Set of graphic symbols for visual modeling in social-humanitarian knowledge

Dmitriy M. Koshlakov 
Insti­tute of Phi­los­o­phy, Russ­ian Acad­e­my of Sci­ences
Bryan­sk State Tech­ni­cal Uni­ver­si­ty

Set of graph­ic sym­bols for visu­al mod­el­ing in social-human­i­tar­i­an knowl­edge

Abstract. The paper rais­es and dis­cuss­es the research prob­lem of knowl­edge visu­al­iza­tion. It is stat­ed that the sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge knows a lot of visu­al lan­guages that allow us to describe and trans­mit knowl­edge, stim­u­late the cog­ni­tive process and pro­vide it with a suf­fi­cient­ly high lev­el of for­mal­iz­ing. How­ev­er, as men­tioned in the paper, the avail­abil­i­ty of visu­al lan­guages in social and human­i­tar­i­an knowl­edge is cur­rent­ly insuf­fi­cient, which is due to the fact that there are no gen­er­al and rich in con­tent visu­al lan­guages describ­ing social and human­i­tar­i­an process­es. The paper con­sid­ers the the­o­ret­i­cal basis of the author’s pro­posed solu­tion to the pre­vi­ous­ly posed prob­lem of deficit of avail­able visu­al lan­guages. The author notes that visu­al epis­te­mol­o­gy should be one of the­o­ret­i­cal state­ments of research into the uses of visu­al lan­guages. Anoth­er sig­nif­i­cant the­o­ret­i­cal basis sug­gest­ed for solv­ing the prob­lem are the ideas of func­tion­al asym­me­try of the human brain, con­sid­ered in the con­text of so-called com­put­er metaphor. The third the­o­ret­i­cal basis of the solu­tion embraces the con­cepts of visu­al lan­guage, visu­al mod­el­ing, and visu­al mod­el. The author pro­pos­es the set of graph­ic sym­bols, the basic ele­ments of which are two signs – the sign of the object and the sign of the rela­tion­ship between objects. Fur­ther­more, the author pro­pos­es addi­tion­al signs for indi­cate var­i­ous types of links and rela­tions between objects. The paper states that in addi­tion to cog­ni­tive func­tions, visu­al mod­el­ing per­forms a sig­nif­i­cant com­mu­nica­tive func­tion, as it makes the results of the cog­ni­tive process more vis­i­ble and more con­ve­nient for per­cep­tion. The author empha­sizes the vari­abil­i­ty of visu­al mod­el­ing process­es and stress­es that these process­es large­ly depend on the aes­thet­ic con­scious­ness of the cog­niz­ing sub­ject. Such depen­dence indi­cates that epis­te­mol­o­gy and aes­thet­ics are some­how inter­twined in visu­al mod­el­ing. The final part of the paper sum­ma­rizes the results of the research. The author notes that the set of visu­al signs as com­po­nents of the visu­al lan­guage pro­posed by the author can be suc­cess­ful­ly used in solv­ing such prob­lems as: sys­tem­at­ic descrip­tion and visu­al mod­el­ling of com­plex process­es and sys­tems, both in social and human­i­tar­i­an fields and beyond them; mod­el­ling, descrip­tion and analy­sis of text, dis­course, rea­son­ing.

Key­words: con­nec­tion, knowl­edge, knowl­edge visu­al­iza­tion, object, process, sym­bol, sys­tem, visu­al epis­te­mol­o­gy, visu­al lan­guage, visu­al mod­el, visu­al mod­el­ing

DOI: 10.32326/2618–9267–2021–4–2–107–124

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