History of Psychology 2014, Vol. 17, No. 1, 19-35

© 2014 American Psychological Association 1093-4510/14/$12.00 DOI: IO.IO37/aOO35386

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE VOCABULARIES OF PSYCHOLOGY AND OTHER SUBJECTS John G. Benjafield Brock University The vocabulary of Anglophone psychology is shared with many other subjects. Previous research using the Oxford English Dictionary has shown that the subjects having the most words in common with psychology are biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, pathology, philosophy, and physics. The present study presents a database of the vocabularies of these 12 subjects that is similar to one previously constructed for psychology, enabling the histories of the vocabularies of these subjects to be compared with each other as well as with psychology. All subjects have a majority of word senses that are metaphorical. However, psychology is not among the most metaphorical of subjects, a distinction belonging to computing, linguistics, and mathematics. Indeed, the history of other subjects shows an increasing tendency to recycle old words and give them new, metaphorical meanings. The history of psychology shows an increasing tendency to invent new words rather than metaphorical senses of existing words. These results were discussed in terms of the degree to which psychology's vocabulary remains unsettled in comparison with other subjects. The possibility was raised that the vocabulary of psychology is in a state similar to that of chemistry prior to Lavoisier. Keywords: interdisciplinary research, metaphor, polysemy, vocabulary

The study of the history of the vocabulary of psychology was pioneered by Kurt Danziger (1997), David Leary (1990a,1990b), Jill Morawski (Morawski & St. Martin, 2011), and Graham Richards (1989), among others. These historians provided in-depth analyses of the histories of particular words, providing an indispensable method of exploring the complex history of important concept-words in psychology. There is a complementary approach to the study of psychology's vocabulary that uses methods drawn from the digital humanities to examine samples of words from psychological journals in order to better discern the various "'genres' of psychology" (Green, Feinerer, & Burman, 2013, p. 2; Young & Green, 2013). Still another line of inquiry uses the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) as a research tool to

explore linguistic and cognitive factors that may have played a role in the history of psychology's language (e.g., Benjafield, 2012, 2013). A rationale for the continued use of the OED in historical research is given in Benjafield (2012, pp. 51-52). An extremely useful feature of the OED is that the entry for each word "is organized into a hierarchy of senses, which include definitions, labels and cited quotations. Subject labels distinguish the subject classification of a sense, for example they signal how a word may be used in Anthropology, Music or Computing" (Langari & Tompa, 2001). The OED Online (2013) describes itself as follows: The OED is widely regarded as the accepted authority on the English language. It is an unsurpassed guide to the meaning, history, and pronunciation of 600,000 words— past and present—from across the English-speaking world.... As a historical dictionary, the OED is very different from those of current English, in which the focus is on present-day meanings. You'll still find these in the OED, but you'll also find the history of individual words, and ofthe language—traced through 3 million quotations, firom classic literature and specialist periodicals to films scripts and cookery books.... The OED started life more than 150 years ago. Today, the dictionary is in the process of its first major revision. Updates revise and extend the

John G. Benjafield, Department of Psychology, Brock University, Ontario, Canada. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John G. Benjafield, 83 Videl Crescent North, St. Catharines, ON. L2W 0A3, Canada. E-mail: John .benjafield ©brocku.ca 19

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BENJAEIELD OED at regular intervals, each time subtly adjusting our image of the English language. ("About," para. 1-3)

Words Shared Between Psychology and Other Subjects Some words that have psychological senses also have senses in other subjects (Ash, 2007, p. 6). Some of the more obvious subjects that share part of psychology's vocabulary include biology (e.g., individuation), medicine (e.g., pathogenic), and philosophy (e.g., schema). Benjafield (2013) found that the subjects sharing the most words with psychology were biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, pathology, philosophy, and physics. One of the reasons for a comparative study of the vocabularies of psychology and kindred subjects is that psychologists are often concerned with their position in the so-called "hierarchy of the sciences" (Comte, 1858; Simonton, 2004, 2006). Of course, psychologists are also involved with other subjects such as law, music, and philosophy (Simonton, 2009). Indeed, Backhouse and Fontaine (2010) reviewed evidence that, of all the social sciences, psychologists have been the most likely to engage in projects involving subjects other than psychology. They observed that "the striking feature of postwar cross-disciplinary ventures is the omnipresence of psychologists" (p. 208). The common vocabularies of the subjects being examined in this study may in part be tbe result of the interdisciplinary attitude of psychologists. An examination of the vocabularies of these subjects should further our understanding of the relationships between psychology and other subjects. Primary and Secondary Words An important distinction both in previous studies and in the present one is that between primary and secondary words. In psychology, a primary word is one for which its psychological sense is the first to occur in the history of the written language. A secondary word is one for which its psychological sense only emerges after one or more other senses have become established in the written language. An example of the former is subitize, which was introduced by Kaufman, Lord, Reese, and Volkmann

