DOYLC

It is a well-known fact that the financial services industry - and their regulators - often use bizarre language.  For instance, Alan Greenspan, during his tenure as Chairman of the Federal Reserve System, was famous for achieving a level of incomprehension that spawned a generation of "Fed Watchers" needed to interpret him.  However, the problem goes far beyond Mr. Greenspan, and one of the worst offenses committed by financial services is scientism. Scientism is the application of the language and methods of the natural sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) to problem domains that are completely outside of the realm of natural science.  For instance, the term "financial engineering" has been used to describe a large set of practices which contributed significantly to the great financial crisis we are still living in.  Having worked in asset securitization myself, I can assure anyone that whatever these practices were, they were certainly no form of "en...

The previous post looked at analogies, which often are unrecognized as such in information management.  It posited that analogical terms are applied to new and poorly understood concepts, which go undefined or poorly defined.   As a result attributes of the concept to which the analogical term originally signified are transferred to the new concept.  Of course, this transfer also tends to go unrecognized.  The result is a bad definition of the new concept, which can have severe negative practical effects. I came across a discussion of analogies by Robert B. Stewart in the book Come Let Us Reason (2012, Copan and Craig, editors, ISBN 978-1-4336-7220-0).  Stewart points out that analogies "are not evidence that something is so , but rather illustrations of how   something could be so " (Stewart's italics).  Here I think Stewart is discussing analogies in controversy - how they can be used to support a point, or in the search for an explanation....