As words, images, and concepts are the media through which hermeneutic understanding takes place, reflection on their nature is central to any appreciation of how hermeneutics operates. The joy of coming to recognition entails the knowing of something again that we already know as if for the first time. In the image, what we already know (pre‐reflectively) emerges as if illuminated, from all the contingent and variable circumstances that condition it; it is grasped in its essence. It is known (...) as something”. The speculative dimension of language elucidates the capacity of an image to be future orientated. Words, images, and concepts have actual and potential satellite meanings able to upset and transform their core meanings. Indeterminacy of meaning is central. Reading, writing, and attentive looking are practices which because of the speculative dimensions of word, image, and concept disturb and disrupt what we think we know with certainty. (shrink)

From "word-images' to "chapter-shots: The irnagiuist montage of Anatolij Mariengof. The article discusses the three dominant imaginist principles of Anatolij Mariengofs (1897-1962) poetic technique, as they are translated into prose in his first fictional novel Cynics (1928). These principles include the "catalogue of images", a genre introduced by Vadim Shershenevich, i.e. poetry formed of nouns, which Mariengof makes use of in his longer imaginist poems. Another dominant imaginist principle, to which Mariengof referred in his theoretic articles and poetic texts, (...) is similar to the creating of shocking images typical of Russian futurism. Mariengofs application is the juxtaposition of "pure" (chistyj) and "impure" (nechistyj), either a conflict between the vehicle and the object within a metaphor or a conflict between metaphors. This is an essential poetic feature in both Mariengofs poetry and prose. The third, maybe the most Mariengofian imaginist principle, relevant to the study of Cynics, is the poetics of transition (poetika sdviga), i.e. a certain fragmented structure of the text, which is related to Mariengors use of heteroaccentual rhyme. All these principles can be treated as fundamental elements in Mariengofs use of montage technique in his fictional prose. (shrink)

From "word-images' to "chapter-shots: The irnagiuist montage of Anatolij Mariengof. The article discusses the three dominant imaginist principles of Anatolij Mariengofs (1897-1962) poetic technique, as they are translated into prose in his first fictional novel Cynics (1928). These principles include the "catalogue of images", a genre introduced by Vadim Shershenevich, i.e. poetry formed of nouns, which Mariengof makes use of in his longer imaginist poems. Another dominant imaginist principle, to which Mariengof referred in his theoretic articles and poetic texts, (...) is similar to the creating of shocking images typical of Russian futurism. Mariengofs application is the juxtaposition of "pure" (chistyj) and "impure" (nechistyj), either a conflict between the vehicle and the object within a metaphor or a conflict between metaphors. This is an essential poetic feature in both Mariengofs poetry and prose. The third, maybe the most Mariengofian imaginist principle, relevant to the study of Cynics, is the poetics of transition (poetika sdviga), i.e. a certain fragmented structure of the text, which is related to Mariengors use of heteroaccentual rhyme. All these principles can be treated as fundamental elements in Mariengofs use of montage technique in his fictional prose. (shrink)

Christopher Gauker proposes that all cognition can be divided into nonconceptual image-based thought and conceptual language-based thought. The division between the two hinges on the representational powers of their respective mediums. I argue that a richer variety of representational states and processes is necessary in order to explain both human and nonhuman cognition. There are aspects of nonhuman cognition that cannot be explained simply by images, and there are aspects of human conceptual thought, particularly those dealing with causal reasoning, (...) that push us towards positing abstract systems of representation that are neither imagistic nor linguistic. Conceptual thought, then, occurs in its own proprietary inner code, not in images or words. (shrink)

The article presents a study that aims to bring together the image and the word or ways of knowing through the concept of words and their respective ways to see images. Accordingly, when words are put together, phenomenological insight has been followed which does justice to lived experiences. Moreover, the author stresses the idea of the punctum in words as a wound.

