COMING TO TERMS WITH 'SOCIAL SCIENCE'

ONOMANTICS: FROM CONCEPTS TO TERMS

The Technology .  In order to identify a concept we can prepare records which resemble dictionary entries but reverse their structure. Instead of starting with a word to be defined, we must begin with a concept to be identified by a text, a description, that specifies its necessary characteristics.  Such concepts may well be fuzzy in the sense that one cannot easily determine whether a particular case meets the criteria.  If I want to talk about "independent states," you might claim that, de facto if not de jure, Taiwan is an independent state.  To make a concept less fuzzy, one might introduce additional criteria -- thus to qualify as an "independent state," one might stipulate that it must have not only such domestic characteristics as a governmental system and defense capabilities, but also external recognition -- it must be both de jure and de facto.  However, for some purposes you might want to include all states that meet the domestic criteria, even if not the international ones.

In many context such marginal distinctions are not important and need not be specified -- the trade-off is that the more sharply a concept is defined, the more complex its definition may become. Definitions that include "usually" actually identify more than one concept: for example, to define a "bird" as a "feathered vertebrate that can usually fly" describes both the broad class of all birds, and a sub-class of "flying birds" -- thus an ostrich is a bird but not a flying bird.  Such marginal distinctions make many concepts fuzzy but we work with them because, for practical purposes, the distinction is not important -- most birds, after all, do fly, just as most states have de jure recognition.

The extension of Western concepts to the Rest of the world often involves such questions.  The term, "class" might be used to refer to the "caste" system in India, but the availability of a separate term enables us to avoid this error.  However, the extension of the term "political party" to include the "political parties" found in both military and "single party" dictatorships obscures important distinctions between different kinds of political structure. Failure to observe such distinctions muddies analysis in many fields of inquiry where the extension of Western-based concepts to non-Western contexts is obfuscating.  If "social science" is to expand as a globally relevant form of inquiry, it needs to add many new terms to its vocabulary in order to make important distinctions visible.

Important as such questions are, I shall not elaborate on them here because my aim is to make the point that the basic element of any onomantic record is not a word to be defined, but rather a described concept, i.e. a text that mentions its essential characteristics.  Non-essential characteristics should not be included in the definition of any concept -- rather, they provide the basis for identifying a different (though often quite similar) concept. The word "essential" is used here, not to suggest the prior existence of an "essence" but, rather, to identify a characteristic that is required in order for a concept to be operationalized. Such concepts are socially created to meet practical needs -- they do not represent "essences" (as imagined in Platonic "realism").  Rather, they are created whenever someone finds them useful as tools to support some kind of analysis.

Of course, the phenomena may be quite ancient: when certain bones were unearthed by paleontologists, they invented a concept to explain what they found and decided to call it "dinasaur".  Further exploration led them to recognize additional varieties of these monstrous lizards to which they assigned such terms as "tyrannosaurus," "diplodocus," "coelophysis," etc.  The referents for these terms existed more than 200 million years ago, but the concepts used to identify them are modern inventions.  Similarly, many contemporary phenomena and distinctions that we need to study and learn about the world today remain invisible to us because we lack the necessary concepts to identify them.

Such concepts, when they are new, may not have any terms.  I don't know how long it took after the discovery of a genetic phenomenon to agree on "DNA" as a term for it.  During the interval, some purely arbitrary term, like "The X factor," could have been used.  My point is that the utility and validity of a concept depends on its usefulness and not on the connotations of any term that may designate it -- indeed unnamed concepts may be quite useful.  If so, they are usually assigned terms.  How this can be done more efficiently is the focus of onomantics.  It contrasts with the opposite lexicographic (semantic) option which starts with established words and investigates their meanings.

Systematic Relationships.  An important question for onomantics that has only incidental relevance in semantics involves systematic relationships between concepts.  The most familiar results of semantic analysis can be found in dictionaries whose entries are normally arranged alphabetically by entry words.  This procedure ignores relations between concepts -- the spelling of words determines the placement of entries in an arbitrary but determinate and retrievable way.  However, a systematic arrangement of words is also useful, especially in the arrangement of synonymies composed of word groups, as seen in Roget's Thesaurus.  By contrast, the records in an onomantic glossary cannot be arranged alphabetically because the first word of a concept description offers no clues for retrieval purposes. A systematic ordering of concepts, as in the thesaurus, is therefore necessary.

