Contingency or socio-historical complexity

Therefore, we regard most socio-historical factors as contingent for the case of terminology de-

scription.

Contingencies are encountered in the reading and comparison (interpretation/ construction)

of texts in thetextual archives3 of a discipline or field – the preparation of samples and excerpts

which would then be combined, contextualized and condensed in the form of records. Thus, they accompany the activity of constructing experiential meaning from which the terminographer’s worldview emerges.

As contingencies are resolved by application of schemes like text-world model (4.2.2.1) and discourse-world model (4.2.2.2), these records can ultimately be “terminated” (compare Alex-

eeva, (5.3)) with a designating expression or term. It is this expression which also serves as a “handle” to activate the respective concept or category in discourse production. Given the context, it stands to reason that this would be a retronym (5.3) whose conventional usage can assimilate or be accommodated to the given range of text fragments and the terms and expli- cations they contain. Seen a priori, both the choice of retronym term and the exact range of

fragments to be categorized are indeterminate as the context into which they can be inserted needs to be inductively established. This is the function of themeta-schemes ofscientificity and disciplinarity.

Indeterminacy or semantic uncertainty as we understand it (4.1.2) can be understood as a “normal” feature of this process. The activity of subject delimitation thus becomes a subfunction of the overall process and is practiced a posteri, by gradually adding information about the

context in which a term or fragment has been discovered to the record. This entire thesis – in whole or in part – may serve to exemplify this practice, whereby the construction of the concept ofstereotype (2.5) can be seen as prototypically demonstrating the form of the records that we

refer to.

This aspect of the practice of philosophical terminography is intuitive, and its ad-hoc infor-

mality is owed to what will be described as thecontingency of subject fields, which we simply

accept as a fact of experience.

It can be sharply contrasted with the perspective of subject delimitation and corpus building asa priori activities, which was provisionally assumed in (1.4.1) and may be the result of the

more pedagogical concerns of termontography that make it necessary that pre-defined subject

structures are taken as the point of departure (Temmerman and Kerremans, 2003).

The form of indeterminacy that is described by e.g. (Kristiansen, 2007), below, is perhaps best subsumed under the heading ofcontingency in the present context. However, what should

we understand by the category ofcontingency?

The idea of contingency should be understood in the context of the need to conjecture (i.e.

predict, explain) about the workings ofsemantic systemsby means of thesociological imagination

3_{This is not an physical corpus but a paradigmatic abstraction of discourse in general; textual archives are}

“archives of [... the discourse community’s] common interest [...] The textual archive [...] is avirtual concept

as it is not only impossible nowadays to collect everything which has been recorded on [... a] subject”, Ahmad/ Rogers, cited in Temmerman, 2000, p. 53.

or theory of mind ((2); (5.4.1.1)), whereby the expectation is that the conjecture should yield

a viable explanation that is ideally consistent with observer’s idea of scientificity (3). This is

however more of a feature of discourse production than one ofworldview construction.

In this context, the resolution of perturbations resulting from competing alternative expla-

nations involves the imposition of simplifying heuristics – or a “reduction of complexity”, as

achieved by someone in particular rather than a semantic system as a collective abstraction

– on experiences which involve a large number of unknown variables. This is what makes an interpretation taskexperientially complex in the cultural or socio-historical sense entailed by the

termcontingency.

As an idea, it has seen some reception in terminology research and translation studies, due again to the influence of Luhmann (Hermans, 1999, p. 81, Budin, 1996b, pp. 25/26, and the above). There it is seen to denote “ontic coincidence” (Budin). Contingency is a retronym likely

adopted from philosophy, where it is defined more strictly (compareproposition as used in (3.4)

vs. (4.2.2.1)):

In logic and metaphysics, contingency designates a modality which is often er- roneously described as ‘coincidental’. A condition is contingent if and only if it is

neither necessary nor impossible.