(1949, p. 520). An example of the latter is surgent, which was given a psychological sense by R. B. Cattell (1933), but the original sense of which was "rising or swelling in waves" (date of entry, 1592). The same distinction can be made in other subjects. For example, a primary word in computing is twistor (1957), meaning "a nonvolatile memory element consisting of an insulated copper wire wound helically round with a wire of readily magnetized material." A well-known secondary word in computing is cookie, which originally meant a small sweet biscuit (1754), but now has the additional meaning of a "packet of data that is passed between computers or programs to allow access or to activate certain features" (1987). Polysemy Another aspect of language explored by Benjafield (2012, 2013) was polysemy, which is the number of different senses a word possesses (Lee, 1990). For secondary psychological words, it is possible to trace a process of metaphoric polysemy that provides a basis for the eventual occurrence of the psychological sense of a word. Recall the example of Cattell's (1933) use of surgent. Bowdle and Gentner (2005) observed that "secondary, figurative senses are typically more abstract than the original word senses" and referred to "this evolution toward metaphoric polysemy as the career of metaphor" (p. 198). Metaphor is a major way of generating new psychological senses of words (Danziger, 1997). Indeed, as one reviewer put it, the Leary (1990a,b)/Richards (1989) thesis is that "all psychological language is ultimately metaphorical." It would be useful to know how psychology compares with different subjects in the degree to which their vocabularies are metaphorical. One of the purposes of the present study is to compare the proportion of secondary versus primary words used by different subjects. The proportion of secondary words in a subject is an index of the degree to which metaphor has been used to expand the vocabulary of that subject. Relation of the Present Study to the History of Vocabulary as a Whole Recent research on the growth of vocabulary over historical time often uses data sets associ-

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

ated with the Google Books Ngram Viewer (2013) (e.g.. Gao, Hu, Mao, & Perc, 2012; Geriach & Altmann, 2013; Michel et al., 2011) as well as other sources. Although these studies do not directly address the concems of the present article, their methods of studying the history of vocabulary as a whole suggest novel ways of approaching the history of particular vocabularies both within and between subjects. For example, an important issue concems the setting within which a new word is introduced, such as the primary words used in the subjects being examined in the present study. Petersen, Tenenbaum, Havlin, Stanley, and Perc (2012) observed that "additional explanations [are required] that put the word into context with preexisting words.... [A] new word requires the additional use of preexisting words" in order to explain the "content of the new word using existing technical terms" (p. 4). Therefore, the successful introduction of primary words in a subject is dependent on the use of old ones, and contributes to the frequency with which older words are used. An important point is that the addition of a primary word to the vocabulary of a subject requires effort, and there will be an opposing tendency to simply continue to use old words instead (Zipf, 1949/1965). Petersen et al. (2012) found that over historical time, "new words are needed less and less" (p. 8), and suggested that this occurs because of the "greater number of combinations of words that become available as more words are added to a language, lessening the need for lexical expansion" (p. 8). Petersen et al.'s (2012) study distinguished between new words and old words, but did not explore polysemy, which is a central concern of the present study. Polysemy is a pervasive feature of old words. George Kingsley Zipf (19021950; Zipf, 1949/1965), whose work is enjoying something of a revival (Geriach & Altmann, 2013; Perc, 2012; Pustet, 2004), showed that the older the word, the more frequently it is used and the more meanings it tends to have (Benjafield, 2012; Lee, 1990). As was noted here, the creation of new words and the continued use of old ones are opposing dispositions. Zipf (1945) characterized this tension as follows; Hence there are two opposing drives: the one (a) making for a single vocabulary of a single word with M meanings and 100% frequency, and the other (b) making for a vocabulary of M different words with one