There is, however, another reason for stressing the classification of conceptual information.  Because words are usually polysemic (having more than one meaning) it is actually impossible to arrange them systematically -- only concepts can be put in a systematic order.  To verify this point, have a look at the index to Roget's Thesaurus where one can see that many words are placed in several entries -- that's because they represent different concepts. Moreover, and this is substantively important, locating concepts as items in a system provides essential information about each concept. When they can be classed hierarchically, we identify genus-species relationships -- distinguishing broader from narrower concepts, "fruit" from "apples" and "oranges", for example.  Other kinds of relationships are also important: part/whole, cause/effect, object/property/process/dimension, etc.

The important notion of related concepts is among the most problematic.  Imagine two overlapping circles, "A" and "B."  We may use "AB" to represent notions that combine A and B.  By contrast, the circles illustrate that it is also possible to have A without B, and B without A.  Some related concepts are linked by a phrase: consider "kith and kin," which identifies the friends and relatives of a gemeinschaft community (a peasant village, for example).  From the point of view of any member, other members may be friends or relatives but, in many cases, individuals are both friends and relatives (i.e. "kith" and "kin").  The two concepts are so fuzzy and overlapping that, in such contexts, there is no need to distinguish between them and modern people, whose suburban neighbors are neither kith nor kin, do not know the difference -- they may even think that "kith" is some kind of synonym for "kin."

A more contemporary example involves the fuzzy relation between "race" and "ethnicity," two words that are often paired.  As commonly understood, persons sharing racial features may be ethnically different (speaking different languages, for example), and members of one ethnic community may be racially different (as are the Jews in Israel), but often enough, racial and ethnic distinctions coincide.  The "race/ethnic" relationships has an important historical dynamics in the United States, but in most countries it is not significant.  This example also illustrates how a parochial usage can travel, acquiring new meanings in countries where the terms do not reflect reality -- instead, they are superimposed on the assumption that they must represent some kind of reality that needs to be discovered.  Another good example is "class" and "caste," both of which are often used, out of context, to characterize relationships quite different from those that originally led to the coining of these terms.

Onomantic systems of concepts can be built out of relationships such as those mentioned above.  As I have noted, identifying these relationship is useful to help us understand concepts -- it is also useful for retrieval purpose.  However, more than one system can be used to link overlapping sets of concepts that have different uses. We need to know this in order to overcome a widespread misconception that all concepts should be located (or locatable) in a single classification scheme.  This is a misleading error.  No doubt the notion arose because, in its most familiar application, library books are shelved conceptually according to one of several schemes (Dewey, Library of Congress, Bliss, Ranganathan, etc.).  That's because books cannot be shelved in two places at once.  The class numbers that determine their shelf location need, therefore, to belong to a single classification scheme.

Similarly, when concept records are reproduced on paper, it is convenient to assign a single class number to each concept. However, when concept records are computerized, it is easy to assign several numbers to a single record -- this enables one to relate concepts to each other in various ways.  Each of two related concepts, for example, may fall under two headings: a copper pipe can be associated, by material, with other copper objects, and by function, with other kinds of pipes.  Items in a part/whole or cause-effect relationship may also be identified hierarchically. Users may select any classification scheme they like and retrieve concepts arranged accordingly.  The same principle is familiar in a computerized address book that permits names to be retrieved alphabetically, by place of residence, or field of interest, although only one record per person is needed. This not only produces lists but it can be used to find individuals who have a particular interest or live in a given place.  The same database enables one to look up an individual to find h/er address -- I shall use "/" to represent third person pronouns of either gender -- thus "h/er" should be read as "he or her", "s/he" as "she or he," and "h/ers" as "his or hers."

