On nearness measures in fuzzy relational data models

AbstractIt has been widely recognized that the imprecision and incompleteness inherent in real-world data suggest a fuzzy extension for information management systems. Various attempts to enhance these systems by fuzzy extensions can be found in the literature. Varying approaches concerning the fuzzification of the concept of a relation are possible, two of which are referred to in this article as the generalized fuzzy approach and the fuzzy-set relation approach. In these enhanced models, items can no longer be retrieved by merely using equality-check operations between constants; instead, operations based on some kind of nearness measures have to be developed. In fact, these models require such a nearness measure to be established for each domain for the evaluation of queries made upon them. An investigation of proposed nearness measures, often fuzzy equivalences, is conducted. The unnaturalness and impracticality of these measures leads to the development of a new measure: the resemblance relation, which is defined to be a fuzzified version of a tolerance relation. Various aspects of this relation are analyzed and discussed. It is also shown how the resemblance relation can be used to reduce redundancy in fuzzy relational database systems

A concept for resemblance in large scale geometry

In this paper, we introduce the notion of large scale resemblance structure as a new large scale structure by axiomatizing the concept of `being alike in large scale' for a family of subsets of a set. We see that in a particular case, large scale resemblances on a set can induce a nearness on it, and as a consequence, we offer a relatively big class of examples to show that `not every near family is contained in a bunch'. Besides, We show how some large scale properties like asymptotic dimension can be generalized to large scale resemblance spaces

Arthritic Hand-Finger Movement Similarity Measurements: Tolerance Near Set Approach

The problem considered in this paper is how to measure the degree of resemblance between nonarthritic and arthritic hand movements during rehabilitation exercise. The solution to this problem stems from recent work on a tolerance space view of digital images and the introduction of image resemblance measures. The motivation for this work is both to quantify and to visualize differences between hand-finger movements in an effort to provide clinicians and physicians with indications of the efficacy of the prescribed rehabilitation exercise. The more recent introduction of tolerance near sets has led to a useful approach for measuring the similarity of sets of objects and their application to the problem of classifying image sequences extracted from videos showing finger-hand movement during rehabilitation exercise. The approach to measuring the resemblance between hand movement images introduced in this paper is based on an application of the well-known Hausdorff distance measure and a tolerance nearness measure. The contribution of this paper is an approach to measuring as well as visualizing the degree of separation between images in arthritic and nonarthritic hand-finger motion videos captured during rehabilitation exercise

Mimesis and Metaphor

"Representation", "imitation" and "mirroring" have proved to be insufficient translations of the concept of mimesis. Walter Benjamin's notion of "mimetic potential" offers a different view on the qualities of mimesis. Benjamin stresses the importance of language and its mediality to mimesis; for him language is the "höchste Stufe des mimetischen Verhaltens und das vollkommenste Archiv der unsinnlichen Ähnlichkeit" (Benjamin 1991, Bd. II/1, 213) He considers mimesis on the level of linguistic mediality. In the following I will try to outline the mimetic potential of metaphors in literary texts which focus on their linguistic mediality. As Paul Ricoeur suggests, "the possibility that metaphorical discourse says something about reality collides with the apparent constitution of poetic discourse, which seems to be essentially non-referential and centred on itself. To this non-referential conception of poetic discourse I oppose the idea that the suspension of literal reference is the condition for the release of a power of second-degree reference which is properly poetic reference. Thus, to use an expression borrowed from Jakobson, one must not speak only of split sense but of 'split reference' as well." (Ricoeur 1977, 6

Re-Imagining Text — Re-Imagining Hermeneutics

With the advent of the digital age and new mediums of communication, it is becoming increasingly important for those interested in the interpretation of religious text to look beyond traditional ideas of text and textuality to find the sacred in unlikely places. Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenological reorientation of classical hermeneutics from romanticized notions of authorial intent and psychological divinations to a serious engagement with the “science of the text” is a hermeneutical tool that opens up an important dialogue between the interpreter, the world of the text, and the contemporary world in front of the text. This article examines three significant insights that Paul Ricoeur contributes to our expanding understanding of text. First under scrutiny will be Ricoeur’s de-regionalization of classic hermeneutics culminating in his understanding of Dasein (Being) as “being-in-the-world,” allowing mean-ing to transcend the physical boundaries of the text. Next, Ricoeur’s three-fold under-standing of traditionality/Traditions/tradition as the “chain of interpretations” through which religious language transcends the tem-poral boundary of historicity will be explored. The final section will focus on Ricoeur’s understanding of the productive imagination and metaphoric truth as the under-appreciated yet key insight around which Ricoeur’s philosophical investigation into the metaphoric transfer from text to life revolves

A view on the iconic turn from a semiotic perspective

Media are not only a means of communication. From a cognitive perspective, they may be viewed as components of an external, auxiliary memory system (Schönpflug 1997), and contemporary cognitive science “construes cognition as a complex system in which cognitive processes are ‘embodied, situated’ in environments, and ‘distributed’ across people and artifacts” (Nersessian 2007: 2). In man-machine communication, man-man-communication via digital machinery and especially in the World Wide Web (Heintz 2006, Steels 2006) the “external” components of this system have taken on more and more of the characteristics of our individual, “internal”, living and active memory with its richness of sensual and symbolic formats. The intellectual challenge in the drafts of the “masterminds” of hypertext (Eisenstein) and multimedia (Lintsbakh) was the detection of temporal/spatial, mathematical and linguistic correspondences between such different sensual and symbolic representations (Bulgakova 2007, Tsivian 2007). The so called “iconic” or “pictorial turn” was pulled along by the digital turn, and it may in turn have stimulated and accelerated the digital turn

The Last Word in Greek Philosophy

What does it take to settle an argument or debate, for the classical Greek philosophers, and how does this compare with our modern ideas about resolving disputes? Plato and Aristotle are not quite what they been reputed to be

Dread Hermeneutics: Bob Marley, Paul Ricoeur and the Productive Imagination.

This article presents Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutic of the productive imagination as a methodological tool for understanding the innovative social function of texts that in exceeding their semantic meaning, iconically augment reality. Through the reasoning of Rastafari elder Mortimo Planno’s unpublished text, Rastafarian: The Earth’s Most Strangest Man, and the religious and biblical signification from the music of his most famous postulate, Bob Marley, this article applies Paul Ricœur’s schema of the religious productive imagination to conceptualize the metaphoric transfer from text to life of verbal and iconic images of Rastafari’s hermeneutic of word, sound and power. This transformation is accomplished through what Ricœur terms the phenomenology of the iconic augmentation of reality. Understanding this semantic innovation is critical to understanding the capacity of the religious imagination to transform reality as a proclamation of hope in the midst of despair