Reference - what is it? Concept and types of reference

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

The first object in a referential relationship is something that acts as a reference to the second object. The second object referred to by the first object is called the referent of the first object. The name of the first object is usually a phrase or expression. Or some other symbolic representation. Its referent can be anything - a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept. Small group reference is an example of how a term can successfully migrate from linguistics to sociology. Incidents like this are not uncommon these days.

Features of the definition

Synonymous with reference - link. Links can take many forms: thought, auditory perception (onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory or tactile, emotional state, relationship with others, space-time coordinate, symbolic or alphanumeric, physical object or energy projection. In some cases, methods are used that deliberately hide the link fromsome observers. As in cryptography.

References appear in many areas of human endeavor and knowledge, and the term takes on shades of meaning specific to the context in which it is used. Some of them are described in the sections below.

Etymology

Reference is a word of foreign origin. The word reference comes from the Middle English referren, from the Middle French référer, from the Latin referre, formed from the prefix re and ferre - "to transfer". There are a number of words that come from the same root - this is referentiality, referee, referent, referendum.

The verb refers to (to) and its derivatives can carry the meaning "to refer to" or "to connect with", as in the reference meanings described in this article. Another meaning is "to consult". This is reflected in expressions such as “reference work”, “reference service”, “job reference”, etc.

In linguistics and philology

Studies of how language interacts with the world are called reference theories. Another name is the theory of reference. Frege was a supporter of the mediated reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of every expression, including sentences, into two components: meaning and reference (reference). The meaning of a sentence is the thought it expresses. Such thought is abstract, universal and objective. The meaning of any sub-representative expression lies in its contribution to the idea of what the embedded sentence expresses. Feelings define a reference, and are also ways of representing objects, onwhich refer expressions. Links are objects in the world that select words. The feelings of sentences are thoughts. And their references are true values (true or false). Sentence references included in statements regarding statements and other opaque contexts are their normal meanings.

Examples

Bertrand Russell, in his later writings, and for reasons related to his theory of acquaintance in epistemology, argued that the only directly referential expressions are "logically proper names". Logically proper names are terms such as "I", "now", "here" and other indices.

He viewed the proper names described above as "abbreviated specific descriptions". Therefore, "Donald J. Trump" may be short for "current President of the United States and husband of Melania Trump." Certain descriptions denote phrases that are analyzed by Russell into existentially quantified logical constructs. However, such objects should not be considered significant in themselves, they only have meaning in the sentence expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Hence, for Russell, they are not directly referenced as logically proper names.

Advanced Theory

Despite the fact that reference in psychology is the more well-known meaning of this concept, in linguistics it also plays a big role. On Frege's account, any referring expression has a meaning and a referent. Such an "indirect link" hascertain theoretical advantages over Mill's point of view. For example, referenced names such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain create problems for a direct referential point of view because one might hear "Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens" and be surprised - thus their cognitive content seems different.

Despite the differences between Frege's and Russell's views, they are generally regarded as descriptivists. Such descriptivism has been criticized in the title and necessity of Saul Kripke.

Kripke advanced what became known as the "modal argument" (or "argument from rigidity"). Consider Aristotle's name and description of "Plato's greatest disciple", "founder of logic", and "Alexander's teacher". Aristotle obviously fits all descriptions (and many others that we commonly associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed, he would be any or all of these descriptions. Aristotle could well exist without doing any of the things for which he is known to posterity. He could exist and not become known to posterity at all, or die in infancy. Suppose that Aristotle is associated in Mary with the description "the last great philosopher of antiquity", and (actually) Aristotle died in infancy. Then the description of Mary seems to refer to Plato. But this is deeply illogical. Hence, according to Kripke, names are rigid designations. That is, they refer to the same person in every possible world in which that person exists. In thatIn the same work, Kripke formulated several other arguments against Frege-Russell descriptivism.

Semantics

In semantics, "referencing" is the relationship between nouns or pronouns and the objects that are named by them. Therefore, the word "John" refers to the person of John. The word "it" refers to some previously specified object. That is? The mentioned object is called the referent of the word. Sometimes a word denotes an object. The reverse relation, the relation from the object to the word, is called an example; the object illustrates what the word stands for. In parsing, if a word refers to a previous word, the previous word is called an antecedent.

Gottlob Frege argued that the reference cannot be interpreted as something identical with the meaning: "Hesperus" (the ancient Greek name for the "evening star") and "Phosphorus" (the ancient Greek name for the "morning star") refer to Venus, but the astronomical fact is in that "Hesperus" is "Phosphorus", that is, it is still one and the same object, even if the meanings of the mentioned words are known to us. This problem led Frege to distinguish between meaning and reference to a word. Some cases seem too complex to be classified within this framework. Accepting the notion of a secondary link may be necessary to fill the gap.