Hypertext.  The use of several classification schemes for a given body of concept records leads to a discussion of hypertext, a modern way of organizing information that has been popularized by computers, and is now globally available on the World Wide Web. A link in a text permits one to jump at will to related items of information, as illustrated by the address book example mentioned above.  The basic idea is well known in the form of reference numbers which enable readers of a book to jump, by page numbers, to a note that elaborates on a notion by means of extra data.  On a computer, one can do the same thing much more easily by clicking a mouse when the cursor hits a marked word on the screen.  Since the creation of the WWW, this technique not only enables one to jump to a note in the same text, but to jump to a related text that may be loaded on a host computer anywhere in the world.  Let us consider some of the implications of this radically new technology.

Imagine, for example, that we have one and only one record for a concept, but it has been classified in several ways to reflect a variety of points of view or purposes: metalurgists will want to find "copper pipe" in the context of uses of a metal, whereas plumbers will look for the same thing in relation to repairing a fixture.  Economists may want to use a concept, "price," for example, to see how it relates to supply/demand forces, but a political scientists may want to understand how prices can be controlled by government -- each may, therefore, need the same concept but in different contexts.

Links work in opposite directions: a concept record, for example, can display several class numbers that permit readers to jump to various contexts in which they are relevant; and, reciprocally, anyone reading a particular text can jump to the record that describes a a relevant concept.  All computer users employ this technique when they use the "help" menu on Windows or WordPerfect. If they are baffled to understand a technical term, for example, they can click the mouse to find the relevant definition.  On paper, the explanation of "onomantics" offered above must be remembered by anyone encountering it at a later point, but on my Web Page, I can provide links to 'onomantic' at various points in the text, permitting readers to jump to the explanation of this concept whenever they want to refresh their memory.  The same technique can be used for substantive terms, like "state nation," "ethnic nation," "national state," and "independent state."  Another techniques involves defining all the difficult terms used in a text in a glossary attached to it.  Users can jump to the glossary to find these concept descriptions -- in hypertext they can do it more easily -- and, in principle, they can jump to concept descriptions that may be available anywhere in the world.

When the explanation of a new concept can be found only in a reference note or glossary attached to a paper, only persons holding the paper are actually able to use it.  By contrast, if the note is lodged in a Web page, the user may jump to its explanation (including concept records, as well as data, references and comments) at any place in the world that hosts the linked item.  By placing this paper on my own Web Page (at http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/) I will make the descriptions of its key concepts globally available to anyone having access to the WWW. That does not eliminate the need to put this text on paper -- but it greatly extends its availability.

To make this notion more concrete at a micro-level, let us imagine that two scholars (K and H) are working separately in Korea and Hawaii on a closely related problem.  They want to coordinate their efforts, using their Web pages, to make sure that each understands and uses correctly the new concepts that they need. Each may construct a nomenclator  (the term I use for a conceptual glossary, one that identifies new concepts and proposed terms for them) and post it in h/is own Web page.  K and H can, then, consult their colleague's nomenclator at any time and, cumulatively, make use of each other's concepts and understand their terms.  This is a "bottom-up approach" (Malkia ??) that can be used by any scholar or group of scholars.  It can also lay the foundation for a macro-level global apparatus to introduce and designate new concepts. (More details about how this can be done can be found on my Web Page -- http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr/onom.htm).

My point is that, in an onomantic perspective, it is unnecessary to compile a master dictionary (glossary) that comprehensively identifies and describes all the concepts used in a given field of specialization -- instead, building cumulatively from small points of clarity, one can introduce new concepts and make them available for use by a growing community of scholars, anywhere in the world, who share an interest.  This applies to the very specific concepts required in a highly specialized field of study as well as the broadest concepts that inform our work as political scientists -- or the proposed generic Social Science as a global, multi-disciplinary framework for studying our world system in historic and futurist perspective.

Let me emphasize that the onomantic approach should not replace the semantic approach -- both are needed and they supplement each other.  Dictionaries (glossaries) based on terminographic methods can and should be compiled for specialists in every discipline and field.  They report on the established usages of colleagues working this field -- it identifies the terms they use and the technical meanings they have.  Both an alphabetical and one or more classification scheme are needed to make such works effective --that means they require two parts, a set of records and an index. But let me not say more about the terminographic dimension of the conceptual scheme required for any subject field to develop in a coherent way.  Its theory and methods are well established.  By contrast, the onomantic approach is not understood but it has become necessary for the growth of any new field of study or paradigm shift, such as the one needed to go from our discipline-based set of social sciences to an integrated global social science.

