Construct · 4 fields · 6 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
● jingle · one word, four constructs Nearest construct by meaninggovernmentcompare the meaningsEvery construct on the map is compared with every other by the meaning of its definitions, and the closest one is surfaced here. The nearest construct to state is government.
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The complete specification of a physical system's condition at an instant, from which every measurable property follows. In quantum mechanics Dirac's The Principles of Quantum Mechanics (1930) fixed the state as a vector in an abstract space, the state vector or ket, which encodes the probabilities of every possible measurement outcome. In thermodynamics, as set out in Callen's Thermodynamics and an Introduction to Thermostatistics, a state is fixed instead by a handful of macroscopic variables such as temperature, pressure, and volume. The referent is a system, not a person and not an institution, and the unit is the system's full physical condition, so the word carries no connotation of temporariness or authority.[1][2]
The compulsory political association that, within a given territory, successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force. Weber gave this definition in Politics as a Vocation (1919), where the state is the institution that alone may authorize violence and to which people concede the right to rule. Here state is a countable noun for a sovereign body, not a condition of anything: it names an organization with a territory, officials, and a claim to legitimacy. It shares only the letters with the physicist's state and the programmer's state; the referent is a governing institution and the unit is the polity, not a system's condition.[3]
The stored information a machine or program holds at a given step, which together with the input determines what it does next. Turing's 1937 On Computable Numbers defined a computing machine by its m-configuration, the internal condition that, with the scanned symbol, fixes the next move, and this is the ancestor of machine state. In the theory of finite automata set out by Hopcroft and Ullman, a machine is literally a finite set of states with transitions between them, and program state is the current contents of a program's memory. The referent is a machine or program and the unit is stored configuration, so unlike the physicist's state it is discrete and symbolic, and unlike the political state it is not an institution.[4][5]
A temporary condition a person is in at a moment, as opposed to a trait, which is a stable disposition. Spielberger's Manual for the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (1983) draws the distinction sharply for anxiety: state anxiety is a transient reaction of tension and apprehension that rises and falls with the situation, while trait anxiety is a person's standing tendency to react anxiously. Here state is a within-person condition that changes over minutes or hours, measured by how one feels right now. The referent is a person and the unit is a momentary psychological condition, which differs from the physicist's system, the political institution, and the machine's stored information.[6]
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