IBSS: New Methods for Investigating the Formation of Individual and Shared Concepts and Their Dynamic Dispersion Across Related Societies

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This interdisciplinary research project will develop and test new mathematical models that explore the ways through which conceptual meaning is represented in languages as those languages change in complexity over time. The project investigators also will examine the ways such meaning is shared among groups of individuals in societies. The project's models will describe the dynamic development of concepts as a geometric system and will provide methods for understanding the linguistic representation of concepts and the ways semantic meaning from one community can be influenced by that of neighboring communities. Although this project will focus on the ways that color terms have evolved within languages and societies, the insights and information from this project will apply beyond the domain of color representation to any set of concepts in which objects have a similarity structure that can be assessed and described mathematically. Examples of the kinds of situations where the approach and methods to be developed during this project will have utility are the following: (1) the development of unambiguous and formally scalable artificial intelligence and robotic analogs of human classification and categorization systems; (2) the development of a global communication methodology that could be used to enhance rapid global information messaging capabilities; and (3) the construction of standardized systems for information representation in critical systems, such as medical diagnostic systems and transportation systems. The formation and communication of concepts permeate a diverse range of human activities. They play roles in education systems; in the organization and design of transportation systems; in the physical and virtual design of retail markets and consumer goods; in classifications of quality and risk in medical diagnoses; in business performance; and in social values. Psychologists, linguists, anthropologists, computer scientists, and other scholars have studied concepts by focusing on specific examples of concept formation while trying to understand how such conceptual systems are formed. One specific concept that has received attention is how color terms "evolve" and how their conceptual meaning is understood and shared by members of a society. Conceptualization of color is an important special case because color stimuli can be precisely measured and easily duplicated, and the human perceptual space of a million colors can be described with mathematical precision. This project will focus on the development and testing of mathematical models that capture the ways color term concepts are categorized and shared. The models to be designed and tested will use geometric formalisms for characterizing meaning in general and will specifically demonstrate their use by investigating color terms and concepts. Testing will use data from a wide variety of societies, including the Mesoamerican Color Survey (MCS), a database of systematically collected categorization behaviors of 900 individuals who have communicated with one or more of 116 endangered or developing languages that are at various stages of color lexicon development. The MCS is largely in hand-written form, and one product of this project will be its full digitalization using modern computer science crowd-sourcing methods. Full digitalization of the MCS database will make it available for use by the global scientific community for the first time. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.