An Example: Ethnicity.  All of this may sound utopian and beyond our capabilities.  However, I think we have reached the stage of development where it can be realized with relatively little cost, though with a lot of attention.  To be effective, the onomantic approach should be anchored in the work of a community of scholars interested in research on a theme that interests all of them. Projects sponsored by the ISSC on "poverty," "global change," "cities," "multi-disciplinary problems," or the status of the "social sciences," all identify appropriate themes, as would many others, such as those studied by IPSA research committees -- including COCTA which has focussed attention on the analysis of concepts and terms in social theory.

The central apparatus that we need is an information network that includes, among its components, information about relevant publications (including books and journals), on-going research in a wide range of universities and institutes, abstracting services designed to facilitate the identification of relevant documents, and a variety of regional and international organizations interested in the subject under study.  An onomantic network nested in such an information network will fill a niche that is now vacant.  It will greatly enhance the capacity of scholars to communicate clearly with each other whenever they need to use new concepts that cannot yet be unambiguously represented by established terms.  The discussion of "nations," "states," "modernity" and "Western" offered above provide some examples of what I have in mind.

Established projects and agencies already provide elements of the information networks we need.  Unfortunately, they are usually organized by process rather than subject -- in other words, we have a global bibliographic network for information about books and journals.  Although it may be organized by disciplines, it is not organized by subject fields, the real-world foci of interest of researchers. The same is true of abstracting services and ongoing research information.  Moreover, each of these services is organized separately which means that it is scarcely "user-friendly," -- a researcher needs to follow different chains to locate the information relevant to h/is concerns.  The hypertext technology, used via the WWW, now enables us to integrate and focus these resources so that researchers in any particular field of inquiry can readily discover relevant information -- well, I mean, it enables us in principle, although we have not yet implemented this idea.

Unfortunately, a crucial component of such a network does not yet exist although it is urgently necessary. This involves our basic vocabulary, and especially the new concepts and terms that will increase in number as the global extent and new problems faced by an increasingly interactive world system explode around us. Fortunately, the technology and infrastructure needed to solve these problems is now available.

A starting point to understand how the onomantic component of global integrated information system can be found in my paper, "Turmoil among Nations," which can be seen by anyone with access to my Web Page <http://www2.hawaii.edu/~fredr>. Linked to this paper is a set of "TAN" concepts that were introduced in the paper -- they can be found by clicking the mouse at points in the text where they are used.  Moreover, they are interdependent concepts and links between them as individual items, as well as through a general classification scheme that offers symoptic view of their relationships, is available within the set of concept records. Readers can also find on my Web Page a set of articles discussing the onomantic approach and methodology -- the discussion here is just a summary of this material.

Networking.  If no one ever looks at these concept records, they will remain an isolated exercise, irrelevant to the global problem. In order for the demonstration to have any effects, it needs to be linked to a network of users.  Such networks can be established in any field of inquiry that a set of interested scholars wants to develop.  I have launched one for experimental purposes that might be able to utilize the information available in my TAN project, as described above.  It constitutes the embryo of an integrated information network, but only an embryo.  However, with careful nurturing, it has the potential for evolving into a mature system.

To be more concrete, I chose the field of ethnic studies (including nationalism, migration/refugees, and race-relations) for demonstration purpose.  My TAN paper clearly illustrates some conceptual problems in this field, and they provide the materials used above in my discussion of "state" and "nation."  The starting point was a Listserv called ETHNIC-L.that I established at the University of Hawaii.  Its charter members were representatives of the IPSA research committee on Politics and Ethnicity and comparable groups in several other member associations of the ISSC: Sociology and International Studies.  UNESCO'S MOST (Management of Social Transformations) project has emphasized ethnicity as one of its priority problem areas, and it is linked to this network, as are the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and a considerable number of regional research centers, discussion lists, and journal editors. The basic purpose of ETHNIC-L was not to promote substantive discourse but, rather, to provide information about each group's activities and to facilitate liaison in ways that would help each member become more effective and able to cooperate with others sharing its interests.

