Walter Map was a twelfth-century courtier and royal servant. He was a prolific writer, but De Nugis Curialium is the only surviving work confidently attributed to him. The book is a collection of short stories and anecdotes about the court, religion and history. Map's references demonstrate that he read widely, not only biblical and theological works, but also classical authors such as Horace, Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal. The only surviving manuscript of the work is a fourteenth-century copy once belonging to (...) the monk John Wells of Ramsey Abbey. The Cambridge bibliographer M. R. James would have been attracted to the breadth of Map's referencing, and the author's light-hearted writing style which was intended to entertain. James' 1914 Oxford publication corrected the earlier work of Thomas Wright who published an edition for the Camden Society in 1850. (shrink)

Most of us create and use a panoply of non-sentential representations throughout our ordinary lives: we regularly use maps to navigate, charts to keep track of complex patterns of data, and diagrams to visualize logical and causal relations among states of affairs. But philosophers typically pay little attention to such representations, focusing almost exclusively on language instead. In particular, when theorizing about the mind, many philosophers assume that there is a very tight mapping between language and thought. Some analyze (...) utterances as the outer vocalizations of inner thoughts (e.g. Grice 1957, Devitt 2005), while others treat thought as a form of inner speech (e.g. Sellars 1956/1997, Carruthers 2002). But even philosophers who take no stand on the relative priority of language and thought still tend to individuate mental states in terms of the sentences we use to ascribe them. Indeed, Dummett (1993) claims that it is constitutive of analytic philosophy that it approaches the mind by way of language. In many ways, this linguistic model is salutary. Our thoughts are often intimately intertwined with their linguistic expression, and public language does provide a comparatively tractable proxy for, and a window into, the messier realm of thought. However, an exclusive focus on thought as it is expressed in language threatens to leave other sorts of thought unexplained, or even to blind us to their possibility. In particular, many cognitive ethologists and psychologists find it useful to talk about humans, chimpanzees, birds, rats, and even bees as employing cognitive maps. We need to make sense of this way of talking about minds as well as more familiar sentential descriptions. In what follows, I investigate the theoretical and practical possibility of non-sentential thought. Ultimately, I am most interested in the contours of distinctively human thought: what forms does human thought take, and how do those different forms interact? How does human thought compare with that of other animals? In this essay, however, I focus on a narrower and more basic theoretical question: could thought occur in maps? Many philosophers are convinced that in some important sense, thought per se must be language-like.. (shrink)

Risk management is a well-known method to face technological challenges through a win–win combination of protective and proactive approaches, fostering the collaboration of operators, researchers, regulators, and industries for the exploitation of new markets. In the field of autonomous and unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, a considerable amount of work has been devoted to risk analysis, the generation of ground risk maps, and ground risk assessment by estimating the fatality rate. The paper aims to expand this approach with a (...) tool for managing data protection risks raised by drones through the design of flight maps. The tool should allow UAS operators choosing the best air corridor for their drones based on the so-called privacy by design principle pursuant to Article 25 of the EU data protection regulation, the GDPR. Among the manifold applications of this approach, the design of fly zones for drones can be tailored for public authorities in the phase of authorization of new operations, much as for national Data Protection authorities that have to control the lawfulness of personal data processing by UAS operations. The overall aim is to present the first win–win approach to data protection issues, aerospace engineering challenges, and risk management methods for the threats posed by this technology. (shrink)

We propose that children employ specialized cognitive systems that allow them to recover an accurate “causal map” of the world: an abstract, coherent, learned representation of the causal relations among events. This kind of knowledge can be perspicuously understood in terms of the formalism of directed graphical causal models, or “Bayes nets”. Children’s causal learning and inference may involve computations similar to those for learning causal Bayes nets and for predicting with them. Experimental results suggest that 2- to 4-year-old children (...) construct new causal maps and that their learning is consistent with the Bayes net formalism. (shrink)

Several authors have hypothesized that completely positive maps should provide the means for generalizing quantum dynamics. In a critical analysis of that proposal, we show that such maps are incompatible with the standard phenomenological theory of spin relaxation and that the theoretical argument which has been offered as justification for the hypothesis is fallacious.

