Essay Database

Classification is the fundamental interpretive process found in political cognition, whether individual or collective. Recall that Ronald Reagan's ``freedom fighters'' and Leonid Brezhnev's ``bandits and criminals'' were two classifications for the same Afghanistan resistance. These leaders selected labels to call forth desired political actions in their audiences. The intended perlocutionary effects arise because the labels elicit particular ways of framing the problem, or ``seeing-as'' (Wittgenstein, 1953), and from these stereotypical, or ``natural'' political responses follow. Examples …

…by keeping individual recognizers simple - and simpler recognizers facilitate specification with English sentences. Beyond semantic content analysis, lexical classification extends the referential capabilities of RELATUS because it provides a basic inference mechanism that augments indexation, semantically disambiguates word senses, and provides criteria for further deliberation in reference (section 3.2). As it helps extend the model reference (section 2.3), lexical classification in turn leads to more sophisticated text models that better approximate human linguistic and cognitive capabilities.