To provide an accessible location for information about each group, including links to its own Web Pages and listservs, plus the ability to send mail directly from the Page to members of the List, I created an ETHNIC page on my own home page -- see the page. It contains an alphabetical list of the member groups, a list of individual members, and an index by subject of specialization and action categories, such as conferences, databases, on-going research, and "terminology."  Unfortunately, we still lack useful links for bibliographic information.  A number of papers, including this one, are posted on this Site to provide background information for interested users, plus links to the Web Pages mentioned above.

Meshing.  In order to develop the onomantic component of this information network we need to establish a terminology page -- it should be called an onomantic page but I hesitate to use this word because it still lacks face validity.  Its goal, however, will be to mesh concept records prepared by individuals anywhere who share our interests in ethnicity.  Eventually, I hope my TAN concept records (mentioned above) will provide a starting point or entering wedge for this new page.  The next step will be to find colleagues anywhere who are working on ethnic problems and want to introduce new concepts, or find others who may have proposed them already. When I find someone willing to become involved, by providing concept records for the new concepts that s/he is proposing, I will link it to my own TAN concepts, and provide a link on the Terminology Page. As the idea gains acceptance among subscribers to ETHNIC-L, my hope is that others will become interested and decide to participate in this project.  Let me mention a few "nuts and bolts" considerations that will need to be considered.

First, to identify every concept proposed by anyone, a serial number should be attached to it for quick identification and reference. Every book gets a serial number when it is accessioned by a library, but it serves only record-keeping purposes.  In a hypertext computer file, however, serial numbers can be used to retrieve records in an efficient way.  They should be attached to a text that can be reached through a URL on a host computer.  Serial numbers do not convey any meaning but they can uniquely identify every concept and enable users to locate it.  Every file on a Web Page can be identified and retrieved by means of its URL.  Each concept can be numbered as an item in an onomantic file.  My Terminology File would not support links to each concept, however, Rather, its links would enable users to find various onomantic files that relate to their subject of concern.

For example, my onomantic file for the TAN paper (which contains 20 or so concept records) could be coded with several key words, such as "ethnic nationalism."  Many onomantic files relating to "ethnicity" could be listed, characterized, and linked on the ETHNIC-L terminology page in my Home Site.  However, I would not want to construct a comprehensive guide to concepts with links to each individual record.  Rather, individual scholars could create their own guides to the concepts they want to use -- and they should include links enabling readers to find the onomantic files from which borrowed concepts have been taken.  This procedure will, I think, increasingly permit scholars both to identify and collaborate with anyone in the world who shares their research interests, and also to sharpen their conceptual tools so that they will be able to understand each other better and, eventually, become more intelligible to larger communities or readers interested in their work.

Thesaurus versus Classification.  To support a terminology (onomantic) page as suggested above, key words and class numbers will be needed. The serial numbers discussed above are needed for retrieval purposes but they are useless for indexing or indicating relationships between concepts.  To support coherent theory development in any field, we need sets of linked concepts and, for this reason, we need classification schemes and thesauri.  They enable us to organize our knowledge and also support the retrieval of information.  It is important to distinguish between these two functions which are easily confused with each other.

Part of our confusion arises from the semantic structure of ordinary dictionaries.  Their entry-words enable readers to locate the precise spot where a particular entry can be found.  That means, they serve retrieval purposes whenever one knows how to spell a word.  However, since words have meanings (usually more than one) they also provide links to concepts and, as in a "thesaurus" used for indexing purposes, relationships between terms are typically indicated -- by implication these relations also express relations between concepts.

Insofar as the technical terms of a subject field are well known and precise, the use of alphabetized entries is practical for retrieval purposes and, through hierarchic or classified indexes, an indexing thesaurus may also reflect concept relationships. This means that such tools are very helpful, perhaps indispensable, for organizing knowledge providing only familiar terms are used.