Squashed entanglement :829–840, 2004) is a monogamous entanglement measure, which implies that highly extendible states have small value of the squashed entanglement. Here, invoking a recent inequality for the quantum conditional mutual information :575–611, 2015) greatly extended and simplified in various work since, we show the converse, that a small value of squashed entanglement implies that the state is close to a highly extendible state. As a corollary, we establish an alternative proof of the faithfulness of squashed entanglement. We briefly (...) discuss the previous and subsequent history of the Fawzi–Renner bound and related conjectures, and close by advertising a potentially far-reaching generalization to universal and functorial recovery maps for the monotonicity of the relative entropy. (shrink)

“Scientific theories are maps of the natural world.” This metaphor is often used as part of a deflationary argument for a weak but relatively global version of scientific realism, a version that recognizes the place of conventions, goals, and contingencies in scientific representations, while maintaining that they are typically true in a clear and literal sense. By examining, in a naturalistic way, some relationships between maps and what they map, we question the scope and value of realist construals (...) of maps—and by extension of scientific representations. Deflationary philosophy of science requires more variegated stances. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy of technology after the empirical turn has surprisingly little to say on the relation between language and technology. This essay describes this gap, offers a preliminary discussion of how language and technology may be related to show that there is a rich conceptual space to be gained, and begins to explore some ways in which the gap could be bridged by starting from within specific philosophical subfields and traditions. One route starts from philosophy of language (both ‘‘analytic’’ and (...) ‘‘continental’’: Searle and Heidegger) and discusses some potential implications for thinking about technology; another starts from artefact-oriented approaches in philosophy of technology and STS and shows that these approaches might helpfully be extended by theorizing relationships between language and techno- logical artefacts. The essay concludes by suggesting a research agenda, which invites more work on the relation between language and technology. (shrink)

"You are here, a map declares, but of course you are not, any more than you truly occupy the vantage point into which a landscape painting puts you. How maps and paintings figure and reconfigure space--as well as our place in it--is the subject of Edward S. Casey's study, an exploration of how we portray the world and its many places. Casey's discussion ranges widely from Northern Sung landscape painting to nineteenth-century American and British landscape painting and photography, from (...) prehistoric petroglyphs and medieval portolan charts to seventeenth-century Dutch cartography and land survey maps of the American frontier. From these culturally and historically diverse forays a theory of representation emerges. Casey proposes that the representation of place in visual works be judged in terms not of resemblance, but of reconnecting with an earth and world that are not the mere content of mind or language--a reconnection that calls for the embodiment and implacement of the human subject." -- Book jacket. (shrink)

A common way to understand memory structures in the cognitive sciences is as a cognitive map​. Cognitive maps are representational systems organized by dimensions shared with physical space. The appeal to these maps begins literally: as an account of how spatial information is represented and used to inform spatial navigation. Invocations of cognitive maps, however, are often more ambitious; cognitive maps are meant to scale up and provide the basis for our more sophisticated memory capacities. The (...) extension is not meant to be metaphorical, but the way in which these richer mental structures are supposed to remain map-like is rarely made explicit. Here we investigate this missing link, asking: how do cognitive maps represent non-spatial information?​ We begin with a survey of foundational work on spatial cognitive maps and then provide a comparative review of alternative, non-spatial representational structures. We then turn to several cutting-edge projects that are engaged in the task of scaling up cognitive maps so as to accommodate non-spatial information: first, on the spatial-isometric approach​ , encoding content that is non-spatial but in some sense isomorphic to spatial content; second, on the ​ abstraction approach​ , encoding content that is an abstraction over first-order spatial information; and third, on the ​ embedding approach​ , embedding non-spatial information within a spatial context, a prominent example being the Method-of-Loci. Putting these cases alongside one another reveals the variety of options available for building cognitive maps, and the distinctive limitations of each. We conclude by reflecting on where these results take us in terms of understanding the place of cognitive maps in memory. (shrink)

I seek recurrent characteristics of ancient world maps from different cultures to gain insights into constant aspects of human perceptions and world views. Discussed is how circular horizons are introduced to delineate the far and unknown world, how the shapes of the known areas are idealised by being given regular shapes, and how the way from the rim to the centre often epitomises cosmogony or evolutionary progress.

