What's In a Name
Posted by Dan Creswell in Philosophy, Technology, tags: Engineering, Philosophy, TechnologyAs soon as we give something a name, it becomes open to abuse and misuse.
Vendors can claim they are doing it and support it, developers can claim they do it, use it or implement it. There are a bunch of ready examples: Agile, XP, SOA and REST. Naming something makes it easy to ignore or forget its underpinnings, the elements that deliver value.
As a martial artist, I’m familiar with this pattern of behaviour: various people claim to practice and teach authentic Silat, Karate, Kung Fu, Escrima and so on. Inevitably some of them are exposed as pretenders. One of the more notable martial artists, Bruce Lee was sufficiently concerned about this that he gave serious consideration to leaving his approach to martial art (Jeet Kune Do) unnamed*.
Is it worth naming things? Might we be better served by making our knowledge, approaches and philosophies visible for others without naming them to adopt or not as they see fit? Would it reduce the number of valueless certifications, buzzword cv’s and endless wars over which way is the way and who’s doing it right?
* Jeet Kune Do (1997) ‘Actually, I never wanted to give a name to the kind of Chinese gung fu that I have invented, but for convenience sake, I still call it “Jeet Kune Do”. However, I want to emphasize that there is no distinction between jeet kune do and any other kind of gung fu, for I strongly object to formality, and to the idea of distinction of branches.’
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I’m sure you know it’s always been a problem and will always be a problem. However, check out this approach to a solution by C.S Pierce and his philosophy of Pragmatism. He ended up renaming it to Pragmaticism because of all the people who diluted and changed his original meaning to suit their own ends.
“But at present, the word [pragmatism] begins to be met with occasionally in the literary journals, where it gets abused in the merciless way that words have to expect when they fall into literary clutches. … So then, the writer, finding his bantling “pragmatism” so promoted, feels that it is time to kiss his child good-by and relinquish it to its higher destiny; while to serve the precise purpose of expressing the original definition, he begs to announce the birth of the word “pragmaticism”, which is ugly enough to be safe from kidnappers. (C. S. Peirce, CP 5.414.)”
Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmaticism
So just use a word that is ugly enough that people wont want to use it for their own purposes.
How about the Pragmaticistic Dictator?
Jason
“I’m sure you know it’s always been a problem and will always be a problem.”
Indeed, I just feel it’s rather more widespread than ought to be acceptable for a professional discipline. Goes into the same box as all the developers and architects that wait with bated breath for vendors to tell them what next great thing is, and of course it turns out to be whatever the vendor wants to sell
“So just use a word that is ugly enough that people wont want to use it for their own purposes.
How about the Pragmaticistic Dictator?”
Love it.
Hey Dan, long time.
I think the problem is around naming them as things with nouns rather than actions with verbs. The ignorance conundrum (you can’t know something if you don’t already know it) is particularly bad with nouns because if you don’t understand all the implied nouns, you’ll hit the problem you describe. If you describe with verbs, it’s much more likely going to imply direction to take which then leads to other directions.
Cheers!