I was noodling around
with stipulative and legislative definitions, and started to diagram out what I
was finding. It occurred to me that I have not really had a rethink about diagramming the relationships between the concepts involved in definition work for a while. Pretty soon I found that I
lacked some of the fundamentals, and had to get them sorted out before I could deal with stipulative and legislative definitions.
The result of that effort is the cartoon shown in Figure
1. I am calling it a "cartoon" because I
have not had time yet to work it up in some formal notation, such as conceptual
graph. I also realize it is
incomplete. For instance, I have not had
time to figure out where to put Nominal Definition.
Figure 1: Relations of
Concept and Term
In Figure 1 all supertype-subtype relations are indicated by
solid lines, with the label "is genus of", indicating how the
superordinate genus is related to the subordinate genus. This is to distinguish them from other kinds of relationships.
So let us look at what we have (in no particular order):
Term: a linguistic
symbol that signifies a concept.
Common Term: a
term that signifies a concept that is understood by the general population.
Technical Term: a
term that signifies a concept that is understood by a restricted community, and
exists within a specialized context.
Existing Term: a term
that has been in use prior to a specific point in time.
New Term: a term
that is created at a particular point in time, and did not exist prior to this
point in time.
Interpretant: a
mind or machine that understands a particular term to signify a particular concept.
Terminologist: a person
or group of people that assigns a term to concept. The term may be an Existing Term or New Term.
Concept: cognition of a
universal as distinguished from the particulars which it unifies [from
Baldwin's Dictionary of Philosophy, under "Conception"].
Previously Existing Concept: a concept that exists prior to a particular time,
irrespective of whether it is known to exist or not.
Not Previously Existing Concept: a concept that does not exist prior to a particular time. [It was this that I was interested in with
respect to stipulative and legislative definitions.]
Previously Known Concept: a Previously Existing Concept that is known to exist. It is known by at least someone. However, there is no guarantee it is known by
everyone.
Not Previously Known Concept: a Previously Existing Concept that is not known to exist. It might be unknown to everyone, or to a
specific community.
Real Definition: an
explanation of a concept.
Critique
Well, this is interesting, but within
my preliminary definitions some terms remain undefined.
They are: linguistic symbol;
general population; community; context [ugh! I hate that one]; time [more
difficult than "context"]; mind; machine; signify; person; group of
people; universal; particular; exist.
I think I am also missing a taxonomy
(or other concept set) under Previously Known Concept, Not Previously Known
Concept to indicate "known / not known by whom".
I will have to figure out all of this in
the future - too late today.
Other Notes
- · It is interesting to see how Term has two taxonomies: Common Term, Technical Term; and Existing Term, New Term. These seem to be fully external to each other ("orthogonal"), which introduces complexity.
- · I wanted to show that the question "what does T mean?" where "T" is some term is a very suspect question. I do not think the diagram shows it. I think this is a false assumption of univocity, which is something else. Oh well.
This is very much a work in
progress. I will push on from here to
stipulative and legislative definitions.
The graphical representation of concepts and terms in the context of communities is a novel and valuable representation technique.
ReplyDeleteThere are two aspects of business terms that differ from scientific terms and thus make it more difficult to reach a common understanding in a community. Business terms are “manmade”. They are not defined by nor bounded by laws of nature such as biology, chemistry or physics. Some are defined based on a formula such as mortgage backed securities but the formulas themselves are subject to interpretations as well. Secondly, the meaning of a business term varies by context, time and community. Therefore the meaning of these terms is more dynamic and volatile. These factors are not addressed in the creation and maintenance of business terms. A term should have attributes that reflect its currency (freshness), its shelf life, who was present at the time of creation (founding fathers) and the place and conditions when the term was conceived. Without this environmental information, a definition of a term is arbitrary and random. I think the “cartoon” is a way to capture this important information as an instance of creation of the term.
I suggest that legislative terms are even more difficult to map. Legislation is an attempt to bring ideologies to compromise and when written down they are purposely vague and subject to interpretation. Terms are selected to represent intent rather than consensus or precision. Selecting terms is more art and rhetoric than science. However, the graphical representation can be used to examine and expose the reasons for misunderstandings and interpretations but it is unlikely legislators will adopt this discipline for writing legislation following this rigor.
I think this representation is a valuable technique and worthy of further exploration. Great idea!