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Having taken care - for the moment - of the core conceptual model for concepts, terms, and definitions, I returned to where I began, which was to try to show how Stipulative Definitions and Legislative Definitions differ, and to do so visually as shown in Figure 1 Figure 1: Conceptual Model of Stipulative and Legislative Definitions Basic Definitions The concepts shown in Figure 1 are defined as follows: Stipulative Definition: a definition that a Definition Creator creates to describe a concept and which the Definition Creator assigns to a term.  In performing the latter, the Definition Creator acts as a Terminologist.  Legislative Definition: a Stipulative Definition whose Definition Creator is an Authority, and whose acceptance is obligatory for Legislative Definition Users. Authority: an individual person or organization who has legitimacy sufficient to make any Legislative Definition they create binding upon one or more Legislative Definition Users Definition User: a...

Well, I had another day or so of thinking about the conceptual model I was developing - originally for stipulative and legislative definitions.  Actually, a few minutes rather than a whole day was what I had, but such is life when you have a job.  But even in that limited time I realized that I had not got the idea of communities in the model.  So I went back to the conceptual model and put in communities as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term Speech Community: a group of individuals who share a vocabulary that describes a concept system.  [See Wikipedia for more - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_community - although it seems you have to belong to the Speech Community Speech Community to understand this entry.] Semantic Community: a group of individuals who share a common understanding of a set of concepts and relationships (a concept system), irrespective of the terms used to describe them. I understand that both of these definitions ar...

I was noodling around with stipulative and legislative definitions, and started to diagram out what I was finding.   It occurred to me that I have not really had a rethink about diagramming the relationships between the concepts involved in definition work for a while.    Pretty soon I found that I lacked some of the fundamentals, and had to get them sorted out before I could deal with stipulative and legislative definitions. The result of that effort is the cartoon shown in Figure 1.  I am calling it a "cartoon" because I have not had time yet to work it up in some formal notation, such as conceptual graph.  I also realize it is incomplete.  For instance, I have not had time to figure out where to put Nominal Definition. Figure 1: Relations of Concept and Term In Figure 1 all supertype-subtype relations are indicated by solid lines, with the label "is genus of", indicating how the superordinate genus is related to the subordinate genus.  This is...

A few days ago my son was getting same day surgery and I was forced to sit in a waiting room for longer than I wanted.  The usual trash TV was being shown to keep the nervous relatives quiet, and there was a typical "self-help" show on which featured some bizarre members of the general public, each of whom had issues that apparently had some entertainment value. A phrase that kept coming up was various variations of "define yourself", as in "How do you define yourself?", or "Don't let your [whatever problem the person had] define you".  It occurred to me that the purveyors of these phrases must have had only a fuzzy idea of what they were saying.  They were probably repeating a cliché they had heard before, to save themselves the difficulty of thinking and finding a way to express their thoughts. Definitions for Concepts, Identities for Individuals So what was wrong with asking "How Do You Define Yourself?" The answer is that defin...

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....

A while back I blogged on Univocal, Equivocal, and Analogous terms.   Thomas Aquinas wrote about these in Summa Theologica , so it is not really a new topic.   That said, I think that how we deal with these three classes of term in information management is a fairly murky area, and requires the development of practical guidance.   Let’s start with analogous terms.   What is an analogy?   The Free Dictionary provides the following definition: similarity in some respects between things that are otherwise dissimilar. [http://www.thefreedictionary.com/analogy, accessed 2012-06-29]   This is a reasonable start, but I think that we need to understand a lot more about analogous terms in information management.   I would suggest that an analogous term is: a term used to signify a concept that uses all or part of a term which signifies a second concept that is better understood.   There are supposed to be attributes in common between the two concepts (ofte...