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meaning per word and with a lower average relative frequency, (p. 254)

The preceding quote from Zipf sharpens the issue. The choice is not simply between inventing a new word with a novel meaning or continuing to use an old word with an existing meaning. The choice may well be between inventing a new word to convey a novel meaning or introducing an additional sense for an existing word. Petersen et al's (2012) findings suggest that the importance of primary words should be at its height early in the history of the language and decline thereafter. Secondary words involve the "reuse of words which are more easily produced or understood" (Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2012, p. 280), thus requiring less effort than inventing a new word. In order to successfully introduce a new word, one must provide a context within which it can be understood. However, existing words already have one or more meanings, and thus come equipped with a context within which the new sense can begin to be comprehended. One aspect of the current study is to see if secondary words become relatively more important as time goes on. Method During 2012, a database containing 1,200 words was constructed using the OED Online (2013). Twelve lists of words were obtained from the OED Online. Each list contained all the words with subject labels in one of biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, law, linguistics, mathematics, medicine, music, pathology, philosophy, or physics. Then 100 words were selected from each list using the random sampling procedure in Systat 13. The entry for each word in each ofthe 12 samples was downloaded from the OED Online. These 12 samples were combined with the 600 psychology words from Benjafield (2012, Appendix, pp. 68-71) to make a combined database of 1,800 words. The primary variables of interest were as follows; • Original date of entry of each word. For example, transformation is a secondary word in physics. Its original date of entry is 1475. Minidisk is a primary word in computing, its original date of entry being 1970. • Date of entry of the subject sense. The date of entry of the sense of transformation in physics is 1857. To use another example, compiler is

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BENJAFIELD

a secondary word in computing. Its original date of entry is 1330, when it meant someone who gathered materials for a manuscript. Its meaning in computing is a program for translating one language into another (date of entry, 1953). By contrast, Chromatograph is a primary word in chemistry, and so its subject sense is the same as its original sense (1953). Thus, secondary words have two dates of entry (original and subject), but primary words have only one. • Number and kind of subject labels in each entry that belong to one of the 12 subjects. For example, in addition to its sense in physics, transformation has other senses in biology, chemistry, electricity, linguistics, mathematics, and pathology. • The source of the first known sense for each word in each subject. For example, insult is a secondary word in medicine, with its source being Stedman (1904). • Polysemy—the number of different senses for each word (Lee, 1990). Of course, the results of research using the OED applies to Anglophone subjects only, and should not be generalized to the vocabularies of subjects in other languages. To some degree, the methods and data analysis are informed by George Kelly's (1955) approach to the history of science (Benjafield, 2008; Osbeck, Nersessian, Malone, & Newstetter, 2010, pp. 229-239). Kelly's (1955) unit of analysis was the construct, which "is a way in which some things are constrtjed as being alike and yet different from others" (p. 105). The things that are construed are called elements, and may be anything of interest to the investigator. In our case, the elements are the set of 12 subjects plus psychology. In what follows, we will consider three constructs that represent some of the ways in which the vocabulary of psychology is both similar to and different from the vocabularies of other subjects. The constructs are the frequency with which primary versus secondary words are used, the dates of entry of primary words versus secondary word subject senses, and the degree to which the vocabulary of a subject is polysemous. Results and Discussion The word senses for the 12 subjects sampled in the present study come from a wide variety of

sources, many of whom are well-known authors. For example, in biology, a novel sense of ideally was proposed by Charles Darwin (1859), whereas in chemistry, Robert Boyle (1660) gave us a new sense of embody. In a paper written in 1837 but unpublished until 1973 (Green, 2001), Charles Babbage defined store in a way that would come to be used routinely in computing. William James (1890), interestingly enough, used commutating in a way that would prove useful in electricity. Shakespeare (1600) provided us with a legal meaning of precedent; Benjamin Lee Whorf (1938/1956) proposed a linguistic sense of operator, and Thomas Hobbes (1671/1992) drew our attention to what proo/might mean in mathematics. Wilkie Collins's (1860) novel Women in White presented a sense of management suited to medicine, and Benjamin Jowett's (1875) translation of Plato introduced a musical sense of panharmonic. William James tums up again as the creator of a sense of atactic (James, 1880) appropriate for pathology. In philosophy, Alfred North Whitehead provided pushiness (Whitehead, 1920), and, finally, Charles Galton Darwin, the grandson of Charles Darwin, gave us a sense of quantal (Darwin, 1936) suitable for physics. Primary and Secondary Words The percentage of secondary words for each subject is given in Table 1. Subjects are listed from the lowest to the highest percentage of Table 1 Median Percentage of Secondary Words for Each Subject Subject

