ONOMANTICS AND TERMINOLOGY
[You may return to the reference number in Part One by using the HOME button on your screen, or you may return to the TOP of the paper.]1. No doubt after a standard term for each concept in a system has been accepted by those who use it, one can produce alphabetized lists of these terms followed by descriptions of the concepts they designate -- an example can be found in the Compilation of engineering terms produced by the American Society for Testing Materials (ASTM). However, alphabetized lists of concepts are as exceptional for describing sets of linked concepts as is the systematic format used in Roget's Thesaurus for listing lexemes -- actually, some versions have been alphabetized -- one of the best is Roget II.
2. Although some folks argue that any object can only be understood or talked about as an individual concept, my own preference is to make a sharp distinction between objects and the characteristics, actions, or properties of objects that come to our minds as notions or concepts. By contrast, objects have an independent existence outside of our perceptions.
3. Terminology, as a field of research and practice, has been handicapped from its origins, by its use of term as part of the name of the field. Although its fundamental goals and methods include onomantic (ana-semantic) analysis, the term term misleads those who have only a superficial knowledge of Onomantics. They easily accept Terminology as a type of semantic or lexicographic field that focusses on the technical vocabulary of well-established subject fields or special languages.
Of course, we do need the help of linguists and specialized lexicographers to analyze the vocabulary used in special languages, but the problems involved in the lexicography of LSP (Languages for Special Purposes, as it is often also called) differ significantly from those involved in the onomantic analysis of the concepts represented in these languages. The distinction is, essentially, the difference between the semantic analysis of lexemes already in use and the ana-semantic processes involved in identifying the related concepts needed in a given subject field whether of not they already have terms or may, as is typical for newly created fields, offer several ambiguous synonyms for each important new concept.
4. One might oversimplify the time perspective of Lexicography and Onomantics by saying that the former is conservative while the latter is radical. This might help one understand why Lexicography is well- established and can boast hundreds of dictionaries as proof of its importance. By contrast, Onomantics is struggling for recognition and may even be viewed as a possible threat to the status quo. It cannot even boast of any well recognized conceptual glossary that is clearly based on an onomantic perspective -- my INTERCOCTA GLOSSARY for Ethnicity Research, although distinctly onomantic in design, is not an exception because it is scarcely "well recognized" -- nor should it be, because it was only a demonstration model of what could be done. As for the many familiar glossaries ("terminologies") prepared by terminologists, I believe they are not unambiguously onomantic in design, as I try to prove in this paper.
The use of conservative and radical in the preceding paragraph invites criticism because they are fighting words, often used in political controversy. I wanted to replace them with two better words, but they are not familiar and will also, I fear, invite controversy. Both have a mythic origin: Epimetheus as a Greek god oriented to the past, and his brother, Prometheus, looked to the future. The attempt by Prometheus to help humans by bringing fire to them offended Jupiter who promptly condemned him to be enchained on a mountain side where vultures could daily feed upon his liver.
A parallel fate awaits modern Prometheans whose future orientation leads them to propose innovations that seem to threaten the established interests defended by the world's Epimetheans. This metaphor is not my invention -- I learned it in the 1930's when, as a college student, I read William Sheldon's Psychology and the Promethean Will, a profound but unfairly neglected work. In it, he wrote of the Promethean that "He is the inventive genius of the human mind, but he is thereby always tempting the patience of morality, and so becomes the object of intense suppression... It is only the rare Promethean who lives to see the triumph of his own vision". By contrast, "Epimetheus is the follower of the right, the adapter to the present, and the worshipper of the wisdom that is" (p.79). Sheldon himself observed that "Prometheus is radical, and Epimetheus is conservative," but "there are many conservative people who are not Epimethean, and many radicals who are far from Promethean" (p.80). No doubt Sheldon saw himself as an unrewarded Promethean.
5. To say that terminologists are in agreement about the meaning of concept is not precisely true. In a version of ISO 1087, Vocabulary of Terminology, that appeared in 1969, the text quoted above appears as a definition of concept: i.e. "any unit of thought..." However, in its 1990 version, this definition was narrowed to read "a unit of thought constituted through abstraction on the basis of properties common to a set of objects," but in a revision proposed in 1994, this definition was expanded to include "...a set of one or more objects." Three marginally differentiated concepts are identified by these three definitions:
Let me offer some comments based on these definitions each of which, I think, actually identifies a marginally different concept. How should we evaluate their comparative utility?
