Given the increasing influence of religious fundamentalism on politics (e.g. the Christian right in the United States or the Muslim fundamentalism associated with Al Qaeda), the question of how we can conceive of law and order, or society itself, without employing repressive ideals becomes more urgent. We need a way of conceptualizing the origin and process of idealization (which is necessary f...

The structuralist heritage in linguistics continues to obscure the essential properties of natural language as an empirical phenomenon. It is argued that the new framework of autopoiesis possesses a greater explanatory power, as it assumes the connotational nature of language. The key notions of representation, sign and signification, interpretation, intentionality and communication, and recipr...

In this article we argue that the automatic generation of dynamic multimedia presentation requires both low-level collections of objective measurements for media units representing prototypical style elements, and high-level conceptual descriptions supporting contextual and presentational requirements. Only the combination of both facilitates the retrieval of adequate material and its user-cent...

This article gives an overview of the psychiatric approach to psychotic hallucinations and discusses Lacan’s conceptual break from this paradigm. Rejecting the traditional focus on the unreality of hallucinatory perceptions, Lacan examines the effects that psychotic hallucinations have on the person who experiences them. He develops an alternative theoretical framework which indicates that psyc...

We seek to aid investigators in the production of high-quality graphics that do their investigations justice by providing the reader with optimum access to the relevant aspects of the data. The depiction of by-subject data, the signification of pairing when present, and the use of symbolic dimensionality (graphing different symbols to identify relevant subgroups) and small multiples (the presen...

On peut montrer que les prépositions et flexions finales, quand elles sont représentées au moyen d'un graphe sémantique, sont de même nature sémantique que d'autres signes linguistiques. Leur fonction est soit syntaxique soit sémantique. Dans ce dernier cas, elles correspondent à des noeuds dans le graphe et en grande majorité prennent deux actants, rarement un ou trois. Elle peuvent aussi en m...

A crucial problem of knowledge representation is that it has to be formal and informal at the same time. Here, ‘formal’ refers to knowledge as a mathematical concept which is thought, and ‘informal’ to knowledge as something which is experienced, i.e. a ‘real’ world phenomenon. This paper is an attempt to reconcile these potentially contradictory conditions. Our aim is to show that a cognitivel...

DICTIONARY. 1. A book dealing with the individual words of a language (or certain specified classes of them), so as to set forth their orthography, pronunciation, signification, and use, their synonyms, derivation, and history, or at least some of these facts; for convenience of reference, the words are arranged in some order, now, in most languages, alphabetical; and in larger dictionaries the...

This paper offers an approach to “social bookmarking”: four French websites are described here, with regards to their cultural signification. “Bookmarking” can be considered a traditional intellectual and cultural activity: this symbolic level must be taken into consideration to understand how people act on the Internet, and how they attach value and meaning to their actions. Individual partici...

The dynamics of recruitment within a two political party system that influence individuals through party member contact and television advertising are explored via a mathematical contagion model that includes a population of committed party members and a population of “undecided” or “susceptible” individuals. The contagion model supports multiple outcomes including two-party coexistence. In ord...