What's In A Name?

What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other word would smell as sweet.
   — William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

I don't know who invented words, but they are a marvelous invention. They provide a medium for communicating with the world around us, and for organizing our thoughts about that world.

Names are a particularly useful class of words. They can encapsulate an entity of arbitrary complexity into a succinct word or two. The entity might be concrete, abstract, or some combination of the two.

Calling out the entity's name is so much easier than describing it each time we want to reference it. In this compressed form, we can manipulate our ideas more easily using less memory space. We can move mountains inside a single word. When I think of "Everest," I imagine the tallest mountain in the world. If I say "Everest" to you, you likely do so also.

Shared Understanding

I remember a situation when I was a teenage TV repairman when I was shown a television set to fix while the customer waited. I was told "this TV is broken," and I stopped what I was doing to fix it.

I turned it on, and there was no picture. With a little troubleshooting, I found that the brightness control on the side of the set was cracked. I replaced that control, and the TV produced a picture on the screen. I closed the set back up, and pronounced it "fixed."

I took the TV to the front office where the customer was waiting. They paid and left with it. Later, I heard that they had returned and demanded a refund. They were unhappy with the repair and subsequently taken the TV to another repair shop. Apparently the cracked brightness control was a consequence of them transporting the set on the back seat of their car.

The problem that I found was not the "broken" that the customer knew about. We had two different meanings of the word "broken." When I found a problem that illustrated the label "broken," I stopped there. "The problem" had been identified and fixed.

That word "the" can get in our way of understanding a situation. There is always more than we currently understand. It's up to us to set the boundary for how far we explore for now. Does our current understanding give us a sufficient handle on the situation?

When communicating with others, does the handle we have on the situation sufficiently match that held by the others that the communication actually works? I received my "handle" on the situation of the TV through someone working in the front office. It matched, well enough, what I observed. I know now that it's better to ask for a description of what they observe at the start, and ask for them to review the situation when I think I'm done. I was young, then, and didn't know that. I'm older now and still sometimes fail to do these things.

When I say "blue," what shade comes to mind for you? Do you think it's the same shade that I had in mind when I said it?

How about when I say "evil?" Do you think we refer to the same behavior? Is it a noun or an adjective? Do you think "evil" is property of how people act, or something innate in their being. Or is it an entity that exists outside of people?

Does the word "evil" help us communicate what we see in the world, or does it communicate how we feel about it? Does the word help us deal with what we don't like, or does it magnify it for us and call it into our lives?

Reification

Reification is the mental process of turning abstract ideas into concrete notions. Giving a name to something, or some concept, can fool us into thinking it actually exists. The act of naming calls it into existence for us.

Evil, though often thought of as an entity or quality, is probably better understood as a relationship. An action is evil if it hurts me, or hurts someone whose well-being I care about and to which am paying attention. To someone not paying attention or who considers that person irrelevant, it may just seem like a shrewd move.

When you haven't been feeling well, how much comfort does it give you when the doctor tells you the name of the condition that they think is aflicting you? I find it often makes me think the problem is nearly solved. It's a "simple" matter of looking up the solution for the diagnosis.

Many situations in life don't have a simple known solution, though. Often the diagnosis only describes some noticeable symptoms rather than underlying causes. If the diagnosis contains the word "syndrome," then this is likely true, but not always. I'm not even sure there's a distinct boundary between medical conditions and behavioral patterns. Where would you classify introversion? Or forgetfulness?

Even when the diagnosis is more precise than naming the symptoms, the solution may be far from clear. It's not even necessarily true that the named diagnosis is pathological and requires a solution.

Labeling and Categorization

A diagnosis, whether specific or descriptive, gives us a convenient label to refer to the situation. Names and labels are useful shortcuts for talking about something or searching for how others have talked about it.

The labels can also get in the way in a couple of different ways. We've seen, in the broken TV story, how a label can mean different things to different people. And we've seen how evidence that supports the label can satisfy our search for understanding and inhibit going further.

We often categorize individuals into groups according to some aspect or property we perceive of them. There are tall people and short people. There are noisy dogs and quiet dogs. A diagnosis may indicate another way of categorization. There are people with diabetes. There are people allergic to gluten. These are convenient categories to use when offering strategies for dealing with the consequences of the diagnosed condition.

The category is, itself, a label that applies collectively. Because we can reason about a representative example in a category, it's a short step to applying that reasoning to all the members of the category. This can save a lot of thinking, but can also lead us astray. Tomatoes are botanically a fruit, but from a culinary point of view are considered vegetables and not usually added to a fruit salad. Legally, for the purposes of the Tariff Act of 1883, they are considered a vegetable and were taxed as such.

Once we've categorized individuals for one perceived aspect, we tend to generalize and consider them similar in other unstated ways, also. Maybe we've had experience with some tall people looking down on us figuratively as well as literally. We might generalize this to considering all tall people to be overbearing, even those we might find humble and kind if we really got to know them.

Once we've categorized someone in one fashion, it may blind us to other appropriate categories. In fact once we have a list of categories, we may not consider other categories at all.¹ The categories restrict our visible world, and remove a lot of nuance and context. Is this dog noisy all the time, or do we only notice the dog when it is noisy? In what situations is the dog noisy?

Names, labels, and categories are incredibly useful, except when they aren't. What are your strategies to keep them from fooling you when you're not paying close enough attention? It's something to think about. And if you're willing to share, I'd appreciate it if you'd share them with me.

P.S. I apologize for the length of this month's newsletter. As I wrote it, it grew, and I couldn't find any part I wanted to leave out. I appreciate you for reading all the way to the end.

Did this newsletter seem overly long to you? Perhaps you could suggest what part could be deleted.

And if you'd like to talk further about this topic, you could schedule a Zoom Session with me to talk about it.

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