and category information from an image despite surprising limitations in detecting changes to the individual parts of that image. In this article we provide evidence that the construction of a perceptual whole, or Gestalt, reduces awareness of changes to the parts of this object. This result suggests that the rapid extraction of a perceptual Gestalt, and the in...
متن کاملBrain-decoding fMRI reveals how wholes relate to the sum of parts.
The human brain performs many nonlinear operations in order to extract relevant information from local inputs. How can we observe and quantify these effects within and across large patches of cortex? In this paper, we discuss the application of multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to address this issue. Specifically, we show how MVPA (i) allows to ...
متن کامل