We define `ousiometrics' to be the study of essential meaning in whatever context that meaningful signals are communicated, and `telegnomics' as the study of remotely sensed knowledge. From work emerging through the middle of the 20th century, the essence of meaning has become generally accepted as being well captured by the three orthogonal dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activation (EPA). By re-examining first types and then tokens for the English language, and through the use of automatically annotated histograms -- `ousiograms' -- we find here that: 1. The essence of meaning conveyed by words is instead best described by a compass-like power-danger (PD) framework, and 2. Analysis of a disparate collection of large-scale English language corpora -- literature, news, Wikipedia, talk radio, and social media -- shows that natural language exhibits a systematic bias toward safe, low danger words -- a reinterpretation of the Pollyanna principle's positivity bias for written expression. To help justify our choice of dimension names and to help address the problems with representing observed ousiometric dimensions by bipolar adjective pairs, we introduce and explore `synousionyms' and `antousionyms' -- ousiometric counterparts of synonyms and antonyms. We further show that the PD framework revises the circumplex model of affect as a more general model of state of mind. Finally, we use our findings to construct and test a prototype `ousiometer', a telegnomic instrument that measures ousiometric time series for temporal corpora. We contend that our power-danger ousiometric framework provides a complement for entropy-based measurements, and may be of value for the study of a wide variety of communication across biological and artificial life.

翻译：我们将“奥西计量学”定义为研究有意义信号传播情境下本质意义的学科，将“远程认知学”定义为研究远程感知知识的学科。自20世纪中叶以来的研究表明，意义的本质已被普遍认为可通过评价、效能和激活三个正交维度进行准确刻画。通过首先重新审视英语语言中的“类型”，再考察其“实例”，并借助自动标注的直方图——“奥西图”——我们发现：1. 词语所传达的意义本质更宜用类似罗盘的“力量-危险”框架描述；2. 对不同大规模英语语料库（文学、新闻、维基百科、谈话类广播及社交媒体）的分析表明，自然语言系统性地偏向使用安全、低危险的词语——这是对波莉安娜原则中书面表达积极偏好的重新诠释。为论证所选维度名称的合理性，并解决用两极形容词对表征观测到的奥西计量维度所存在的问题，我们引入并探讨了“同义奥西词”与“反义奥西词”——即与同义词和反义词对应的奥西计量概念。我们进一步指出，“力量-危险”框架修正了情感环形模型，将其推广为更具普适性的心境状态模型。最后，我们基于研究发现构建并测试了原型“奥西计”——一种测量时序语料库奥西计量时间序列的远程认知仪器。我们认为该力量-危险奥西计量框架可作为基于熵测量的补充工具，对生物与人工智能中各类通信的研究具有潜在价值。