The first object in a referential relationship is something that acts as a reference to the second object. The second object referenced 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. His referent can be anything - a material object, person, event, activity or abstract concept. The small group reference is an example of how a term can successfully move from linguistics to sociology. In our time, such incidents are not uncommon.
Definition Features
A synonym for reference is a link. Links can take various forms: thought, auditory perception (onomatopoeia), visual (text), olfactory or tactile, emotional state, relationships with others, space-time coordinate, symbolic or alphanumeric, physical object or energy projection. In some cases, methods are used that deliberately hide the link from some observers. Like in cryptography.
References are mentioned in many areas of human activity and knowledge, this term takes on shades of meaning that are 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 Central English referren, from the Central French référer, from the Latin referre, formed from the prefix re and ferre - "transfer". There are a number of words originating from one root - this is reference, referee, referent, referendum.
The verb refers (to) and its derivatives can carry the meaning of “link to” or “connect to”, as in the meaning of the links described in this article. Another meaning is to “consult”. This is reflected in such expressions as “reference work”, “reference service”, “certificate of work”, 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 proponent of indirect reference theory. Frege divided the semantic content of each expression, including sentences, into two components: meaning and reference (link). The meaning of a sentence is the thought that it expresses. Such a thought is abstract, universal and objective. The meaning of any subrepresentative expression is its contribution to the idea of what the embedded sentence expresses. Feelings define a link, and are also ways of representing objects referenced by expressions. Links are objects in the world that select words. Feelings of suggestions are thoughts. And their references are true values (true or false). References to sentences included in utterances regarding utterances and other opaque contexts are their usual meanings.
Examples
Bertrand Russell, in his later works and for reasons related to his theory of dating in epistemology, argued that the only directly referenced expressions are “logically proper names”. Logically proper names are terms such as "I", "now", "here" and other indices.
He regarded the proper names described above as “abbreviated specific descriptions”. Consequently, "Donald J. Trump" may be an abbreviation for "the current president of the United States and the husband of Melania Trump." Certain descriptions denote phrases that Russell analyzes into existentially quantified logical constructs. However, such objects should not be considered significant in themselves; they only matter in the sentence expressed by the sentences of which they are a part. Therefore, for Russell, they do not have a direct link as logically proper names.
Advanced theory
Despite the fact that reference in psychology is a better known meaning of this concept, it also plays a large role in linguistics. On Frege’s account, any referenced expression makes sense and referent. Such an “indirect reference” has certain theoretical advantages over Mill's point of view. For example, link names such as Samuel Clemens and Mark Twain pose problems for a direct reference point of view because someone might hear “Mark Twain - Samuel Clemens” and be surprised - thus their cognitive content seems different.
Despite the differences between the views of Frege and Russell, they are usually regarded as descriptive. Such descriptivism has been criticized for the name and necessity of Saul Kripke.
Kripke put forward what became known as a “modal argument” (or “argument from rigidity”). Consider the name of Aristotle and the description of "the greatest student of Plato," "the founder of logic" and "teacher of Alexander." Aristotle, obviously, corresponds to all descriptions (and many others that we usually associate with him), but it is not necessarily true that if Aristotle existed, then he was any or all of these descriptions. Aristotle could well exist without doing any of the things that made him descendants. He could exist and not become known to posterity at all, or die in infancy. Suppose Aristotle is associated with Mary with the description “the last great philosopher of antiquity,” and (actual) Aristotle died in infancy. Then the description of Mary seems to refer to Plato. But this is deeply illogical. Therefore, according to Kripke, names are hard notation. That is, they refer to the same person in every possible world in which this person exists. In the same work, Kripke formulated several other arguments against Frege-Russell's descriptivism.
Semantics
In semantics, “reference” is the relationship between nouns or pronouns and the objects that they name. Therefore, the word “John” refers to the person of John. The word "it" refers to some previously indicated object. I.e? The mentioned object is called the referent of the word. Sometimes a word denotes an object. The inverse relation, the relation from the object to the word is called an example; the object illustrates what the word means. In parsing, if a word refers to a previous word, the previous word is called the antecedent.
