Thoughts on the Linguistic Etiquette of Nomenclature

Note

Ozzie Gooen · January 2020 · Completeness: ★★☆ (developing)

Unpublished QURI draft, posted as-is — rough and unfinished; collaborator comments have been removed.

Ozzie Gooen’s take

I think naming conceptual topics well is very important, but surprisingly under-appreciated and understudied. My impression is that very few people care about this meta-topic, so it’s hard to make much headway.

Opus 4.8’s summary

A short two-part draft (January 2020) on naming. The first part proposes a heuristic: a good name is one that multiple independent discoverers would have been expected to converge on, illustrated with Shannon’s choice of “information,” and links to Wikipedia pages on multiple discoveries and Stigler’s law. The second part argues that a community’s stock of positively-connoted words is a fixed public resource, using a hypothetical “Liberty Technology” to illustrate displacement and negative-externality effects, and floats taxing terminology use in proportion to counterfactual cost, drawing an analogy to domain-name markets. The two sections are presented side by side without integration; several bolded fragments near the top (e.g. “The 8 Methods of Exploration,” “The Master List”) are unexplained stubs, and neither idea is developed past initial statement.

Presuppositions in Names

“The 8 Methods of Exploration”

“The Master List”

The Heuristic of Expected Multiple Discovery

One nice property of a good name is that it would have been expected to have been separately identified and chosen by multiple hypothetical discoverers. For example, Claude Shannon used the term “information” for a technical concept in his paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication.” It would have been very possible for him to have instead named this a new work like “shlonah”. However, this technical concept mapped quite closely with existing intuitions around vernacular definitions of “information”, so referring to the technical term by its’ vernacular similar was quite intuitive. One could imagine that had another person defined the concept without seeing this paper, they too may have used the word “information” for this purpose. It seems like calling it “information” both satisfied the considerations of:1) Being relatively intuitive to technical readers.

2. Was the likely word to be used had someone else name the concept.

Perhaps this is more apparent when the definition is a clear combination of multiple related words in a way that implies the correct meaning. “Information Theory” is an evident name for a scientific field based around the technical definition of information. Something like “Claudism” would likely have been much worse.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_misnamed_theorems

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_examples_of_Stigler%27s_law

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eponym

Positive Verbal Affects as a Fixed Public Resource

The space of existing beliefs and intuitions within a community on a set of terminology can be considered a fixed public resource in regards to new terminology.

For example, a group could have strongly positive impressions of the word “liberty”. If a company were to market themselves under the name “Liberty”, they would likely be benefiting from this positive affect. Perhaps the company calls itself “Liberty Technology” to invoke positive associations.

One challenge is that the space of available terminology is a limited good. If one group were to call itself “Liberty Technology” and became popular from doing so, that would limit other groups from using “Liberty” in their names.

The first reason for this is “replacement”; a second group also called “Liberty Technology” would encounter clashes with the first, and other groups with similar names would also face confusion.

The second reason is the potential for the presence of negative externalities. Perhaps Liberty Technology collects and sells large amounts of data on its customers to Spyware companies and causes a corresponding scandal. If so, community members may develop a negative connotation of the word “Liberty” that could apply to all future uses of the word. This can be viewed as a negative externality of the impact of “Liberty Technology” on the space of names near the word “Liberty.”

Note that at any point in time, there may only be a fixed number of words with positive affects to the extent as “Liberty”, especially in relation to many kinds of specific business types.

One suggested solution for dealing with problems of fixed public resources is to tax participants in proportion to the counterfactual cost and externalities of their uses of terminology. A brand would have to pay a fixed fee to use the name “Liberty Technology” if it were evident that Liberty was a popular word and that their use of the name would displace naming of other actors. They may have to pay an additional fee in correspondence to any negative externalities they cause, or perhaps gain a subsidy on positive externalities they cause.

This kind of setup is related to the WWW domain system. While top-level domain registrars don’t typically charge different prices for different domain names, markets are quickly established as users and domain parkers purchase domains and can circumstantially sell them off. Calinsurance.com was reportedly sold for $49.7 million, for instance.