A number of recent models of semantics combine linguistic information, derived from text corpora, and visual information, derived from image collections, demonstrating that the resulting multimodal models are better than either of their unimodal counterparts, in accounting for behavioral data. Empirical work on semantic processing has shown that emotion also plays an important role especially in abstract concepts; however, models integrating emotion along with linguistic and visual information are lacking. Here, we first improve on visual and affective representations, derived (...) from state‐of‐the‐art existing models, by choosing models that best fit available human semantic data and extending the number of concepts they cover. Crucially then, we assess whether adding affective representations (obtained from a neural network model designed to predict emojis from co‐occurring text) improves the model's ability to fit semantic similarity/relatedness judgments from a purely linguistic and linguistic–visual model. We find that, given specific weights assigned to the models, adding both visual and affective representations improves performance, with visual representations providing an improvement especially for more concrete words, and affective representations improving especially the fit for more abstract words. (shrink)

Abstract In this essay, I will argue that images can play a substantial role in argumentation: exploiting information from the context, they can contribute directly and substantially to the communication of the propositions that play the roles of premises and conclusion. Furthermore, they can achieve this directly, i.e. without the need of verbalization. I will ground this claim by presenting and analyzing some arguments where images are essential to the argumentation process. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s10503-011-9259-y Authors (...) Axel Arturo Barceló Aspeitia, Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Cto. Mario de la Cueva s/n, Cd. Universitaria, Coyoacán, 04500 DF, Mexico Journal Argumentation Online ISSN 1572-8374 Print ISSN 0920-427X. (shrink)

As one tries to grasp love and its images within José Leonilson's production, a multiplicity of aspects and meanings are seen that also relate to Louise Bourgeois's oeuvre in regard to the interest in human relations. Through a comparative approach to both artists' poetics, an understanding is created that love is not a simplistic action and all the words read in or applied to their visual discourse must be considered within a wide range of love in visual and literary images. (...) Keywords: literature and visual arts / love / creativity / Bourgeois, Louise / Leonilson, José / word and image. (shrink)

At least since Locke, philosophers and psychologists have usually held that concepts arise out of sensory perceptions, thoughts are built from concepts, and language enables speakers to convey their thoughts to hearers. Christopher Gauker holds that this tradition is mistaken about both concepts and language. The mind cannot abstract the building blocks of thoughts from perceptual representations. More generally, we have no account of the origin of concepts that grants them the requisite independence from language. Gauker's alternative is to show (...) that much of cognition consists in thinking by means of mental imagery, without the help of concepts, and that language is a tool by which interlocutors coordinate their actions in pursuit of shared goals. Imagistic cognition supports the acquisition and use of this tool, and when the use of this tool is internalized, it becomes the very medium of conceptual thought. (shrink)

Focusing on Heidegger and the work of Paul Klee, Schmidt pursues larger issues in the relationship between word, image, and truth.

In this paper, a novel approach for word extraction and character segmentation from the handwritten Bangla document images is reported. At first, a modified Run Length Smoothing Algorithm, called Spiral Run Length Smearing Algorithm, is applied for the extraction of words from the text lines of unconstrained handwritten Bangla document images. This technique has helped to overcome some of the drawbacks of standard horizontal and vertical RLSA techniques. SRLSA technique has been applied on the Bangla handwritten document image (...) database CMATERdb1.1.1 and the success rate of the word extraction is found to be 86.01%. In the second part of the work, we have presented a useful solution to the problem on how best word images of handwritten Bangla script can be segmented into constituent characters. Moreover, the technique can segment the words having discontinuity in Matra, a prominent feature of Bangla script. It also optimizes the trade-off between under/over segmentation as Matra region and segmentation points are estimated more precisely. As a result, better word segmentation accuracy is achieved with minimal data loss. Here, a success rate of 92.48% is observed on a dataset of 750 handwritten Bangla words which is 3.35% higher than that of our earlier techniques. (shrink)

This text focuses from a philological perspective on media theories and their impact on traditional text-based disciplines. Therefore it looks at the problems that have emerged for Media Studies as well as for traditional studies in philology when reflecting on the concept of self-reference, since their subjects can seemingly no longer rely on the purity of the written word. If research work in the field of humanities is still mainly documented by texts, how does the advance of images as (...) a challenging research subject affect the text that is referring to that subject? Speaking in media terms: how is the medium `text', which still remains text when it is concerned with the medium `image', affected by the `other' medium? This question deals with the problem of self-reference, hence the construction of disciplinary limitations in various academic fields. Beginning with this question, I try to find out how the difference between self-reference and reference has been and still is being organized in texts. How can we compare different types of theorizing images in texts? These abstract problems will be exemplified by situating the word—image bias in a wider historical context. The text concludes by developing some possibilities for future research within this area of visual culture and academic writing. (shrink)

