Authorless Authority: Dictionaries, Structuralism and Objectivity
November 29th 2009 15:02
:
If dictionaries really want to reinvent 'authoritative', where is the reference to the author?
Category: No Category
Whether you look up an Oxford, Webster, or an online dictionary (take www.dictionary.com, for example), you will notice that the name of the person(s) who created the definition are not provided. The information you are given is stripped of its author, creating a text which contributes to the corrosive illusion that there is such a thing as an objective body of knowledge that can be accessed by all and all can access.
Any text should promote critical thinking; the opportunity to debate its content, contest alleged meaning and question its structure. A line of text offering the name of the people responsible for the definition represents the text as a product of a human being, not some almighty Lingual Body Source (or, since few people read the credits at the start/end of a dictionary, perhaps from God "him"self). Once we are explicitly aware that language has been designed for people by people, we are more likely to be discerning, curious, probing readers of dictionary definitions. We are able to say, "Okay, well that is what Joseph Van Gericho thinks, and it's an interesting text, however I feel that this word would be best elucidated by [such and such] approach."
What is the reason that dictionary definitions appear to be stripped of personal context? Why shouldn't this text be seen as subjective, biased or one-of-a-kind as a poem about a fictional character?
I believe that the people currently creating dictionaries (i.e. academics with PhDs in linguistics) are suffering from an overdose of structuralist discourse. I believe they don't play enough with different modes of thinking, and find postmodern concerns oblique and uninteresting. In other words, they are severely lacking in charm and personality.
Listing all the contributors to the dictionary within its pages in one isolated section is insufficient. Readers need to know who was responsible for the definition. Was the author male or female? Are they the sole originator of this word, or have they merely added a comma in the work of a previous inventor?
Who is inventing our words? We talk about the evolution of language over time (Old English, Middle English, etc), but what about the proliferation of definitions and the discourses they spark decade to decade, year to year, month to month? Surely our information technology is booming exponentially, including the many different dictionaries that are created, some for general audiences, some for niche markets. What then becomes of the evolution of language, when we can't appreciate the contribution of personal context of a single word in the Macquarie Dictionary?
According to my friend, Rune Vejby, "[I]n all other aspects of life we seem to be very concerned about the notion of origin or source. Think about the food products we buy. People are obsessing about where it comes from, some meat producers in Denmark can actually tell you which exact cow a specific piece of beef comes from... The same thing with other goods such as coffee, wine.... but people remain strangely uncritical towards the origin of definitions of the world they live in. They are uncritical towards denotations."
If I was to tell fifty of my friends to come up with a definition for a specific word for me, I would have fifty different definitions. Don't believe me? Look up the same word in as many dictionaries as you can find. I can promise you that each definition will be unique. And even if you do find exactly the same wording from two different sources, you can be sure that the associations of the first author are different to those of the second, just by virtue of everyone having their own unique mindset. Ages ago, I posted seven different definitions of the word 'ambiguity' here.
There are times when railing against a definitions could lead to innovations in theory in the public domain... for example, consider the definition of 'psychosis' given by Dictionary.com:
[sahy-koh-sis] psy.cho.sis
[-seez] -noun, plural -ses
1. a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality.
2. any severe form of mental disorder, as schizophrenia or paranoia.
Definition #1 works on the assumption that there is an objective reality. However, I argue that reality is a state of mind, and that an objective reality doesn't exist. Who is to say what is universally real and what is not? How can you have impaired contact with something that doesn't exist? (What does impaired connote here? Is psychosis a negative thing? What if psychosis is the most appropriate response to disturbing stimuli?)
Rune had a different reaction earlier this year: [This version of 'psychosis'] means nothing to me! [...] In their definition everyone could be psychotic. If their is no fixed reality, everyone is impaired.
The person responsible for this definition has been influenced by what I shall call objectivity-normative contemporary psychiatric discourse. They do not credit their sources, something which would reveal the literature they read to come up with this definition. If they had, I would have less hesitation in critiquing this text: When you say "According to" or "So and so says" you are empowering a voice. Giving a single person authority. This is the kind of authority which is easier to recognise as such. Instead, I see this authorless text as possible designed to permeate my subconsciousness, and if I let it to do this I would be infecting my mind with the unrefined literary structures of irresponsible opportunists who don't actually care about language at all. Or perhaps they're sold on the illusion of objectivity to the extent that there is nothing more that they would like than to disseminate definitions as if they were, as Rune thinks, 'divine'. The authorless text is also critic-less. Or so its creators would have us believe.
We should be blurring the lines between dictionaries and works of art. Lists are in fact poems - the only difference is that they are designed without conscious attempts to contribute to the genre of poetry. This simply makes them crude, unsophisticated poems - devoid of taste for alliteration, assonance and other literary techniques.
Perhaps as well as poetry, developers of dictionaries should look to dream interpretation dictionaries for inspiration. While these are flawed in their own way, usually indebted to the Jungian idea of the collective unconsciousness, it's a start in the right direction: Investigating how a word resonates with you personally on every level. Just as a well-analysed dream makes you reinvent your conscious narratives, performing a definition should be a transformational personal endeavour.
I have to get going soon, but consider Mr Vejby's notion - that there is "violence entailed" in the omission of the author from a definition. Reproduced is the illusion that the def. could and should directly reflect reality, instead of being one person's representation of self. Reproduced is the enigma of absolute knowledge, for all those words together further enable people to come up with their own reductive and redundant objectivity-normative search for totality, a finite amount of knowledge, an accessible completeness to language.
