A Commonplace Book

The Rectification of Names

Tsze-lu said, "The ruler of Wei has been waiting for you, in order with you to administer the government. What will you consider the first thing to be done?"
The Master replied, "What is necessary is to rectify names."
"So! indeed!" said Tsze-lu. "You are wide of the mark! Why must there be such rectification?"
The Master said, "How uncultivated you are, Yu! A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve.
"If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success.
"When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot.
"Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect."

I believe Hollywood won [the Eldred case] because they have successfully repositioned copyright as a property issue. In other words, they successfully urged the world to understand copyright in terms of property. Copyright = property may not be accurate in a strict legal sense, but it still makes common sense, even to the Supreme Court....

While the one side talks about licenses with verbs like copy, distribute, play, share and perform, the other side talks about rights with verbs like own, protect, safeguard, protect, secure, authorize, buy, sell, infringe, pirate, infringe, and steal.

This isn't just a battle of words. It's a battle of understandings. And understandings are framed by conceptual metaphors.

Pity taxonomy. When it is not being mistaken for the craft of making dead things look alive, the science of naming things seems, in this age of scientific razzle-dazzle, hopelessly old-fashioned.

And yet the act of naming is, in many ways, the fundamental task of our intellect. The world, as William James suggested, appears "a blooming, buzzing confusion." As scientists, our ability to parse that confusion--to group objects into meaningful categories and give those categories names--is both the prerequisite to and the culmination of our understanding of the world. The way we name things, however, inevitably affects how we perceive those things.

In imperial China, when a new dynasty arrived on the scene, the emperor performed a ritual called the "rectification of names" in the belief that the previous dynasty had fallen in part because reality and the names we have for it had ceased to correspond.

If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.

Feste. words are grown so false, I am loath to prove
reason with them.