1. To list Pound’s triumphs of recognition in the realm of art, music, or literature is by itself no more enlightening than to catalog his oversights. Thus, for example, his instant and almost uncanny responsiveness to the work of Henri Gaudier-Brzeska is not more informative than his bizarre ranking of Francis Picabia’s paintings above those of Picasso or Matisse. Clearly it is essential to know, with as much specificity as possible, exactly what Pound said about a particular work of art (...) or literature and, equally important, given the frequent shifts of emphasis and interest throughout his long career, just when these opinions were first formulated. Like every reader of the The Cantos, I am conscious of the enormous service rendered by Pound scholars whose research is giving us a more complete inventory of the poet’s various statements and positions, and it would be foolish to take my point here as a derogation of such efforts. But a list, no matter how complete, is not an argument, and an inventory, no matter how scrupulously assembled, is not an explanation; a recurrent problem in Pound studies is that too often the compoilation of discrete items of information is seen as a sufficient answer to problems of interpretation and understanding. In other words, I think it essential that discussions of pound and the Visual Arts move beyond the quagmire resulting from still another frain-storm of “factual atoms” chronicling his various passions and dislikes.2. Far from implying, however, that we must therefore simply accept Pound’s brilliant discoveries and pass over his “howling blunders,” my position would emphasize the need to take his ideas seriously enough to confront them, to test them against the material to which they are a response and for which they often seek to provide an explanatory account. There are times, as I have argued in an analogous context, when it is less demeaning to give a man credit for his worst errors than to remove from him the capacity to err.3. What we require, I believe, is less a catalog of all of Pound’s specific statements about various artists, with each utterance assigned a positive or negative prefix depending upon our own personal and currently sanctioned hierarchy of values, than a careful study of the place of those statements in the logic and texture of Pound’s own work. The attempt to focus attention on The Cantos’ network of artistic references—its invocation of masterpieces and privileged moments of cultural achievement—will yield only trivial results unless the inner dynamic linking Pound’s various exampla and the actual role these play in the poem’s argument become clearer in the process. Michael André Bernstein, associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of The Tale of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic and Prima della Rivoluzione , a volume of verse. He is currently completing a study of the Abject Hero and literary genealogy. His previous contribution to. (shrink)

Seeing and hearing God in the Old Testament -- Seeing and hearing God in the New Testament -- Word and image in classical Greek philosophy -- Philosophers and sophists of the early Roman era -- Image, text and incarnation in the second century -- Image, text and incarnation in the third century -- Neoplatonism and the arts -- Image, text and incarnation in the fourth century -- Myth and text in proclus -- Christianity of Christian (...) Platonism. (shrink)

words compose a significant part of speech. Despite this, learning them is complicated. Abstract concepts collect more heterogeneous exemplars and are more detached from sensory modalities than concrete concepts. Recent views propose that, because of their complexity, other people are pivotal for abstract concepts’ acquisition and use, e.g., to explain their meaning. We tested this hypothesis using a combined behavioral and thermal imaging paradigm. Twenty-one Italian children determined whether acoustic stimuli were or not correct Italian words. Concrete terms yielded faster (...) responses than abstract ones: for the first time, this effect appears with response times in very young children. More crucially, the higher increase in temperature of the nasal tip suggests that, with abstract concepts, children might be more socially and cognitively engaged. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the problem of changing stylistic paradigm in the Persian poetry of XVI-XVII centuries and reflection of this process in self-consciousness of outstanding authors of the period. Parallel with preserving stable norms of traditional poetics literary practice demonstrates flexibility and forms new range of popular poetic strategies. New aesthetic criteria if ideal poetic language, expressed with epithet ‘colourful’, appears alongside with criteria of previous period, expressed with epithet ‘sweet’ and step by step gets leadership. Lyric poetry (...) of three famous authors of the period of formation and golden age of Indian style served the object of analyses. The phenomena of visualization of imagery connected with perfect poetic language illustrated by examples of ‘Poet and Poetry’ motifs located in ‘frame text’ in end of the qhazal. These motifs serve one of the regular contexts of author’s name and show author’s attitude to his creation, including stylistic preferences. Refinement of poetic fantasy being declared basic condition of creating perfect poetry described visually as coiling lasso, poetry itself as flourishing garden, fountain or European house decorated with painting. Such characteristic of word creation has analogies in the works of Baroque style theorist Giambattista Marino. (shrink)

