Resemblance

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Related to Resemblant: Disingenuity

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Resemblance

in philosophy, the correspondence between a representation, or image, and its original.

The concept of resemblance, which is used in modeling, embraces three basic relationships: the correspondence between a qualitative property of a representation and a particular feature of the original (for example, the color green as perceived in the leaves of a plant corresponds to a given length of the electromagnetic waves emitted by the surface of the leaves); the correspondence between the structural design of a representation and the structural design of the original (for example, the design of a geographic map corresponds to the geometric design of a locality), where distinct types of structural correspondence may be described by different mathematical mappings, such as isomorphism or homomorphism; and the correspondence between the quantitative characteristics of a representation and those of the original (for example, quantitative thermostatic value corresponds to measurable body temperature).

The degree of resemblance, or of congruity, between a representation and its original can be evaluated in terms of the following: reliability of information, of what is known, or, in the case of theoretical constructs, demonstrability; exactness and fullness of representation; and depth or relevance of representation of particular properties, connections, and relations. Dialectical materialism rejects the one-sided interpretation of resemblance as a mirror reflection embodied in physical likeness or as the hieroglyphic representation of an object proposed by the theory of hieroglyphs.

REFERENCES

See references under REFLECTION.

V. S. TIUKHTIN

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