Gottlob Frege argued that the reference cannot be interpreted as something identical with the meaning: “Hesper” (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 that “ Hesper "is" Phosphorus ", that is, it is still the same object, even if the meanings of the words mentioned are known to us. This problem made Frege distinguish between meaning and reference to a word. Some cases seem too complicated to be classified within this framework. The adoption of the concept 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 first of which can refer to entities in the world or refer to more abstract concepts, for example, “thought”. Certain parts of speech exist only to express reference, namely anaphora, such as pronouns. A subset of reflexives expresses a joint reference of two participants in a sentence. It can be an agent (actor) and a patient (acted), as in “a person washed himself”, a subject and a recipient, as in “I showed Mary to myself”, or various other possible combinations. But not only the humanities have absorbed this term. Exact sciences can also boast of their versions of the 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, about which a little lower.
Technics and computers
In computer science, equipment reference is a value that allows a program to indirectly access a specific data item, such as a variable value or an entry in a computer's memory or in some other storage device. They say that a link refers to data, and access to data is called link dereferencing. The concept of reference equipment therefore often refers not to equipment as such, but to data.
Referentiality is different from the database itself. Typically, for links to data stored in memory in a given system, the link is implemented as a physical address where the data is in memory or in a storage device. For this reason, the link is often mistakenly confused with a pointer or address and claim that they “point” to the data. However, the link can also be implemented in other ways, such as the offset (difference) between the address of the data item and some fixed "base" address as an index in the 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 “technology 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 nontrivial search operation in some table data structure.
References are widely used in programming, especially for efficiently transferring large or volatile data as arguments to procedures or for exchanging such data among various applications. 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 considerable complexity in the program, partly due to the possibility of hanging and wild links, and partly due to the fact that the data topology with links is a directed graph, the analysis of which can be quite complicated.
Links increase the flexibility of where objects can be stored, how they are distributed, and how they are transferred between areas of the code.
An important point. As long as you can access the data link, you can access the data through it, the data itself does not need to be moved. They also facilitate the exchange of data between different areas of code. Everyone keeps a link to it.
Mechanism
The link mechanism, if it differs in implementation, is a fundamental function of a programming language. Common to almost all modern programming languages. Even some languages that do not support the direct use of links have some internal or implicit use. For example, a link-by-link agreement can be implemented with explicit or implicit use of links.
More generally, a link can be thought of as a piece of data that uniquely retrieves 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 clearly defined (unambiguous) function from K to D} {zero} determines the type of link, where zero is an image of a key that does not refer to anything significant.
An alternative representation of such a function is a directed graph called the 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 that occurs in several theories at once. From the point of view of mental processing in psychology, self-reference is used to establish identification with the mental state during introspection. This allows a person to develop their own guidelines in a greater degree of immediate awareness. However, it can also lead to circular reasoning, preventing the development of thinking.
In accordance with the theory of perceptual control (PCT), the reference condition is the state in which the output of the control system tends to change the controlled quantity. The main assertion is that "all behavior is oriented all the time to control certain quantities in relation to specific reference conditions."
Self-reference (self-reference)
Self-linking occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. A link can be expressed either directly (through some kind of intermediate sentence or formula), or through some coding. In philosophy, this also refers to the subject's ability to talk about himself or relate to himself: to have the type of thought expressed in the nominative case of the singular in the first person.
Self-reference is studied and finds application 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 creature is so powerful that it can create a stone that it cannot lift. The epimenidic paradox "All Cretans are Liars", uttered by the ancient Greek Cretan, was one of the first recorded versions. Modern philosophy sometimes uses the same technique to demonstrate that a putative concept is meaningless or poorly defined.
Intergroup Reference
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 identifies himself in one way or another. Intergroup reference 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 referentiality of small groups, because this is an important phenomenon from the point of view of microsociology.