First, all three definitions repeat the phrase, unit of thought. To my mind, unit of knowledge may be more useful since, clearly, we can easily have random thoughts that make no contribution to our systems of knowledge -- they are so fuzzy or irrelevant that we could disregard them as mere conceptions. After refinement, they could become useful units of knowledge, i.e. concepts. By contrast, if an idea -- like that of nothing or zero or infinity or void -- contributes to our knowledge, we accept it as a concept, whether or not it has been abstracted from any object. If changes are to be made in the original definition, therefore, I would prefer to think of "concepts" as "units of knowledge," using knowledge as it is understood in research on Knowledge Organization. The focus on units of knowledge, incidentally, was proposed as early as 1977 by Ingetraut Dahlberg in her Bangalore lectures on Ontical Structures and Universal Classification.
Since the focus of this essay is on the representation of concepts rather than on their definition, I shall avoid further comments on "concepts" except to mention a point reflected in the definitional shift from 1990 to 1994 identified above. Perhaps the 1994 version evolved from discussions about the meaning of object which had been defined in 1990 as "any part of the perceivable or conceivable world." Did this not involve a distinction between the existence of objects outside our perceptions and our human capacity to imagine objects that, in fact, may not exist? If so, it may have become apparent that one could not only name real objects but also those that we only imagine. Perhaps as a result, in 1994, an additional entry for individual concept got into the draft of ISO 1087. It was defined as a "concept that refers to an individual object," illustrated by "Saturn," the name of a planet -- this name, incidentally, also raises questions about the mythical deity who, originally, carried this name. By contrast, general concept was substituted for concept as it had been described in 1990 as an abstraction based on two or more objects.
No doubt, the idea of an individual concept has philosophical validity insofar as an object can exist in time/space, but our image of that object, as reflected in our minds, is only a concept. Moreover, knowledge includes idiographic information about individual objects as well as scientific or nomothetic knowledge generated by abstractions based on comparisons between sets of two or more objects. The theoretical framework for recognizing individual concepts was explained in Dahlberg's Bangalore lectures and in subsequent papers (Dahlberg 1978 , 1981, 1988, 1995) The case for recognizing individual concepts has also been advocated by some main stream terminologists: see, for example, Picht and Draskau's text on Terminology, 1985, pp.38-39.
For practical purposes, however, I shall not speak further about this matter in the body of this article. The word, concept, is polysemic and it can obviously designate a variety of ideas. If we distinguish clearly between general and individual concepts, we can make two relevant points. First, in practice, as revealed by the text of ISO 1087, all of the concepts defined in this glossary are general concepts. If there is no need for individual concepts in the vocabulary of Terminology, why not ignore them here and use the word, concept to mean only general concept?
When and if it is also useful to introduce any individual concepts, we could then take care to distinguish between these two types of knowledge units. The selection of Saturn as the name for a planet was based on a prior decision to borrow names from Greek mythology for this purpose. By contrast, the decision to use onomantics to characterize the representation of concepts was based on an etymological logic rooted in the Greek meaning of onoma- to mean a naming process. Thus the logic of designation for concepts differs from the logic parents use when choosing a name for a newborn child.
A second consideration arises from our organizational context. I argued above for a basic distinction between two kinds of Onomasiology: Onomastics involves the naming of objects and Onomantics concerns the representation of concepts -- or, to be more exact, the designation of general concepts. Anyone wishing to develop a theory of Onomasiology should, surely, distinguish between Onomastics and Onomantics as two branches of the field: the first requires concepts needed to talk about the naming of objects (individual concepts) and the second needs terms that will help us discuss the designation of general concepts. Here, I wish to focus only on the latter and this paper, therefore, is limited to questions that involve general concepts and the problems that come up when we try to represent them -- in the text, I shall refer to them as concepts, dropping the word general as unnecessary in this context.