Percentage

95% CI

Chemistry Psychology Philosophy Law Medicine Pathology Biology Music Electricity Physics Mathematics Linguistics Computing

62 65 71 72 74 76 81 84 87 87 91 94 97

[53, 72] [61,69] [62, 79] [63, 80] [65, 82] [68, 84] [73, 88] [76,91] [80, 93] [80, 93] [85, 96] [89, 98] [93, 99]

Note.

CI = confidence interval.

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

secondary words. Note that every subject has a majority of secondary words. Across all subjects, excluding psychology, secondary words constitute 73% of the total, 95% CI [.70, .75]. The corresponding percentage for psychology is 65%, 95% CI [.61, .68], which is surprisingly low relative to the other subjects considered as a whole. The value for psychology is surprising simply because so much has been made of the fact that the vocabulary of psychology is driven by metaphor (e.g., Leary, 1990a, 1990b; Richards, 1989). However, to a very large extent, the vocabulary of psychology is metaphorical, as reflected by the fact that the majority of its senses come from secondary words. Nonetheless, as one reviewer observed, these data do not fully support the Leary/Richards thesis that "all psychological language is ultimately metaphorical." The data do support a weaker version of the Leary/Richards thesis in that most psychological language is metaphorical. This leaves open the possibility that other processes help to determine the words that make up the vocabulary of psychology. This is a point that will be developed further in the Summary and Conclusions section. Comparison of tbe Percentage of Secondary Words Between Subjects In order to investigate specific differences between subjects, Jacob Cohen's (1967) procedure for making multiple comparisons between proportions was used. Overall, there would appear to be differences between the subjects, X^(12) = 158.11, p < .001. A Scheffé test indicated that chemistry and psychology are both different from linguistics and computing {p < .001). Mathematics is also different from chemistry and psychology (p < .01). Finally, computing differs from philosophy and law (p < .01), as well as medicine and pathology (p < .05). Thus, computing, linguistics and mathematics anchor one end of this construct, whereas chemistry and psychology anchor the other. Why does computing have the most extreme value at one end of this dimension? Colburn and Shute (2007, 2008) provide very helpful analyses of the language of computing. They observe that although computing is often thought of as a part of mathematics, it is abstract in a way that other subjects, even mathematics, are not. Con-

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sider words that are familiar to everyday users of computers, such windows, buttons, tabs, and menus (Colburn & Shute, 2008, p. 526). These are all metaphors, in the OED's sense of being "something [that is] regarded as representative or suggestive of something else." However, unlike most metaphors, "they are descriptions of virtual versions of real things" (p. 527). When the user of a virtual bookstore clicks on "add to shopping cart," "there is nothing to which the concept of a shopping cart could conventionally apply" (p. 526): The virtual entities of computer science use preexisting similarity to feature a cyber world. What is created through the metaphor is not similarity but virtual ontology.. .. [This] marks the change from our use of concrete objects like folders, shopping carts and malls to our use of virtual versions of them. (p. 532)

The present study's sample of computing words contains several that could be used to make the same point as that made by Colburn and Shute (2008). Among the more obvious of these are garbage, onramp, wizard, and worm. If computing is abstract in a way that other subjects are not, linguistics still shares some of computing's abstractions. For example, several words in the present study's samples belong to both computing and linguistics, such as application, identifier, output, and simplex, although each word has different senses in the two subjects. Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that has involved both computer scientists and linguists since the 1950s (Joshi, 1999). Janet Martin-Nielsen (2011) observed that although postwar "linguistics was a remarkably diverse discipline," many linguists "sbifted to computer-based approaches as their theoretical paradigm was overtaken by Chomsky's [1963; Chomsky & Miller, 1963] program in the late 1950s and early 1960s" (p. 150). If we now move to the contrasting pole, can we fairly say that the vocabulary of chemistry is more concrete (less abstract) than that of computing? Of course, everything hinges on the sense of concrete that is used. Psychologists have sometimes used the word concrete to refer to states that are developmentally prior to or more limited than abstract states (e.g.. Brown, 1958, chap. 8; Hobson, 2012), but that sense is not required by these data. One of the senses of concrete that suits chemistry is given by the OED Online (2013) as "existing in a material

