Defintion usage and drift - Rant

[Silmenume]

I'm not sure I understand this deference to the original coiners of useful terms.

Right now the debate of an "idea" has been ground to a halt because of this almost fetishistic deferral to original authors.  I believe it is important, historically, to honor and give credit to those who coin useful terms, however once in the public realm those meanings will drift and change as understanding grows.

To freeze the meaning of a coined word or phrase in time is to do a disservice to discourse especially if no other "word" suffices.  Is it worth the stifling of debate to hold onto a meaning of a word, especially one that is proving to be outmoded?  What's the point?  Are we more worried about intellectual "property rights" or are we more devoted to getting to root of understanding?

[clehrich]

Nature of the beast, I'm afraid, Jay.

Let me make a brief comparison to how this sort of thing works in academia, and then point out how the Forge necessarily differs.

In academia, the way new (good) jargon gets introduced is this.  Some clever-boots writes an article or a book that uses the term, defines it, and applies it fairly rigorously.  Such an article normally runs to about 25 pages, with references; a book can be quite long.

As a rule, the same person continues to work with this new term and concept, and then others, after some years usually, pick it up and start making use of it.  They then define their usages with respect to the original usage, often indicating ways in which they will re-apply the term to other situations.  In other cases, they may say, "This term is very useful, and X defines it like this, and so now I'm going to go use that quite strictly."

Eventually, the term may become common property, and may begin to drift strongly from its original usage, even to the point of becoming useless, incoherent, or flatly at odds with the original usage.

Two fast examples:

Emic/etic
This distinction, formulated by linguist Kenneth Pike, essentially distinguishes between a linguistic object (a sound, for example) as it operates within the meaning-system of its various users, and that same object as a piece of raw data outside of any meaning-system.  Thus /kat/ in English emic usage means a fluffy animal that purrs, but viewed etically it's a sound that can be spotted used throughout English without that emic meaning attached.

Then the same distinction got applied within anthropology, essentially to mean the difference between a native (emic) perspective and an exterior, anthropologist's (etic) perspective.  This emphasizes the point that the native perspective may be fully coherent and not at all the same as the observer's; this is important, for example, when looking at something like a magic spell, which may be emically understood to be effective -- they will provide what they consider evidence, and what is in fact emically understood as evidence -- but may etically be obviously ineffective -- it doesn't work, from our point of view.  The emic/etic distinction here reinforces our understanding that we need to see how they see it.

More recently, this has been criticized, because it implies a facticity and certainty to the exterior (etic) perspective that underscores old colonial and patronizing biases, and so forth.

Deconstruction
In Derrida's usage, rather simplistically, a means of discerning the metaphysical assumptions that necessarily undergird a whole range of truth-claims embedded in philosophy, literature, and elsewhere.  The point is that these texts deconstruct themselves: we examine them closely, and spot the ways in which the texts are founded on unworkable and in fact undesirable to their authors metaphysical assumptions.

Once this enters American literary criticism, deconstruction becomes a warrant for interpreting any text to mean anything at all, because there is no stable meaning or certainty in the text and therefore you can twist it as you like.  As you can see, I think, this is not at all what Derrida had in mind, but it has poisoned a great deal of discussion of the term -- though that is finally changing.

----------------
Now at the Forge, we have every part of this process, except the first: we don't write huge articles and books defining terms in a careful procedural manner, then applying them, and so forth.  So the baseline is at that level unstable.

If we then proceed as in the academy, we do so very rapidly.  The oldest terms specific to the Forge are extremely recent.

The danger, then, is that the drift of a term will lead to total incoherence.  In theory, Derrida could have corrected the lit.crit. gang, though he chose not to do so.  And anthropologists now can argue, from a strong textual basis, that the emic/etic distinction has outlived its purpose.

But at the Forge, without this strong textual foundation, such drift tends to lead to incoherence.  I mean X, you mean Y, and Ron means Z, and we all think we're talking about the same thing.  We cannot really debate the point, because the definitions aren't stable enough in the first place.

So when we have a debate about the extent and implications of a term, it is indeed very important to get its coiner on-board with the discussion.  Without that, we will soon have two versions of the term (at least), each claiming validity on a different basis, without hope of clarification.

Furthermore, RPG discussion has been marred by a lot of loose terminological usage.  One thing you cannot take away from Ron, ultimately, is that he has laid the groundwork for relatively rigorous discussion by nailing down at least a few terms.  If discussion is to proceed fruitfully, we do have to try to stick to the definitions as written.

If we find such a definition invalid or unworkable, it is necessary to provide a specific and generally-accepted corrective, as well.  But this again requires at least minimal agreement from the coiner, who otherwise will use it as he or she originally used it, confusing future discussion.

I understand why you're frustrated, and yes, I know which discussion is bugging you.  But you have to allow some time to pass, and you have to allow for the fact that whatever some may tell you, this is NOT an academic forum.  We're just trying to be as rigorous as we can, and that isn't all that rigorous -- which means we need to hang onto what shreds of definitional rigor are available to us.