With the increasing scale of e-commerce, the complexity of image content makes commodity image classification face great challenges. Image feature extraction often determines the quality of the final classification results. At present, the image feature extraction part mainly includes the underlying visual feature and the intermediate semantic feature. The intermediate semantics of the image acts as a bridge between the underlying features and the advanced semantics of the image, which can make up for the (...) semantic gap to a certain extent and has strong robustness. As a typical intermediate semantic representation method, the bag-of-visual-words model has received extensive attention in image classification. However, the traditional BoVW model loses the location information of local features, and its local feature descriptors mainly focus on the texture shape information of local regions but lack the expression of color information. Therefore, in this paper, the improved bag-of-visual-words model is presented, which contains three aspects of improvement: multiscale local region extraction; local feature description by speeded up robust features and color vector angle histogram ; and diagonal concentric rectangular pattern. Experimental results show that the three aspects of improvement to the BoVW model are complementary, while compared with the traditional BoVW and the BoVW adopting SURF + SPM, the classification accuracy of the improved BoVW is increased by 3.60% and 2.33%, respectively. (shrink)

In Quarles' world the emblem as traditionally conceived must strain across a widening gap between the verbal and the visual. Rosemary Freeman's criticism of Quarles, that in a mechanical "imposition of meaning" the text of the emblem applies an interpretation to, rather than discovers a significance within, the image, is more apt than Freeman realized. With the semantic congruence between word and image no longer guaranteed, artists attempting to yoke the two would have to reconceive the relationship (...) between them. Seen as a response to this need, Blake's illuminated books complicate the emblem tradition in an art of dazzling improvisatory juxtapositions. Indeed, his revaluation of the ties between "body" and "soul" may be taken in one sense as a revision of the emblematist's traditional distinction. Words, once the soul of the emblem, now become truly animate for Blake - flowing, sprouting, multicolored - while their quirky energy, no longer restrained by standardized print, is embodied on sensual, quasi-pictorial shapes; images speak in a new and private vocabulary of emblematic birds, curling tendrils, and other forms that gesture allusively from plate to plate. These frame, underscore, celebrate, intrude upon, parody, or oppose themselves by "contraries" to the meaning of the adjoining text. If Quarles' work signals the failure of the emblem in England, its success in probing the problems of combining language and imagery points toward the renewal of the form in Blake. Ernest B. Gilman, assistant professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of The Curious Perspective. He is currently working on a book on joint literary and pictorial forms in the Renaissance. (shrink)

Gadamer claims that an essential form of truth is disclosed in the search for, and discovery of, a shared language in and through which the matter at issue between the participants in a conversation can come to presentation. He maintains in this regard that the thing itself is given in language. This contention is grounded in his account of the “belonging together” of word and thing. To help us understand this idea I turn to his discussion of the (...) class='Hi'>image, since—in a comparison that Gadamer explicitly makes—here, too, the image “gives” the thing. (shrink)

The Program for Medical Humanities at UC–Berkeley recently hosted a small conference composed largely of health professionals and humanities scholars to reflect on "violence in medicine." The topic itself is unsettling: coupling the two words seems at best oxymoronic and at worst darkly suggestive. The conversation ranged from forms of malpractice and exclusion to ways we normalize questionable protocols and treatments. One of the issues that repeatedly arose was the ways in which patients can emerge from clinical encounters and hospital (...) stays feeling violated, sometimes despite the best intentions of care providers.Having looked closely at a good deal of poetry by patients, I decided to bring forward some examples... (shrink)

