I love dictionaries, computer languages and a variety of other
semantically precise things but I tend to fog out when somone says,
"We have to define our terms...." I'm attracted to Richard Mochelle's
idea but I'm not too keen on carefully contructed neologisms, either.
This problem of an overloaded word keeps coming up. Everybody has a
different notion. The dictionary is precisely general. We start
cataloging different meanings and end in a swamp, finally realizing
that meanings are highly context dependent. So we start cataloging
contexts and end in a swamp. Etc... Another example is "What is
'art'?" _The Art of Motorcycle Maintainance_ is an account of such
swamp excursion.
Here's an apporach to *characterizing* "what we mean by 'work'": Make
a list, a fairly sizable list, of things that might be work. Obvious
candidates, frivolities, formalisms, colloquialisms, stories,
ambiguities and absurdities are all allowed. Then sort the list,
somewhat cavalierly, into three heaps: Those that surely are work,
those that surely aren't and mu. Mu -- no thing -- includes
ambiguities, cases with uncertain contexts, yes-and-no cases, cases
provoking (possibly inflamed) disagreement, whatever's undecidable.
Now ask, how are the things in the yes heap alike? How are the things
in the no heap alike? And, for each thing in the mu heap, what can we
learn about our notions of the thing(s) we commonly call "work"
from its presence in the undecidable/disputable heap.
If you do this with "art", you come to the conclusion...
No, if *I* do this with "art", *I* come to the conclusion (1) that
lots of stuff *is* art that would give the art school academics the
willies and (2) that the question isn't "What is art?" but rather,
"What art is interesting and, in each case, why?" The result is still
a question but one that heads off on a different track from the
original one and leads to new insights.
Is that anything like what you had in mind, Richard? This is somthing
I do in my head. I dunno how it'd play out as a multiperson exercise
on the net and it looks at, rather than dumps, the word you wanted
to dump. But then, you asked for lateral somthing-or-other. :-)
- Mike
--
Michael Spencer Nova Scotia, Canada
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
URL: http://www.mit.edu:8001/people/mspencer/home.html
---
