Stratification or organizational complexity

A second, more cognitive aspect ofexperiential complexity is best described in terms of stratifi- cation.

At its simplest, the conventional meaning of this term can be defined as the belief in a “hierarchy of levels of reality”. François (1999, p. 204) attributes the first formulation of this principle to the philosopher N. Hartmann. An evaluation of this claim should prove difficult as the belief (and certainly the term) seems to be near ubiquitous and recurs in terminology research (Budin, 1996b,

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See for example this observation regarding memory, which can be seen as a “routine” or sub-aspect ofscheme: “Reliable recollection often depends on “source memory,” the recall of how you encountered an object or event. Witnesses have erroneously identified alleged criminals because they had seen them outside the context of the crime [...] A sense of familiarity was retained, but the source of this familiarity was forgotten (Thomson 1988). People often fail to keep track of the origins of their experience or beliefs. [...] The adaptiveness criterion suggests [..] forgetting sources is an economical response to the enormous demands on memory (Harman 1986)”, Goldman, 1999, p. 281.

p. 97), translation studies (Wilss, 1996, pp. 58; 80; 104), linguistics (Halliday, 2004, pp. 53/54) and the sociology of science (Sismondo, 2010, p. 37). Depending on the respective context, it is attributed to phenomena as diverse as the aforementioned semantic systems, knowledge, meaning, grammar, metaphor, power and funding. Stratification has also been represented both

linguistically and graphically. It might best be regarded as a heuristic in the above sense. A

representative example can be recognized, for example, in this figure:

Figure 6.1: Stratification. Caption reads: Dynamic complexity; model of the discursive organi- zation of communication, explained on the example of citation, under the aspect of epistemic innovation (Budin, 1996b, 97, my translation).

Generally, the hierarchies suggested by the idea of stratification seem ordered and clear-cut,

an observation which might be interpreted in terms of theirmodel function insofar as they result

from the same individual’s organizing/ constructing activity. This may however be a function of the respective perspective.

By way of a counter-example, Latour’s explication highlights that these strata or layers may well represent elements that have sprung from the interpretations and cognitive activities of others. It makes clear that in the case of scientific and academic discourse production, the texts must in fact contain such elements:

The difference between a regular text in prose and a technical document is the stratification of the latter. The text is arranged in layers. Each claim is interrupted

byreferences outside the textsor inside the texts to other parts, to figures, to columns,

tables, legends, graphs. Each of these in turn may send you back to other parts of the same texts or to more outside references.

Latour, 1987, 48, my emphasis

These elements, which must be constructed again by each interpreter as maker’s knowledge

(4.1.1) can take all kinds ofsyntagmatic forms, including those of terms,retronyms, explications, fragments, named entities, and so on. Insofar as they contain references to thought objects, their

construction can be seen to be under the influence of the last interpreter’s worldview and the operations of its schemes (and biases), and if6 we assume – for the sake of the argument –

that the discourse of the document refers to the self-same object, the layers of the hierarchy can be taken to become gradually skewed, dented, or sideways twisted into knots, while layers are constantly being removed or added.

Budin’s synopsis of this is that “citing the content of a text changes the knowledge structure of the text, which contains references to further texts” (Budin, 1996b, 96, my translation and

emphasis). This can be seen as an acknowledgement that this process does happen, but not necessarily as a hypothesis of how it comes to be so. In order to visualize the implications of this, we could extend7 _{the geological metaphor one might associate with the term stratification} to aid our understanding. The phenomenonstratification is known in geology as:

the layering that occurs in most sedimentary rocks and in those igneous rocks formed at the Earth’s surface, as from lava flows and volcanic fragmental deposits. The layers range from several millimetres to many metres in thickness and vary greatly in shape. [...] Where layers have been deformed, the record of past move- ments of the Earth’s surface is preserved in the stratification, making possible the

interpretation of geologic events and permitting such practical results as the location of mineral deposits, petroleum fields, and groundwater reservoirs.

Britannica Contributors, 2013, my emphasis

The layers of a document – and by extension those of the context of its production, as indicated by its position in a textual archive – can be seen as elements “deposited” by discourse produc- ers exercising meta-schemes of scientificity and (declarative) disciplinarity. They are however

“deformed” by “tectonic forces”, i.e. the procedural or action-guiding aspects of the respective thick concepts ((3); (7)) and the process of interpretation (4.1.2) resulting in “natural” strata

that might be imagined as similar to something like this:

6_{This is a big “if”, indeed. A fully formulated model ofdisciplinarity might at least help guess the probability}

that an interpretationfitsone context or another, and therefore provide aheuristictentatively adjusted for a particularbias. See case examples.

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“The very systematicity that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another [...] will necessarily hide other aspects of the concept. In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept [...] a metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor”, Lakoff and Johnson, 2003, p. 10. Operationalized for our form ofconcept analysis,this implies that subverting the metaphor by looking at its “hidden” implications becomes a method ofparadigmatic analysis

Figure 6.2: The analogy of geological stratification: image shown is of strata in the formation Stair Hole, in the southwest of England. Source: West, 2012.

Unless order is imposed in one more process of interpretation (“understanding”), stratified

documents can appear as anything but tidy, and the interpretation can only be seen as relative to both the constraints of the object and the interpreter’sworldview. Constructing a plausible –

that is,coherent and viable – account of how heuristics for such processes of interpretation can

be built up is the main challenge ofphilosophical terminography, as previously argued.

As we have surmised, it takes the form of generating a “white box” on theworldview level by

creating a codified piece of discourse detailing the perceived or ascribed organization (i.e. the regularity) of parts of other cognitive artifacts (terms, explications, fragments) in a given context

that is to be identified by executing these procedures. This is where the idea of declarative subject delimitation becomes central.

What is of interest here is how the organization can be understood or described in terms of an explanation that is not only hierarchical but also functional; here, we encounter complexity

in the sense ofstratification as a practical problem of subject delimitation:

The noun complexity can be described as the quality of being intricate and com- pounded. Its values are complicated in structure, consisting of interconnected parts.

When applied to scholarly areas [... it] may be seen as caused by factors that can be ascribed to the scholarly area itself [...] The existence of competing schools within a scholarly area may [...] lead to a higher degree of complexity [...] Another factor may be that many scholarly areas have been developed from already existing scholarly areas.

Kristiansen, 2007, 66, my emphasis

This problem statement needs to be operationalized. The questions to be asked in the process of the resolution ofstratification-related experiential complexity are: Why? What? When? Where?

and, in the human sciences, most often,Who? They should have an impact of the interpretation

of retronyms, given that subject areas, when they develop from others, take over the terms

denoting their object, and that the greater the numbers of competing schools, the greater the number of competingexplications for these retronyms in general ((5.2), (5.3)) will be. In short,

stratification of any cognitive artifact produced in the context8 will appear.

Subject delimitation as supported by a model of declarative disciplinarity would practically

entail abstracting regularity away from the apparent chaos and imposing order in the form of a “disciplinary model” in terms of such questions. Compared to the dialectic of order and chaos as suggested by Budin (1996b, pp. 63; 125-127)), this model would basically constitute the “skeleton” of a discourse-world model that could within limits be used for an a priori subject

delimitation, as well as for term description (context insertion) based on the delimitation, which would emerge from experiential contexts rather than from abstractions that must ultimately be (re-)enacted. Our outline for formulating thedeclarative aspect ofdisciplinarity (and therefore

its model) flows from this understanding ofexperiential complexity that has now been formulated.

The larger model will now be developed further by incorporating considerations on declarative subject delimitation and a number of case studies.