Proposition (psychology)
The term " proposition " is a synonym for sentence , but its main meaning stands for the sentence content . In addition, the expression is associated with a psychological or constructivist meaning:
"Proposition" is defined as the "smallest, abstract unit of knowledge that describes a state of affairs and that makes it possible to switch between different representations of knowledge, for example from concepts to images and vice versa".
Or one relates the expression to mental processes:
"Proposition describes the basic structural feature of memory, namely what semantic predicate - argument - relation (of knowledge structures) for a certain word is present in consciousness . One associates, for example, the word" cut "with the agent (someone or something that can cut), the object (anything that can be cut), and the instrument (anything that can cut through something).
It should be noted that this is a constructivist position, as it conceptually grasps the assumed elementary functionality , but does not say anything about the concrete propositional connection directions and characteristics. These contents are subject to pre-conceptual and reflexive influences and can be understood as differently malleable / determined, depending on the time horizon and technical direction (including their methodological structure). "
It is in this sense that John R. Anderson and his PhD supervisor Gordon H. Bower use the term in their memory theory (1973, 1983, 1988). According to this theory, a state of affairs is stored in the memory in that the representations of the semantic elements of the state of affairs (i.e. subject, predicate, object, context, etc.) are linked to one another through associations . Example: The reminder "Last summer I went on vacation in Turkey" consists of the elementary (and also usable in other contexts) terms "past summer" (time), "Turkey" (place), "I" (subject), "Take vacation" (predicate). This unit of memory could be verbalized or visualized in many ways.
swell
- ^ Homberger, Subject Dictionary for Linguistics (2000) / Proposition