This paper investigates structural properties of monotone function classes within the framework of three-valued logic (3VL), aiming to characterize dependencies and constraints that ensure structural finiteness and order-preserving properties. This research delves into characteristics of structurally finite classes of order-preserving 3VL map. Monotonicity plays a critical role in understanding functional behaviour, which is essential for structuring closed logical operations within $ P_{k} $. We define $ F $ as a closed class in $ P_{k} $, consisting only of mappings that (...) comply with specified operations and are strictly confined to $ P_{k} $. The notation $ F(n) $ represents the subset of mappings in $ F $ dependent on $ n $ variables, highlighting the limited scope of inputs and their respective outputs. Further analysis through $ CR(F) $ facilitates the identification of precursor subclasses within $ F $, which have not yet achieved closure under all necessary operations—a pivotal step in constructing intermediate mapping classes. Within the framework of 3VL, the study examines order-preserving maps $ f_{D}, f_{K}, f_{M^{(2)}}, f_{DM^{(2)}}, f_{KM^{(2)}} $, deliberately excluding the sets $ D, K, M^{(2)} $, where $ DM^{(2)} $ is defined as $ D \cap M^{(2)} $ and $ KM^{(2)} $ as $ K \cap M^{(2)} $. The lattice framework in $ P_{k}(1) $ for $ k = 3 $ systematically organizes these mapping classes based on their completeness properties, with particular emphasis on classes such as $ M $, which is characterized as a comprehensive set governed by the operations of maximum and minimum. Our theorems establish structural finiteness for classes of unary order-preserving maps, emphasizing their two-variable dependency in class construction. This study extends existing findings on single-variable monotonic functions within 3VL by integrating criteria of linear order. Key results include the classification of mapping classes $ F \subseteq M $ containing $ M^{(1)}_{3} $, categorized into distinct groups: $ M^{(1)}_{3}, KM^{(2)}, DM^{(2)}, M^{(2)}, K, D, M $. Inclusion relations are visualized diagrammatically, showing the hierarchical structure of these monotone classes, ultimately validating the structural finiteness of classes incorporating all unary order-preserving maps within the broader context of 3VL. (shrink)

Three different ways to understand the representational content of the feature maps employed in early vision are compared. First is Stephen Kosslyn's claim, entered as part of the debate over mental imagery, that such areas support "depictive" representation, and that visual perception uses them as depictive representations. Reasons are given to doubt this view. Second, an improved version of what I call "feature-placing" is described and advanced. Third, feature-placing is contrasted with the notion that the representational content of those (...) feature maps could be conveyed in a list of sentences about visual objects. Some problems with this last alternative are described. (shrink)

In this book we study the concepts of Fuzzy Cognitive Maps and their Neutrosophic analogue, the Neutrosophic Cognitive Maps.

:Masculinity studies recognizes that masculinity is culturally variable, historically specific, multidimensional, and multiple. This mutability is reflected in concepts like hegemonic masculinity, hybrid masculinity, mosaic masculinities, personalized masculinities, sensual masculinity, and inclusive masculinity. Building on this idea of mutating masculinity, this paper addresses a theoretical problem acknowledged by many scholars: how to account for both the singular intimacy of lived experience and the commonality of shared social norms. In order to build a mutable model that encompasses both experience and norms (...) the paper borrows from Félix Guattari's technique of schizoanalytic cartography, which maps assemblages. This new approach to theorizing masculinity is illustrated by diagrams which map its institutional, discursive, cultural, existential, bodily, and biological aspects. (shrink)

24 undergraduates were blindfolded and walked through paths laid out on a floor to investigate whether the orientation of Ss' cognitive maps (CMs) could be determined after they had learned a path by walking through it. Given the assumption that the CM is picturelike, it was predicted that it has a specific orientation, which implies that tests in which the CM is assumed to be aligned with the path should be less difficult than tests in which the CM is (...) hypothesized to be contraligned. In Exp I (8 Ss), Ss were required to draw a picture of the path they had walked through; in Exp II (14 Ss), Ss were required to locate targets in the path under conditions in which their presumed CMs were either aligned or contraligned with the path. Results show that, in Exp I, all Ss drew the 1st line segment of the path upward, suggesting that this part of the path was fixed in an upward direction in memory. In Exp II, Ss were more accurate and faster in locating points on the path when the CM was hypothesized to be aligned with the path than when it was hypothesized to be contraligned. (shrink)

The effort to understand speech perception on the basis of relationships between acoustic parameters of speech sounds is to be recommended. Neural specializations (combination-sensitivity) for echolocation, communication, and sound localization probably constitute the common mechanisms of vertebrate auditory processing and may be essential for speech production as well as perception. There is, however, no need for meaningful maps.