To speak of the nature of an image is to initiate a problematic second only to that raised by considerations of the nature of language. To inquire into the relations between image and language is to step into a very old philosophical problem. Nevertheless, I would hope at least to approach the edge of such an encounter in the attempt to see what relevance it might have for recent past art. Certainly the term “image” has had a (...) long and embattled history. A taxonomy and a genealogy of the term might be in order. Do we wish to speak of mental images or of optical ones? What about perceptual images or the verbal images of descriptions and metaphors? To consider the sense data and appearances of the perceptual, or the dreams, fantasies, memories, and ideas of the mental image is to review an entire Western philosophical discourse. We might consider the issue of what may or may not be in the mind as an image; or the relation of visual images to linguistic terms; or the relation between objects and visual images that stand for them. Certainly the ways of formulating such relations have decided the divisions of Western metaphysics. Representational theories of the mind revolve around such issues and imply the persistent division of mind from body, subject from object.Let me say right away that my interests here are not to review an entire philosophical discourse with the hope of establishing a clarity of distinctions between the imagistic and the linguistic. Rather the assumption here is that the two are inextricably entangled, and the interest is to see how certain art in this century has resisted or embraced this entanglement. Robert Morris is an artist and a professor at Hunter College. A collection of his writings is forthcoming. (shrink)

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most literary and poetic dialogues. How might one reconcile this evidence of Plato’s predilection for poetry in light of his severe critique of poetry in the Republic? Though his critique is modified and refined in other dialogues, the power of his critique is nowhere significantly undermined. I argue in this paper that Plato’s poetic writing is not inconsistent with his critique, and that in fact there is an affinity between his practice of poetry and (...) his critique. Plato’s critique of poetry is not aimed against poetry itself, but just against its problematic claims and false promises. In turn, Plato’s use of the poetic image, especially in relationship to eros, delimits philosophy, and places it in relation to that which is not attainable for it. The battle between poetry and philosophy is seen to involve a reciprocal benefit for both, and a hidden affinity. In this sense, the poetic image has its philosophical sense precisely because it falls outside of the philosophical perspective. (shrink)

The Symposium is one of Plato’s most literary and poetic dialogues. How might one reconcile this evidence of Plato’s predilection for poetry in light of his severe critique of poetry in the Republic? Though his critique is modified and refined in other dialogues, the power of his critique is nowhere significantly undermined. I argue in this paper that Plato’s poetic writing is not inconsistent with his critique, and that in fact there is an affinity between his practice of poetry and (...) his critique. Plato’s critique of poetry is not aimed against poetry itself, but just against its problematic claims and false promises. In turn, Plato’s use of the poetic image, especially in relationship to eros, delimits philosophy, and places it in relation to that which is not attainable for it. The battle between poetry and philosophy is seen to involve a reciprocal benefit for both, and a hidden affinity. In this sense, the poetic image has its philosophical sense precisely because it falls outside of the philosophical perspective. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the relation between icon and depiction and their equally central role both in verbal and in nonverbal artistic texts. For this purpose, I will examine the contact points between Jakobson and Bakhtin’s theory of text. In particular, I will dwell on Jakobson’s “Quest for the essence of language” and on Bakhtin’s “The Problem of the Text in Linguistics, Philology, and the Human Sciences.” Both Jakobson and Bakhtin build their idea of text on this dialogue between different (...) dimensions. According to Bakhtin dialogical logic is the specific logic of the text. Though indispensable in the initial phase of understanding, the first is reductive if it claims to exhaust the semantic import of the text. Both in Bakhtin and in Jakobson, this idea of text based upon a dialogue between different dimensions implies that sign expression cannot be exhausted in representation because there is something which exceeds representation. I will call this excedent element “depiction.” Depiction is what is at stake in the artistic text, what exceeds the symbolic level of representation. “Depiction” can be configured, both in verbal and non-verbal text, as an idea of iconicity which exceeds resemblance and immediate visibility. (shrink)