Schmidt and Gessmann, 2009, Kontingenz, my translation and emphasis

With regard to the above argument, we now need to reiterate the following: constructivism posits that the mind works by abstracting regularity from experiences (reflective abstraction, (4.1.1))

and consequently projecting them onto expectations of future events under the premise that once

viable decisions will remainviable (5.4.1.1).

If we consider experiences (or systemic “events”) ascontingent, then it follows that all regularity

attributed to them is the result of this abstraction (the action of schemes) and not of the

experiences per se. This difference can be taken to be literally isomorphic to the difference

between system and model.

By way of a practical example, any givenretronym term(e.g. contingency, proposition) might

be characterized as “typical” for a subject field (author, period, etc.) when it was (from a

diachronic perspective) “in fact” an import or inter-domain borrowing from another. This may

however only emerge when the earlier assumption is questioned and further inquiry is done, which contradicts the idea of relatively stable “ignorance arrangements” that allow everybody to “mind their own business”, as the agnotologists contend (4.2.2.2). As the case may be, any such insight requires a revision of thescheme ofdiscourse-world model, which then undergoes an assimilation and/or accommodation (Main conclusion, 246 ff.).

This observation overlaps the phenomenon that Rita Temmerman described as“self-centredness”

and which we described assubject-specific stereotype(2.5.5.2). Thestereotypeis however assumed

to be fixed, while thescheme – ideally – remains variable.

If we repurpose the “psychodynamic” view on stereotype and generalize it to encompass the

interpretation ofcontingent experiences, we can see that the implied interpretations orreflective abstractionsare, like the stereotypes, “functional, but flawed” – in short, that they might be error-

prone4 _{as the theory of cognitive biases suggests (Frey and Frey, 2009; Heylighen, 2010). We} might even regard thestereotypes themselves as a form ofcognitive bias, if we extrapolate from

4

from a realist perspective; otherwise, we could assume that one can abstract inviable regularities as well as viable ones.

decision-making to categorization by understandingcategorization as a decision about whether

different mental phenomena are to be grouped or separated.

Cognitive biases are, at the simplest, the (statistical) errors produced by the application of heuristics to solve problems in complex environments or systems (Fischhoff, 1999, p. 423, Hey-

lighen, 2010, p. 107). Heuristics, by contrast, are “simple, efficient shortcuts applied in judgment

and decision-making when people face overly complex tasks, have limited time or cognitive abil- ity, or deal with incomplete information in the world” (Haselton et al., 2009, p. 737) or “rule[s] of thumb that people use to simplify problem solving when the search space is too large to be systematically explored” (Heylighen, 2010, p. 107).

The idea of “heuristics and biases” is attributed to the cognitive psychologists Amos Tversky

and Daniel Kahneman; it essentially holds that human decision-making tends to deviate from the “normative standards of logic” (Haselton et al., 2009, p. 737) and thus ideal-typical rationality.

This does not contradict the idea of the adaptive function of knowledge (Glasersfeld, 2004, p. 219) as thebias (“flaw” in the realist’s sense) can itself be adaptive5. But it does say that

coping withexperiential complexityby imposing regularity oncontingentevents does not amount

to an approximative understanding of ontic complexity, and this is what differentiates our un-

derstanding from the ontological perspective on complexity.

On this view, it is sensible that constructivism does not want to make any claims about an experiencer-independent reality. Contingency therefore describes the socio-historical aspect of experiential complexity, which is inherited or translated intostratification or cognitive/ organi-

zational complexity to the extent that semantic systems (or rather, the actors that comprise

them!) bring forth cognitive artifacts containing formulations that either refer to contingencies

or must be understood in relation to implicit contingencies. In this case, we can assume that

those who formulated the discourse have had experience of the event in question, which must however remain opaque to the last person constructing information by way of interaction with the artifact.

This aspect of experiential complexity is by far one of the more pressing practical concern to

our conception of philosophical terminography, and a tentative idea of its inductive treatment

will conclude the experimental part of present work (Main conclusion, on page 246 ff.). Here, the concept will only be briefly characterized insofar as this is indispensable for the present discussion.