New concepts, by contrast, lack recognized terms. When terms for any of these concepts gain acceptance, they need no longer to be viewed as new concepts.  Until the genetic concept now known as "DNA" became widely known, it was certainly a new concept -- but after this term gained acceptance, we may say the concept it designates is no longer "new".  Since DNA was discovered in the 1930s, it is perhaps a "recent," if not a new concept.  The notion of a "new concept" therefore, does not depend on the date of its origins but rather on whether or not a term for it has become established.  In this sense, it is itself a new concept that eludes attention because it lacks a specific term -- if we would accept a neologism for it -- perhaps a mint concept could be understood as, like a "mint word," an idea that has been coined but not yet widely known or used. Onomantics is concerned with mint concepts, but I shall avoid this term because "new concepts" is probably easier to accept, even if fuzzy.

The point, of course, is that new (mint) concepts lack established terms and, consequently, cannot be retrieved by means of a word.  Users will not know where to look.  Instead, they need information about these concepts that is normally expressed both in explicit descriptions of their essential characteristics, and in classifications that place them in a logical relationships with other concepts.

Since concept descriptions are useless for retrieval purposes, other techniques are necessary.  The most commonly used involves classification -- an example is offered in my TAN records.  The scheme used is idiosyncratic and merely places this small set of concepts into a scheme that clarifies their mutual relationships from the author's point of view.  Someone with a different goal might want to use some of these concepts and think about them in another framework.  Hypertext technology makes it possible to use  a variety of such schemes to help scholars use the same notions in various contexts.

The classified set of concepts described in my TAN records are put into a systematic order in what I call a cue card, just another record found in the TAN glossary.  Every record contains a link to this cue card.  It enables users both to see how each concept is related to others found in this file, and also to jump promptly to the text that describes it, plus texts that illustrate its use. Several cue cards could be used for the same set of concepts, or for overlapping sets of concepts.  Each such card could reflect a classification scheme favored by some users, though not by many others.

I stress this point because it helps us deal with the problem of additional authors.  It would be unreasonable to expect them to accept my classification scheme because they may well have quite different ways of linking the concepts they need.  You may think of my records as describing a set of concepts linked by a scheme called "FWR".  Just as the authors of entries in an encyclopedia may be uniquely identified by letters, a set of authors of concept records could also be coded by a few letters or even a name.  Each such author, "PQZ," for example, may assign a class number to each of their new concepts so as to locate them in a system that meets their needs. If they don't know how to construct such a classificaiton scheme, they might seek help from a classification specialist. Eventually, members of a community of scholars working in any given field may find it useful to create their shared (standardized) classification scheme -- I see that as a useful but not a necessary element of onomantic records.

The Author-based Perspective.  The notion that every author could create an idiosyncratic scheme to classify the concepts they need will strike many with horror because they are thinking by analogy about how how librarians class books.  In order to arrange them on a shelf so that many users can find them, they need to establish, from the top down, a single scheme according to which the call numbers you see on book back can be used to locate books on library shelves. Although private owners might use such a scheme to class their own books and put them in systematic order, my guess is that most book users arrange them idiosyncratically in accordance with their personal preferences.

My idea is that the classification of new (mint) concepts by any author can, at first, be quite idiosyncratic as a reflection of that author's own interests.  If we abandon the idea that all the new concepts of a field need to be systematically coded, we may see that the analogy of a personal book collection is more appropriate than that of a library.  Since the units to be managed are short concept records publicly available on the WWW, the costs and rewards of this activity are also very different from those confronting a terminographer who seeks to assemble and define all the terms used by specialists in an established field of study.

Let us assume, for illustrative purposes, that several scholars studying ethnic problems have posted on their own Web Pages a set of concept records based on their own research interests, and they have created idiosyncratic classification schemes to organize these concepts according to their own interests and needs -- of course, they could borrow any existing scheme in case they prefered not to design their own system.  Each concept will be given a serial number so readers can easily jump to its description.  A cue card designed to index these records will contain a logically ordered set of suggested terms, each linked by a serial number to a record in which the new concept is described.

Since these will all be new (mint) concepts, no established terms will exist for any of them.  Consequently, the concept descriptions offered in their records cannot be viewed as definitions that explain what a word means.  When well established terms are available, they could be plugged into a cue card just to show how a new concept relates to established ones -- and, to help the user, a definition taken from a suitable dictionary or glossary might also be copied into a record, with an appropriate citation -- e.g. to W3 if the source happens to be Webster's Third International, or any specialized glossary for ethnic studies that happens to be available.  The difference between such term entries and concept records can easily be manifested by listing entry words first on the former, and starting the latter with descriptive texts.