So next time you look up a word in a dictionary of your choice, consider its fragile, humble human context. No matter how imposing the institution providing you the information might appear, it's run by sentient human beings. Those human beings will respond if you contact them to let them know that you would like greater illumination of the authorial presence, through the dramatic step of referencing each work back to its originator. Please don't stop demanding quality information until you get your wishes met.
I love you,
Epiphanie
Any text should promote critical thinking; the opportunity to debate its content, contest alleged meaning and question its structure. A line of text offering the name of the people responsible for the definition represents the text as a product of a human being, not some almighty Lingual Body Source (or, since few people read the credits at the start/end of a dictionary, perhaps from God "him"self). Once we are explicitly aware that language has been designed for people by people, we are more likely to be discerning, curious, probing readers of dictionary definitions. We are able to say, "Okay, well that is what Joseph Van Gericho thinks, and it's an interesting text, however I feel that this word would be best elucidated by [such and such] approach."
What is the reason that dictionary definitions appear to be stripped of personal context? Why shouldn't this text be seen as subjective, biased or one-of-a-kind as a poem about a fictional character?
I believe that the people currently creating dictionaries (i.e. academics with PhDs in linguistics) are suffering from an overdose of structuralist discourse. I believe they don't play enough with different modes of thinking, and find postmodern concerns oblique and uninteresting. In other words, they are severely lacking in charm and personality.
Listing all the contributors to the dictionary within its pages in one isolated section is insufficient. Readers need to know who was responsible for the definition. Was the author male or female? Are they the sole originator of this word, or have they merely added a comma in the work of a previous inventor?
Who is inventing our words? We talk about the evolution of language over time (Old English, Middle English, etc), but what about the proliferation of definitions and the discourses they spark decade to decade, year to year, month to month? Surely our information technology is booming exponentially, including the many different dictionaries that are created, some for general audiences, some for niche markets. What then becomes of the evolution of language, when we can't appreciate the contribution of personal context of a single word in the Macquarie Dictionary?
According to my friend, Rune Vejby, "[I]n all other aspects of life we seem to be very concerned about the notion of origin or source. Think about the food products we buy. People are obsessing about where it comes from, some meat producers in Denmark can actually tell you which exact cow a specific piece of beef comes from... The same thing with other goods such as coffee, wine.... but people remain strangely uncritical towards the origin of definitions of the world they live in. They are uncritical towards denotations."
If I was to tell fifty of my friends to come up with a definition for a specific word for me, I would have fifty different definitions. Don't believe me? Look up the same word in as many dictionaries as you can find. I can promise you that each definition will be unique. And even if you do find exactly the same wording from two different sources, you can be sure that the associations of the first author are different to those of the second, just by virtue of everyone having their own unique mindset. Ages ago, I posted seven different definitions of the word 'ambiguity' here.
There are times when railing against a definitions could lead to innovations in theory in the public domain... for example, consider the definition of 'psychosis' given by Dictionary.com:
[sahy-koh-sis] psy.cho.sis
[-seez] -noun, plural -ses
1. a mental disorder characterized by symptoms, such as delusions or hallucinations, that indicate impaired contact with reality.
2. any severe form of mental disorder, as schizophrenia or paranoia.
Definition #1 works on the assumption that there is an objective reality. However, I argue that reality is a state of mind, and that an objective reality doesn't exist. Who is to say what is universally real and what is not? How can you have impaired contact with something that doesn't exist? (What does impaired connote here? Is psychosis a negative thing? What if psychosis is the most appropriate response to disturbing stimuli?)
Rune had a different reaction earlier this year: [This version of 'psychosis'] means nothing to me! [...] In their definition everyone could be psychotic. If their is no fixed reality, everyone is impaired.
The person responsible for this definition has been influenced by what I shall call objectivity-normative contemporary psychiatric discourse. They do not credit their sources, something which would reveal the literature they read to come up with this definition. If they had, I would have less hesitation in critiquing this text: When you say "According to" or "So and so says" you are empowering a voice. Giving a single person authority. This is the kind of authority which is easier to recognise as such. Instead, I see this authorless text as possible designed to permeate my subconsciousness, and if I let it to do this I would be infecting my mind with the unrefined literary structures of irresponsible opportunists who don't actually care about language at all. Or perhaps they're sold on the illusion of objectivity to the extent that there is nothing more that they would like than to disseminate definitions as if they were, as Rune thinks, 'divine'. The authorless text is also critic-less. Or so its creators would have us believe.
We should be blurring the lines between dictionaries and works of art. Lists are in fact poems - the only difference is that they are designed without conscious attempts to contribute to the genre of poetry. This simply makes them crude, unsophisticated poems - devoid of taste for alliteration, assonance and other literary techniques.
Perhaps as well as poetry, developers of dictionaries should look to dream interpretation dictionaries for inspiration. While these are flawed in their own way, usually indebted to the Jungian idea of the collective unconsciousness, it's a start in the right direction: Investigating how a word resonates with you personally on every level. Just as a well-analysed dream makes you reinvent your conscious narratives, performing a definition should be a transformational personal endeavour.
I have to get going soon, but consider Mr Vejby's notion - that there is "violence entailed" in the omission of the author from a definition. Reproduced is the illusion that the def. could and should directly reflect reality, instead of being one person's representation of self. Reproduced is the enigma of absolute knowledge, for all those words together further enable people to come up with their own reductive and redundant objectivity-normative search for totality, a finite amount of knowledge, an accessible completeness to language.
So next time you look up a word in a dictionary of your choice, consider its fragile, humble human context. No matter how imposing the institution providing you the information might appear, it's run by sentient human beings. Those human beings will respond if you contact them to let them know that you would like greater illumination of the authorial presence, through the dramatic step of referencing each work back to its originator. Please don't stop demanding quality information until you get your wishes met.
I love you,
Epiphanie
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