Re: "schizophrenic" reference

[Dusko Pavlovic <Dusko.Pavlovic@comlab.ox.ac.uk>]

people, can we please please please stop with these evil schizophrenic
dogmatic discussions about terminology? i have been on this list for 20
years, and there were good times, and there were less good times, but i
was never really tempted to start filtering it out.

in the middle of the discussion about evil, and about the religious
conotations pointed out by jean benabou, a lurking student asked me: why
is it that category theorists have no sense of humor? i said all
scientists are a little serious, but she came at me with a collection of
recent terminology from chemistry:

> moronic acid, arsole, bastardin and bastardane, gossypole, buckminster
> fullerene...

all of it in refereed publications. people enjoy themselves creating new
molecules and then creating names the for them.

in physics they have MACHOs and WIMPs. they have the big bang. if we want
to attract more students, maybe we should use names like big bang, and
like pullback, and not like l-adic p-groups, or even galoisian cohomology
(especially since galois was dead <150 years when his cohomology came
about...)

when i say "i had a schizophrenic morning", it does not mean that my
morning has seen a psychiatrist, or even that it was split in two. when i
say "i had 3000 things to do", it doesn't mean that i counted. some people
would prefer to say "i had many things to do". these two statements
express the same fact, but they also express different speakers. the
difference between such expressions is called social life.

some people say that words should have a clear meaning, and that
conotations (religious, moral, ironic) should be avoided. but words
*always* accumulate connotations, entire mythologies, as roland barthes
explained. this cannot be decreed away. the standardized, official,
unambiguous expressions do not express only their standard meanings, but
also the adherence to the social context in which they were standardized.

the argument for standard unambiguous terminologies is usually that the
public would get confused with multiple terms. the rules to be obeyed are
almost always prescribed for the social benefit, and almost never to
assert authority. when i was a child in yugoslavia, you could never say
communism, you had to say socialism, because the difference might confuse
the public.

mathematical notations can be good or bad, and great mathematicians often
design great notations. but natural language is a living organism. words
evolve. in contrast with the mathematical notations, words do not obey
intelligent design, no matter how intelligent we are...

(sorry about the long rant.)

if anyone is interested, i think we should form A Categorical Liberation
Union to defend our terminology from moral and religious influences.

-- dusko

> From: Tom Leinster <Tom.Leinster@glasgow.ac.uk>
> Date: October 29, 2010 4:34:21 AM GMT+02:00
> To: <categories@mta.ca>
> Subject: categories: Re: "schizophrenic" reference
> Reply-To: Tom Leinster <Tom.Leinster@glasgow.ac.uk>
>
>
> I'm afraid I say this every time "schizophrenic" objects come up, but here
> I go again...
>
> Let's not use that word.
>
> To quote the Guardian style guide (http://www.guardian.co.uk/styleguide/s):
>
>    schizophrenia, schizophrenic
>
>    use only in a medical context, never to mean "in two minds",
>    contradictory, or erratic, which is wrong, as well as offensive to
>    people diagnosed with this illness.
>
> There is a concise summary of the history and terminology at
>
>    http://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/dualizing+object
>
> which also links to a discussion of alternatives.  "Dualizing object" and
> "ambimorphic object" are both used.
>
> Best wishes,
> Tom


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