Let us now assume that a second author, S, is writing a paper on an ethnic problem and consults the ETHNIC-L terminology (onomantic) page.  It will be available globally to all scholars associated with existing research committees and institutions.  On that page S will discover that R has established a site containing records for some new concepts related to "ethnic nationalism." Imagining that S might find some of R's concepts relevant to h/er own work, s/he will take a look.  If one of these concepts is useful for S, s/he may use it in h/er paper and make the term with a link to enable readers to jump to R's nomenclator to find the original concept description and a context of use.

No doubt there could be a temptation for S simply to copy the concept description and pretend that it is h/er original idea.  I think we should resist such a temptation not just to preserve academic integrity and resist plagiarism, but for more important reasons -- it will build interest and confidence in the system while making its logic clear and enabling users to find other authors who are using a new concept.  Moreover, reciprocity can be expected --if S calls attention to new concepts proposed by R, R is more likely to respond by inserting links to call the attention of h/er readers to the related work done by S.

Moreover, the development of an onomantic system for a field of study will help innovative scholars overcome a very troublesome problem.  Because of the widespread resistance to neologisms expressed by social scientists (natural scientists are far more willing to accept them) virtually any suggested new term for a concept is viewed by our colleagues with great suspicion. Consequently, there is a widespread tendency for innovative scholars to mask their innovations by stipulating old words to represent new concepts.  Although this disarms critics, it compounds confusion because ambiguous words become even more ambiguous and communication in specialized fields become even more muddy.

In order to avoid the legitimate criticisms that can be directed against writers who, pretentiously, coin terms for concepts they think, incorrectly, that they have created, we need resources to help us discover whether or not someone else has already invented a concept.  Dictionaries and glossaries typically offer no help because, although they can show what established words mean, they cannot prove that no word exists for a concept they have described. To illustrate, when we found in our INTERCOCTA project, that we need to help innovative scholars introduce new concepts and terms, we could not be sure that it was really a new idea -- perhaps it had already been proposed by someone else.  If so, we should refer to their work and adopt whatever terms for the concept they had suggested.  Although we were unable to discover any such precedents, we decided to coin a word, onomantics, and ask anyone who found this concept in earlier work to let us know about it.  Of course, we did find closely related terms, like "onomasiology" and "onomastics," which provided the context in which to propose "onomantics."  We also knew "semantics" as a familiar antonym involving the investigation of the meanings of established words.

Most writers, I think, will gladly make use of a simple technique that can help them find the work of others who have already written related studies and proposed new concepts.  The cue cards attached to each set of concept records should help them locate relevant concepts, something that searching for the definitions of established words cannot do.

Of course, the procedure outlined above will not succeed for everyone -- many new concepts have already been proposed and lost in a vast literature which no one person can expect to master. However, colleagues working in the same field may well remember something that could be helpful.  This suggests a useful adjunct to the core project explained above.  Suppose that S cannot find any help in the concept records prepared by R (or anyone else) -- don't despair.  The existence of ETHNIC-L and several discussion lists linked by it will enable S to send an inquiry to a host of persons sharing h/er interest in ethnic problems.  S/he may ask for help from anyone who has used a particular concept, offering a description of its essential characteristics.  If a positive response comes, this may lead to references that can document prior use of the same concept.  If no such response comes, it may be taken as evidence to support the novelty of a proposed new concept.

Our ethnic lists may also be used in another way expand the resource base for our proposed Terminology Page.  Scholars on these lists can be invited to pay special attention to any claims or offers involving new concepts that they encounter in their work. If they would report such claims on a list, readers might respond by pointing to earlier uses of the same concept they can recall.  If the claim to novelty seems justified, the evidence could be entered into a claims page on the WWW, or even attached to the onomantic page.   Readers interested in any such claim could contact the author and/or read the text, assimilating useful items to their own vocabulary and provide some feed-back to strengthen the growing field.  Anyone offering new concepts of their own who see the utility of any claim could add it with a suitable reference to their own repertoire.  I'm confident additional techniques will emerge -- once a basic structure for designing and linking onomantic glossaries attached to frontier research in a field that is growing. In the context of an information network anchored in the World Wide Web and making use of a terminology page, we should be able to expedite the growth of useful concepts and terms that will help us overcome the essential parochialism of the existing social sciences and develop a global Social Science relevant to the rapidly changing world in which we live.