Recombination maps of ancestral species can be constructed from comparative analyses of genomes from closely related species, exemplified by a recently published map of the human‐chimpanzee ancestor. Such maps resolve differences in recombination rate between species into changes along individual branches in the speciation tree, and allow identification of associated changes in the genomic sequences. We describe how coalescent hidden Markov models are able to call individual recombination events in ancestral species through inference of incomplete lineage sorting along (...) a genomic alignment. In the great apes, speciation events are sufficiently close in time that a map can be inferred for the ancestral species at each internal branch ‐ allowing evolution of recombination rate to be tracked over evolutionary time scales from speciation event to speciation event. We see this approach as a way of characterizing the evolution of recombination rate and the genomic properties that influence it. (shrink)

Weakly interacting lattices of coupled maps can be modeled as ordinary coupled map lattices separated from each other by boundary regions with small coupling parameters. We demonstrate that such weakly interacting lattices can nevertheless have unexpected and striking effects on each other. Under specific conditions, particular stability properties of the lattices are significantly influenced by their weak mutual interaction. This observation is tantamount to an efficacious information flow across the boundary.

The presumption that navigation requires a cognitive map leads to its conception as an abstract computational problem. Instead of loading the question in favor of an inquiry into the metric structure and evolutionary origin of cognitive maps, the task should first be to establish that a map-like representation actually is operative in real animals navigating real environments.

The two great modern naturalists, Linnaeus and Darwin, expressed their intuition about how best to visualize patterns of affinities, that is, morphological similarities and divergences between taxa. Linnaeus suggested that “all plants show affinities on all sides, like a territory on a geographical map,” while Darwin thought that it was virtually impossible to understand the affinities between living and extinct species without a genealogical tree. Genealogical trees follow the diachronic, evolving logic of a timeline, whereas maps depict a synchronous (...) pattern of extant taxa. Although the two seem unrelated, various naturalists made attempts to combine them. Surprisingly, these resulted in three-dimensional images that, in order to be observed, had to be projected on paper. The naturalists Max Fürbringer and Richard Bowdler Sharpe were aware of this fact, but even Darwin himself twice combined the basic intuitions underlying the two modes of representation to produce three-dimensional images. This article is a brief history of the efforts to merge genealogical trees and map-like cross sections of affinities into one three-dimensional image. (shrink)

How can one investigate phenomenal consciousness? As in other areas of science, the investigation of consciousness aims for a more precise knowledge of its phenomena, and the discovery of general truths about their nature. This requires the development of appropriate first-person, second-person, and third-person methods. This book introduces some of the creative ways in which these methods can be applied to different purposes, e.g. to understand the relation of consciousness to brain, to examining or changing consciousness as such, and to (...) the way consciousness is influenced by social, clinical and therapeutic contexts. To clarify the strengths and weaknesses of different methods and to demonstrate the interplay of methodology and epistemology, the book also suggests a number of "maps" of the consciousness studies terrain that places different approaches to the study of consciousness into a broader, interdisciplinary context. (shrink)

During the 17th and 18th centuries, European investigations into Chinese geography underwent a process of change: firstly, from the wild imagination of the classical era to a natural perspective of modern trade, then historical interpretations of religious missionaries to the scientific mapping conducted by sovereign nation-states. This process not only prompted new production of maps, but also disseminated a large amount of geographical knowledge about China in massive publications. This has enriched the geographical vision of Chinese civilization while providing (...) a new intellectual framework for Europeans to understand China. Concurrently, it has formed another route for the travel of knowledge and intercultural interactions between the East and the West. Those interactions between space and knowledge have been reflected in the production, publication and dissemination of numerous maps of China in early modern Europe. (shrink)

