THE MENTAL REPRESENTATION OF THE CONCEPT OF VIOLENCE

Abstract

With the introduction of cognitive science to all the spheres of human activity, new approaches and methods for knowledge acquisition, storage in memory, and classification have been offered by cognitive scientists. Cognitive science focuses literally on the human mind and all the undergoing procedures inside it. Due to the cognitive approach, a human with all his properties was put at the center of various scientific disciplines. Such disciplines as philosophy, psychology, biology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and robotics came together to discover the most complex and mystic phenomenon called the human mind. Modeling the knowledge representation in the mind is an essential part of understanding how it works. Before the introduction of cognitive science, the ideas of representation were very abstract and theoretical. Cognitive science came to offer various practical models for knowledge representation and mental processes. Since cognitive scientists compare the human brain with a computer, different computations such as data structuring and algorithms are used to describe the processing of information in the human mind. One of them is connectionism which describes knowledge representation with the help of different connections between units that stand for concepts, objects, properties, etc. Connectionism developed to prove once more that the human mind has that exceptional ability to think relationally and make connections or associations between different concepts.  In our research, we have tried to model the concept of “violence” according to the connectionist view of computation. The concept of violence has been chosen because of its complex character and the need for a thorough examination. The results of our research can help to finally model the concept of violence as it is represented in certain authors’ minds and finds its reflection in their writings. Finding out a plausible model for concept representation will help improve learning and comprehension skills for people, and will contribute to expanding the comprehension, acquisition, memorization, and usage of the concept. It can also give a lot of food for thought to Artificial Intelligence.    

           Keywords: cognitive science, mental representation, violence, semantic network, connectionism, hierarchy.