Representation (systemics)

About: Representation (systemics) is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 33821 publications have been published within this topic receiving 475461 citations.

Policing Women Police : Uniform Patrol, Promotion and Representation in the CID

Abstract: Using data from a survey conducted within a northern constabulary, women officers' experience of police employment is discussed. It is argued that it is necessary to take into account both wider structural, engendered inequalities and occupational cultural processes to explain differences between men and -women officers' experience of employment. Evidence of women officers' apparent acceptance and reinforcement of views associated with the police occupational culture is presented. These views were not directly constrained by the ascendancy of men's definitions of police employment. It is also suggested, however, that men's views of the wider role of women, as parent, for example, constrained and engendered the ways in which women experienced police employment.

A procedural semantics for semantic networks

Abstract: In this chapter, we describe an approach to the representation of knowledge that formalizes traditional semantic network concepts within a procedural framework. The basic entities of the representation are classes and (binary) relations, and their semantics are provided by a small set of programs. Two organizational principles are offered by the representation: the IS-A and PART-OF hierarchies, which allow the specification of generalization and whole-part relationships, respectively. The concept of a metaclass is also introduced (i.e., a class of classes), and it is shown how it can be used to explain certain features of the representation within itself. Properties of classes are then classified as structural or assertional and it is demonstrated that each type must have different inheritance rules, which can be expressed quite simply in the representation. Finally, a representation for programs is proposed in terms of the IS-A and PART-OF hierarchies. The benefits of such an organization of programs and the relationship between the representation and others such as KRL and FRL are also discussed.

Representation and Behavior

Abstract: Representation is a fundamental concept within cognitive science. Most often, representations are interpreted as mental representations, theoretical entities that are the bearers of meaning and the source of intentionality. This approach views representation as the internal reflection of external circumstances -- that is, as the end station of sensory processes that translate the environmental state of affairs into a set of mental representations. Fred Keijzer stresses, however, that representations are also the starting point for a set of processes that lead back to the external environment. They are used as theoretical components within an explanation of a person's outwardly visible behavior. In this book Keijzer investigates the usefulness of representation for behavioral explanation, irrespective of mental issues. Viewing representation solely in terms of its contribution to explaining behavior allows him to build a serious case for a nonrepresentational approach and to evaluate representation's role in cognitive science. Keijzer provides a reconstruction of cognitive science's implicit representational explanation of behavior, which he calls Agent Theory (AT). AT is the use of mind as a subpersonal mechanism of behavior. He proposes an alternative to AT called Behavioral Systems Theory (BST), which explains behavior as the result of interactions between an organism and its environment. Keijzer compares BST to related work in the biology of cognition, in the building of animal-like robots, and in dynamical systems theory. Most important, he extends BST to the difficult issue of anticipatory behavior through an analogy between behavior and morphogenesis, the process by which a multicellular body develops.