Evolutionary biology is paying increasing attention to the mechanisms that enable phenotypic plasticity, evolvability, and extra‐genetic inheritance. Yet, there is a concern that these phenomena remain insufficiently integrated within evolutionary theory. Understanding their evolutionary implications would require focusing on phenotypes and their variation, but this does not always fit well with the prevalent genetic representation of evolution that screens off developmental mechanisms. Here, we instead use development as a starting point, and represent it in a way that allows genetic, environmental (...) and epigenetic sources of phenotypic variation to be independent. We show why this representation helps to understand the evolutionary consequences of both genetic and non‐genetic phenotype determinants, and discuss how this approach can instigate future areas of empirical and theoretical research. (shrink)

A classic result in the foundations of Yang-Mills theory, due to J. W. Barrett ["Holonomy and Path Structures in General Relativity and Yang-Mills Theory." Int. J. Th. Phys. 30, ], establishes that given a "generalized" holonomy map from the space of piece-wise smooth, closed curves based at some point of a manifold to a Lie group, there exists a principal bundle with that group as structure group and a principal connection on that bundle such that the holonomy map corresponds to (...) the holonomies of that connection. Barrett also provided one sense in which this "recovery theorem" yields a unique bundle, up to isomorphism. Here we show that something stronger is true: with an appropriate definition of isomorphism between generalized holonomy maps, there is an equivalence of categories between the category whose objects are generalized holonomy maps on a smooth, connected manifold and whose arrows are holonomy isomorphisms, and the category whose objects are principal connections on principal bundles over a smooth, connected manifold. This result clarifies, and somewhat improves upon, the sense of "unique recovery" in Barrett's theorems; it also makes precise a sense in which there is no loss of structure involved in moving from a principal bundle formulation of Yang-Mills theory to a holonomy, or "loop", formulation. (shrink)

Ability to recall the timing of events is a crucial aspect of associative learning. Yet, traditional theories of associative learning have often overlooked the role of time in learning association and shaping the behavioral outcome. They address temporal learning as an independent and parallel process. Temporal Coding Hypothesis is an attempt to bringing together the associative and non-associative aspects of learning. This account proposes temporal maps, a representation that encodes several aspects of a learned association, but attach considerable importance (...) to the temporal aspect. A temporal map helps an agent to make inferences about missing information by applying an integration mechanism over a common element present in independently acquired temporal maps. We review the empirical evidence demonstrating the construct of temporal maps and discuss the importance of this concept in clinical and behavioral interventions. (shrink)

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another inflatable rodent. Judges now regularly insert pictures in judgments, but there is no study either of the genres or the precedential status of these modern visual emblemata, these pictorial interventions in the record. Using a comparative visual corpus of over three hundred images extracted from diverse common (...) law jurisdictions, the practice of retinal justice, the novelty of vision in decision, is here anatomized, choreographed, and critically classified. (shrink)

The article explores the meaning and usages of "communicative and cultural memory" in the context of "mental maps". It looks particularly at theories which, on the basis of constructed symbolic divisions, connote a "lasting Balkan/European reality". The explication focuses on the content considered by these theories as specifically Balkan understanding of the concepts of Space and Time. U tekstu se razmatraju znacenja i razlicite primene sadrzaja "komunikativnog i kulturnog pamcenja u kontekstu savremenih "mentalnih mapa" i posebno teorija koje na (...) konstrukcijama simbolickih podela sugerisu "trajnu balkansku realnost". Razmatranje je ograniceno na deo sadrzaja koji ovim teorijama koristi kao argumentacija za tezu "specificno balkanskog" ili "specificno srpskog" razumevanja kategorija vremena i prostora. (shrink)

The explorer Albert Grünwedel’s Tibetan maps of Shambhala are a controversial and contested part of the history of the exploration of the Silk Routes. In the early 1900s Albert Grünwedel collected material related to archaeological sites at Kucha and Turfan including several Tibetan maps of the region, which he published in 1920 in the book Alt-Kutscha. Soon after publication, doubts were raised about the authenticity of the maps, which presented Kucha and Qocho in terms of the mythical (...) realm of Shambhala, and they are still widely considered to be either fabrications or delusions. Judging from internal references to historical figures of the late twelfth century, the maps may derive from sources as early as the thirteenth century, and can be linked to an increasing interest in the Kālacakra tantra and the realm of Shambhala described therein. I conclude that the Alt-Kutscha maps should not be regarded as fakes, nor as historically descriptive maps, but as guides for pilgrims that reimagined these sites in terms of the sacred geography of tantric Buddhism, with particular reference to the mythology of Shambhala. (shrink)