Linguistic sign

The very concept of a linguistic sign is a combination of content and expression, the former of which may refer to entities in the world or refer to moreabstract concepts, such as "thought". Certain parts of speech exist only to express reference, namely: anaphoras such as pronouns. A subset of reflexives expresses a joint reference of two participants in a sentence. It can be agent (actor) and patient (acted), as in "the man washed himself", subject and recipient, as in "I showed Mary to myself", or various other possible combinations. But not only the humanities have absorbed this term. The exact sciences also boast their own versions of this term, such as the dispersion and reference of light in physics. But a much broader definition of reference is given to us by computer science, which is discussed below.

Equipment and computers

In computer science, a hardware reference is a value that allows a program to indirectly refer to a particular piece of data, such as the value of a variable or a record in the computer's memory or some other storage device. A reference is said to refer to data, and accessing data is called dereferencing a reference. The concept of hardware reference therefore often refers not to hardware per se, but to data.

Reference is different from the database itself. Typically, for references to data stored in memory on a given system, the reference is implemented as the physical address where the data resides in memory or on a storage device. For this reason, a reference is often mistakenly confused with a pointer or address and claimed to "point" to data. However, the reference can also be implemented in other ways such as offset(difference)between the address of the data element and some fixed "base" address as an index in an array. Or, more abstractly, as a descriptor. More broadly, on the Web, links can be network addresses, such as URLs. In this context, the term "technical reference" is sometimes used.

Differences

The concept of reference (reference) should not be confused with other values (keys or identifiers) that uniquely identify a data element, but provide access to it only through a non-trivial lookup operation in some table data structure.

References are widely used in programming, especially for efficiently passing large or volatile data as arguments to procedures, or for exchanging such data among different uses. In particular, a reference may point to a variable or record that contains references to other data. This idea is the basis of indirect addressing and many related data structures such as linked lists. Links can cause significant complexity in a program, partly because of the possibility of dangling and wild links, and partly because the topology of data with links is a directed graph, which can be quite difficult to parse.

References increase the flexibility of where objects can be stored, how they are distributed, and how they are passed between code areas.

Important point. As long as the data link can be accessed, the data can be accessed through it, the data itself is notneed to be moved. They also make it easier to share data between different areas of code. Everyone keeps a link to it.

Mechanism

The reference mechanism, when implemented differently, is a fundamental feature of a programming language. Common to almost all modern programming languages. Even some languages that do not support direct use of references have some internal or implicit use. For example, the calling-by-reference convention can be implemented with explicit or implicit references.

More generally, a link can be thought of as a piece of data that allows you to uniquely retrieve another piece of data. This includes primary keys in databases and keys in an associative array. If we have a set of keys K and a set of data objects D, any well-defined (one-to-one) function from K to D ∪ {null} defines a reference type, where null is a representation of a key that does not refer to anything meaningful.

An alternative representation of such a function is a directed graph, called a reachability graph. Here, each data element is represented by a vertex, and there is an edge from u to v if the data element in u refers to the data element in v. The maximum output degree is one. These graphs are valuable in garbage collection, where they can be used to separate accessible from inaccessible objects.

Psychology

In psychology, reference is a very common concept found in several theories at once. From the pointThe mental processing view in psychology uses self-reference to establish identification with a mental state during introspection. This allows the individual to develop their own bearings into a greater degree of immediate awareness. However, it can also lead to circular reasoning, preventing the development of thinking.

According to the Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), the reference condition is the state in which the output of the control system tends to change the controlled value. The main claim is that "all behavior is oriented at all times to the control of certain quantities in relation to specific referential conditions."

Self-reference (self-reference)

Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference can be expressed either directly (through some intermediate clause or formula) or through some encoding. In philosophy, it also refers to the subject's ability to talk about or relate to itself: to have a type of thought expressed in the nominative singular in the first person.

Self-reference is studied and used in mathematics, philosophy, computer programming and linguistics. Self-referencing statements are sometimes paradoxical, they can also be considered recursive.

In classical philosophy, paradoxes were created by self-referential concepts such as the omnipotence paradox: to establish whether a being so powerful that it can create a stone is possible,which it cannot lift. Epimenides' paradox "All Cretans are liars" uttered by an ancient Greek Cretan was one of the first recorded versions. Modern philosophy sometimes uses the same technique to demonstrate that a proposed concept is meaningless or poorly defined.

Intergroup referencing

In sociology there is such a thing as a reference group. It denotes a social group to which a person is accustomed to refer. And with which he somehow identifies himself. Intergroup referencing is the ability of several groups to refer to each other.

The theory of reference groups is regularly used to analyze the current socio-political situation in the country. In recent decades, sociologists have paid close attention to the reference of small groups, because this is an important phenomenon from the point of view of microsociology.