Labels Stick
Direct Link to File. 544 words, 3 minute read, 2 paperback pages
When asked what he would do if he were made [governor], the great Chinese philosopher Confucius replied that he would embark on a program of [fill in the Chinese], “the rectification of names.”
…and say more.
Adam in the garden, naming animals.
US library system, contentiousness.
Labels are words we use to denote categories. Naming something is an act of classification.
One might say that the label is “just” the designator for the category, and that what really matters is the category itself, not the label. This may be true in some cases but not in others. Imagine having a set of physical bins, like in a workshop, with labels to help the craftsman know whats inside each bin. [TODO this is muddled] Clearly some labels are better than others: labeling each bin “things made out of metal” will not be as useful as labels for “screws,” “nails,” “bolts,” etc. or even more precise designations such as “1/2 inch screws”, “wing-nut bolts,” depending on the level of precision needed. In this example, the labels are an aid to looking things up, what in the world of library science the would call retrieval, as in information retrieval. Yet even in situations where a choice of two different words might be just as useful for retrieving information about, say a group of people, the labels used have connotations which have been highly disputed. Take for example, [… the transition from “Negro” to “Black”, or…]
Labels are the signifiers of classifications, and classifications feed into policies, [e.g. give my example of labeling someone a Nazi.]
Wittgenstein [held forth] that most of the disputes, misunderstandings and conundrums in philosophy come from people taking a word from one [area / regime / milieu?] of usage and applying it to another. He said that words ‘mean how they are used’ [my words]….more on that.
Orwell, relabeling. Attaturk?
To what extent are labels bound with categories, and to what extent to labels transcend categories? Consider the age-old problem of language translation. In some cases a language will have no word for a concept or object expressed in another language. For example, the German word “Schadenfreude” has no direct English single-word equivalent, but can be rendered via the phrase “pleasure at anothers misfortune.” Some languages have multiple words where another my only have one word as in the [meme] that “The Eskimos have over 100 words for ‘snow.’”.
Herein lies the “colonialism” aspect of the labeling power-play, as “Eskimo” is not a designation approved by any northern Native American tribes (including the Inuit,…). Even the seemingly “neutral” world of scientific nomenclature is not immune to colonialist [badness?], as European explorers would replace local names for animals with their own names — in many cases, LITERALLY their own names, as in [examples? “Thompson’s gazelle”] instead of [whatever the native word was]. (Note: the science community’s habit of using Latin names for species necessarily means replacing native words.) The “local” designation may be if interest, as the same species may go by different names in different locales, such as the insect in the United States known alternately as the “firefly” or “lightning bug” depending on where you are. (map?)
