I work in what's called a "technical" field, and I often find that the words are irrelevant. Concepts evolve, and may even render the words misleading.
Things like math envy cause us to adopt the dysfunctional parts of technical fields. (Fields medalist) Thurston explained:
"Mathematicians have developed habits of communication that are
often dysfunctional. Organizers of colloquium talks everywhere
exhort speakers to explain things in elementary terms. Nonetheless,
most of the audience at an average colloquium talk gets little of
value from it. Perhaps they are lost within the first 5 minutes,
yet sit silently through the remaining 55 minutes. Or perhaps they
quickly lose interest because the speaker plunges into technical
details without presenting any reason to investigate them. At the
end of the talk, the few mathematicians who are close to the field
of the speaker ask a question or two to avoid embarrassment.
"This pattern is similar to what often holds in classrooms, where we
go through the motions of saying for the record what we think the
students “ought” to learn, while the students are trying to grapple
with the more fundamental issues of learning our language and
guessing at our mental models. Books compensate by giving samples
of how to solve every type of homework problem. Professors
compensate by giving homework and tests that are much easier than
the material “covered” in the course, and then grading the homework
and tests on a scale that requires little understanding. We assume
that the problem is with the students rather than with
communication: that the students either just don’t have what it
takes, or else just don’t care.
"Outsiders are amazed at this phenomenon, but within the
mathematical community, we dismiss it with shrugs."
— William P. Thurston, "On Proof and Progress in Mathematics"
> I regularly work to show my students that they expect vast swaths of
> technical jargon in the natural sciences - however much they complain that
> there are so many terms to learn - but intensely resist the idea that there
> might be equally vast swaths of technical jargon necessary to understand
> social phenomena and that this implies that the social world is transparent
> in a manner that the natural world is not... an implication they know to be
> false given how uncertain, dynamic and contested the social world is.
I agree that the social world is complex in a way that fields like physics aren't. (Physicists are out to study simple things; once something isn't simple enough, it becomes biology or something.)
However, I believe that politics is far more transparent to us. We do learn blindspots due to propaganda, but I don't see jargon as a natural solution to that obstacle. When clarity conflicts with jargon, as it often does, jargon should quickly lose.
But that said, I don't know your students. It's conceivable that if I observed them, I'd realize they're mostly bored aristocrats or something.
All the best,
Tj
On Thu, Mar 1, 2012 at 6:14 AM, Alan Rudy <alan.rudy at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 29, 2012 at 1:04 PM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>> (Some of the material in this post is, I think, relevant to the discussion
>> going on between Alan and me.)
>>
>> I think it is bad practice (and can clutter thinking) to condemn jargon as
>> such. There are contexts and contexts and in some it would be foolish NOT
>> to
>> use jargon (i.e., a special vocabulary for special purposes.) Capital is
>> confusing enough as it is; it would be unintelligible had not Marx coined
>> certain terms for particular reasons. ... SNIP....
>>
>> And in the physical and biological sciences it can be argued that the
>> jargon
>> IS THE SCIENCE. To drop the jargon is to substitute something else (perhaps
>> itself useful) for scientific knowledge.
>>
>>
> It is likely that this is misusing the word jargon, but my sense is that
> there is obfuscatory jargon - that needs unpacking and can often be better
> translated into everyday language - and there is technical jargon.
> Technical jargon is essential to complex understandings of complex
> phenomena. At the same time, however, there are places where technical
> jargon and everyday language use the same word to mean different relations,
> processes, etc. The clearest example, in what I do for a living, is the
> word alienation. Additionally, there are odd, explosive, dynamic,
> upsetting, wonderful words - think nature, or culture - that are suffused
> with a vast array of both technical and everyday meanings, referents, etc.
>
> I regularly work to show my students that they expect vast swaths of
> technical jargon in the natural sciences - however much they complain that
> there are so many terms to learn - but intensely resist the idea that there
> might be equally vast swaths of technical jargon necessary to understand
> social phenomena and that this implies that the social world is transparent
> in a manner that the natural world is not... an implication they know to be
> false given how uncertain, dynamic and contested the social world is.
>
> Too many half-thoughts in here, mea culpa.
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