A Launching Pad.  As a starter, I am prepared to establish a terminology file for ETHNICITY on my own Home Page. Virtually all the social sciences have some scholars working on problems related to ethnicity.  If those who prepare any records for new concepts needed in their work will establish their own home pages, the addresses for these pages can be entered as links in my Terminology (Onomantic) Page. As students of ethnicity use the  Ethnic-L network, they will find others who share their interests and have also proposed new concepts.  By comparing the records of these concepts, they will be able to work toward consensus. Communication will be greatly improved without, I think, any need for "standardization" or pressures toward conformity.

The same principles can, of course, be applied to any fields of specialization.  Just as new research committees of IPSA are created when enough members decide that a proposed theme is worth cooperative scholarship, so networks for the development of new concepts and terms can also evolve spontaneously by means of personal choices and research decisions of concerned individuals and research centers.  Moreover, the WWW provides means for persons working in different disciplines to share concepts and enrich each other's work.

Just as ETHNIC-L can reach many groups sponsoring research in any social science discipline, so other foci of multi-disciplinary research can use the same technique to contact each other, exchange information and borrow concepts that can be helpful to them.  This is especially important because, unfortunately, although members of a single discipline, like political science, often get to know each other and share information through journals and meetings, like the IPSA Congress in Seoul, it is far more difficult to do this across disciplinary boundaries, even though a single problem area attracts the interest of scholars working in different disciplines.

Suggestions, not a Blueprint.  This is not really a "blueprint" for developing onomantic networks as components of the information systems that developing research fields require.  However, it offers some realistic suggestions about how we may start.  Practically speaking, virtually no funding is available for work on onomantic problems, and I cannot visualize a product, like a printed dictionary, that could be sold to produce whatever income might be needed.  Eventually, after the utility of onomantic work has been demonstrated, we may be able to discover foundations willing to subsidize this work, to employ scholars willing to become experts in it, and to help promote education and training projects designed to extend its utilization.  Meanwhile, however, given the availability of the INTERNET as a funded resource available to all computer-users, the kind of project I have discussed above can be launched virtually without any special financing.  It simply requires an understanding by scholars of the benefits they could win for themselves if they were willing to take advantage of the Web and Listservs to launch linked onomantic networks within their own fields of specialization.

Moreover, global associations like IPSA, could also help by naming liaison officers interested in semantic and conceptual problems to join counterparts in other disciplines in studying and promoting the onomantic approach.  However, their efforts no longer need to be concentrated on methodological problems -- we already know how to do onomantic work.  We need to apply this knowledge in various fields of specialization.  The focus, therefore, should shift from methodology to its applications. We might start with some of the interdisciplinary fields identified by the ISSC and UNESCO, such as "poverty," "global change," and "urbanism" as well as the overall study of the transformation and future of the social sciences.  Actually, any field that has attracted the interest of creative scholars could benefit from the creation of an onomantic resource linked to its own global information network.

The knowledge required to launch such a project is also available through COCTA (the Committee for Conceptual and Terminological Analysis) that was created at the Munich IPSA Congress in 1970.  The onomantic approach was developed under COCTA'S INTERCOCTA project, under the aegis of the International Social Science Council, with UNESCO support.  Information about this approach can be found in several papers available though my own Home Page, and from Matti Malkia at <home page>.  I will also prepare concept records for the new concepts introduced in this paper and make them available, for illustrative purpose, as an annex that viewers of my Home Page can consult.

Because the ISSC is linked with all of the world's major disciplinary associations in the social sciences, it provides the most appropriate umbrella for promoting and developing the kind of onomantic information system and supporting activities I have recommended above.  Under the leadership of Matti Malkia, with the help of an international board appointed by the ISSC, I am confident the time has come for us to join in a concerted effort to make the dream sketched out above come true.

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Updated: 27 April 2001