Anatoly P. Suprun

This article describes a categorical structure of perception of still-life painting. Analysis is done on the system of visual opposition elements in still-life. A still-life is considered a “perceptual statement about the world”, and a “visual aphorism”. The research is based on such methods as: semantic spaces constructing and their transformation at introduction of additional elements in still-lifes. It also gives full analysis of an interpretation of complex images and understanding of types of still-life as a visual hermeneutics.

Stating the main principles of Buddhist philosophy and psychology is usually going with help of ancient categories and metaphors, which had been developed since the fifth century B.C. till the tenth century A.C. That means they were worked out by quite different kind of mentality (culture, language, traditions…). That makes those categories and metaphors almost untranslatable on European languages properly and unequivocally. In its turn, that situation makes difficult any kind of modern scientific research of the phenomena, discovered inside Buddhism, as well as ideas, developed in it. In this article we set a question of possibility to select such basic concepts of modern natural science, which can effectively translate main oriental ideas about Reality into modern scientific paradigm and discover the meaning of psychological phenomena from the transpersonal psychology sphere of interest. We take a look on some comparisons between pictures of Reality in modern physics and in Buddhist paradigm, allocating two sides of Reality, called Nirvana and Samsara.

The article demonstrates the inadequacy in the traditional approach of psychology to the description of products of mental representation of perception. The principles of objective representation of subjective experience (principles of “mental map” construction) contain a whole range of contradictions. We propose a consistent mathematical description of the “mental map” based on psychosemiotic principles. Instead of the classical space of characteristics/properties we introduce semantic space that opens the way to a truly adequate representation of psychic reality. The article discusses metrics of the mental map, as well as substantiates the possibility of applying conservation laws to psychology. It is shown that it is possible to reach an adequate representation of research object in the humanities, equivalent to that of natural sciences in terms of accuracy. To verify a new approach, we make use of our theoretical deductions in the explanation of experimental data widely known in psychophysics and inconsistent with Stevens law.