My interest in terminological debates is usually not to discover new ideas but to try to prevent confusion (when readers are likely to infer something wrong from a name, e.g., because of different previous usage or because a compound term is defined to mean something that’s different from what one would reasonably infer from the combination of individual terms). But sometimes terminological debates can uncover hidden assumptions and lead to substantive debates about them. See here for an example.
Whether to call something dephlogisticated air or oxygen was a very important terminological debate in chemisty even when the correlational cluster was the same. It matters if you conceptualize it as absense of something or as positive existence.
In medicine the recent debate about renaming chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) into systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID) is a quite interesting one.
With CFS it’s a quite unclear where to draw the boundary. With SEID you can let someone exercise and then observe how long their body needs to recover and when they take much longer to recover from the exertion you can put the SEID diagnosis on them.
CFS and SEID are both cases where certain states correlate with each other Zacks post doesn’t help us at all to reason about whether we should prefer CFS or SEID as a term.
CFS and SEID are both cases where certain states correlate with each other Zacks post doesn’t help us at all to reason about whether we should prefer CFS or SEID as a term.
I’m definitely not claiming to have the “correct” answer to all terminological disputes. (As the post says, “Of course, there isn’t going to be a unique way to encode the knowledge into natural language.”)
Suppose, hypothetically, that it were discovered that there are actually two or more distinct etiologies causing cases that had historically been classified as “chronic fatigue syndrome”, and cases with different etiologies responded better to different treatments. In this hypothetical scenario, medical professionals would want to split what they had previously called “chronic fatigue syndrome” into two or more categories to reflect their new knowledge. I think someone who insisted that “chronic fatigue syndrome” was still a good category given the new discovery of separate etiologies would be making a mistake (with respect to the goals doctors have when they talk about diseases), even if the separate etiologies had similar symptoms (which is what motivated the CFS label in the first place).
In terms of the configuration space visual metaphor, we would say that while “chronic fatigue syndrome” is a single cluster in the “symptoms” subspace of Diseasespace, more variables than just symptoms are decision-relevant to doctors, and the CFS cluster doesn’t help them reason about those other variables.
This makes me curious—have you found that terminological debates often lead to interesting ideas? Can you give an example?
My interest in terminological debates is usually not to discover new ideas but to try to prevent confusion (when readers are likely to infer something wrong from a name, e.g., because of different previous usage or because a compound term is defined to mean something that’s different from what one would reasonably infer from the combination of individual terms). But sometimes terminological debates can uncover hidden assumptions and lead to substantive debates about them. See here for an example.
Whether to call something dephlogisticated air or oxygen was a very important terminological debate in chemisty even when the correlational cluster was the same. It matters if you conceptualize it as absense of something or as positive existence.
In medicine the recent debate about renaming chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) into systemic exertion intolerance disease (SEID) is a quite interesting one.
With CFS it’s a quite unclear where to draw the boundary. With SEID you can let someone exercise and then observe how long their body needs to recover and when they take much longer to recover from the exertion you can put the SEID diagnosis on them.
CFS and SEID are both cases where certain states correlate with each other Zacks post doesn’t help us at all to reason about whether we should prefer CFS or SEID as a term.
I’m definitely not claiming to have the “correct” answer to all terminological disputes. (As the post says, “Of course, there isn’t going to be a unique way to encode the knowledge into natural language.”)
Suppose, hypothetically, that it were discovered that there are actually two or more distinct etiologies causing cases that had historically been classified as “chronic fatigue syndrome”, and cases with different etiologies responded better to different treatments. In this hypothetical scenario, medical professionals would want to split what they had previously called “chronic fatigue syndrome” into two or more categories to reflect their new knowledge. I think someone who insisted that “chronic fatigue syndrome” was still a good category given the new discovery of separate etiologies would be making a mistake (with respect to the goals doctors have when they talk about diseases), even if the separate etiologies had similar symptoms (which is what motivated the CFS label in the first place).
In terms of the configuration space visual metaphor, we would say that while “chronic fatigue syndrome” is a single cluster in the “symptoms” subspace of Diseasespace, more variables than just symptoms are decision-relevant to doctors, and the CFS cluster doesn’t help them reason about those other variables.