Hope that helps.

[Silmenume]

Yes it does!

... and Thanks!

I'm going to relax and be a much better citizen here at the Forge now!

[contracycle]

The usage and construction of definitions is useful.  Starting every argument by reference to the definitions, or by a call to clarify or define things, is counterproductive.  It is essentially an appeal to authority, although I am aware the motivation is often to establish common ground.  There seems to be amistalken assumption that a definition is factual rather than itself an argument.

[CPXB]

The usage and construction of definitions is useful.  Starting every argument by reference to the definitions, or by a call to clarify or define things, is counterproductive.  It is essentially an appeal to authority, although I am aware the motivation is often to establish common ground.  There seems to be amistalken assumption that a definition is factual rather than itself an argument.

I definitely agree with this but will go even farther.  IME, when people start to argue over the definition of words it is in an opposite of subtle attempt to stop the conversation, a pure rhetorical trick not meant to clarify but obscure.

[clehrich]

The usage and construction of definitions is useful.  Starting every argument by reference to the definitions, or by a call to clarify or define things, is counterproductive.  It is essentially an appeal to authority, although I am aware the motivation is often to establish common ground.  There seems to be amistalken assumption that a definition is factual rather than itself an argument.

I definitely agree with this but will go even farther.  IME, when people start to argue over the definition of words it is in an opposite of subtle attempt to stop the conversation, a pure rhetorical trick not meant to clarify but obscure.

I know what you guys are referring to, but as general principles I do not agree at all.

It depends very deeply on what it is we're defining.  Here's an example of what I think you guys are talking about:

A: X is an argument I'm making about roleplaying games
B: No, that's not a roleplaying game, so hardy har har
A: By "roleplaying game" I mean Y
B: I don't like that definition, I like Z
A: But Ron Edwards says it means Y, so there you are
B: Well Ron Edwards can get stuffed, he's wrong, blah blah[/list:u]This is stupid, and a waste of time.  B, by shifting the discussion to a definitions question about a basic sort of term, has made the discussion relatively pointless.  A, by reaching for authority, has ensured that B succeeds.

Now here's what Jay is talking about:
C: In his book

Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida defines "grammatology" as X.  I will now apply that definition to Y.  Here's what I get.

Or....

C: In his thread "On Harglebargle," Dave Jones said that Harglebargle is X.  I think that's useful, but would revise it a bit to be X(1).

To which the respondents say:

D: I don't agree with Jones's definition of Harglebargle, so I think Z.
E: Since Jones is here on the Forge, let's just first of all get clarification on what Harglebargle meant to him.[/list:u]Now Jay is annoyed, with some justification, when Jones doesn't weigh in, because everything is hanging.  My point was that unless we have common ground about what Jones meant by Harglebargle, it's very difficult to get on to whether X, X(1), or Z is really the most useful definition.

Is this useless?  Not at all.  It enables intelligent discussion of the issues to which the term refers in the first place.  Without clarification, we're stuck.  On the other hand, what Jay is afraid of -- and again, he has some justification for this -- is that nobody will be able to discuss those issues until Jones weighs in, and if he doesn't, for whatever reason, the topic is made off-limits.

My point in the long post above was simply that because the Forge is very fluid and freeform, there's only so much that can be done about this.  The obvious solution, to my mind, is to wait a bit.  If Jones never shows up, you just take whatever definitions he's provided, start there, and then deal with it as you see fit.

There is no authority claim implicit here.  In fact, the whole point is to get out of authority claims.

I tell my writing students that a summary has to cover the ground sufficiently clearly and accurately that the person summarized would say, "Yeah, that's basically right."  This then gives you license to do whatever the hell you want with that person's ideas, ranging from undermining them to applying them elsewhere to whatever you can think of.  The claim is not that this is an authority; it's that by summarizing and being clear, you have given the appropriate nod to the person you're dealing with, and can then let loose.  If you don't do this, however, you're in grave danger of that person saying, "Nope, you missed my point, your whole argument sucks, you're an idiot."  And that person would be right, although that way of putting it is obviously extreme.

Is debating coined terms and neologisms useful?  Yes.  Is debating ordinary terms not used in a critically-important fashion useful?  No, not at all.  But that has nothing to do with what Jay is concerned about.

[contracycle]

From the perspective of developing a theory or argument, I completely disagree that it is useful to rephrase or redefine existing terminology, which appears to be Jays proposition.  I would prefer to make up a term or add a qualifier to an existing term.  Otherwise I fear you just end up adding contextual explanations that undermines the very utility of a definition.

I do think that definitions should stand as exrternal and objective references to ensure all involved are on the same page, but what bugs me most is discussion OF definitions as if they were true or meaningful.  They are not, they are merely conventions, and have to be dethroned as argument clinchers.