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BENJAFIELD

form or as an actual reality, or pertaining to that which so exists. Opposed to abstract." The OED Online observes that "this is the ordinary sense." Indeed, the primary words in our chemistry sample tend to be names for material substances (e.g., benzol, crystallin, eucalin, fustin, heptane, hydrazinium, melamine, olefin, picein, xanthophyll) or pieces of apparatus (e.g., ab-

sorptiometer, retort, Chromatograph). Of course, the vocabulary of chemistry is only relatively concrete. Like all subjects, most of the vocabulary of our chemistry sample consists of secondary words, the chemical senses of which are metaphorical transformations of their original sense (e.g., donate, evolve, invert, mortification, phase). The vocabulary of psychology has been influenced by the naming practices of chemistry, which has often been used as a model for psychology. The classic example is J. S. Mill's (1843/1973) "mental chemistry" (Boring, 1950, pp. 229-230). As it happens, Wundt was not only influenced by Mill, but "chemistry was a field of scientific practice and theory with which Wundt was well acquainted [and] which influenced psychological experimentation as" he practiced it (Schmidgen, 2003, p. 470). Just as chemistry identified and named new compounds, psychologists invented new words for what they believed to be new psychological objects. The primary psychological words thus invented span the whole range of what, at one time or another, has been considered to be the subject matter of psychology. Thus, for example, we have adient, alexithymia, ambiversion, chromaesthesia, deja-vu, distractable, eidetic, empathie, extrapunitive, limen, motorization, nonreward, preconcept, ratiomorphic, and signalization, to name but a few. These new objects of study did not take the "material form" of the compounds investigated by chemists. However, they certainly were believed to exist as "actual realities" and not as virtual entities. In that sense, they fit the definition of concrete. Of course, one also needed new methods and instruments (Grundlach, 2007) to investigate these new psychological objects (e.g., cloze, posttest, scalogram). Both the novel subject matter and new methods were at least partially responsible for the relatively large number of primary words in psychology. The grouping of psychology with chemistry rather than computing may be surprising to

some readers. It is often suggested that computing and psychology were closely related in the latter half of the 20th century. A good example is information theory (Shannon, 1948; Shannon & Weaver, 1949), which was taken to be the template for what was called the "modal model" in cognitive psychology (Gardner, 1985, p. 122; Shiffrin & Atkinson, 1969). However, the way that psychologists implemented information theory had very little to do with information theory properly so called. Indeed, R. Duncan Luce (2003) argued that there is "an actual incompatibility between information theory and the psychological phenomena to which it has been applied" (p. 183). Alan Collins (2007) has made the point that psychologists used information in a way that was "loosely specified and diverse," resulting in "a situation where the technical and everyday uses of the term have become ever harder to distinguish from one another" (p. 68). The different ways in which information has been used in in the two subjects suggest that similarities between the vocabularies of psychology and computing may be more apparent than real. Dates of Entry Table 2 gives the median dates of entry of primary words and secondary word subject senses. Initially, we will focus on the relations between the dates of entry for primary words and those for the subject senses of secondary words. Inspection of the data for the 12 subjects other than psychology shows that the median dates of entry for secondary subject senses is later than the corresponding dates of entry for primary words in 11 of the 12 subjects. This result is unlikely to have occurred by chance (Wilcoxon signed-ranks test, z[N = 12] = 2.67, p = .008). The median dates of entry across all 12 subjects are 1836, 95% CI [1804, 1850], for primary words and 1881, 95% CI [1876, 1887], for secondary word subject senses. Thus, it seems reasonable to conclude that, at least for these 12 subjects, primary words tend to have an earlier date of entry than secondary word subject senses. For psychological words, however, the opposite is the case. The psychological senses of secondary words tend to have an earlier date of entry, as previously reported by Benjafield (2012, pp. 59-60) and shown in the last row of Table 2.

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PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

Table 2 Median Dates of Entry for Primary Words and Secondary Subject Senses Primary words

Secondary senses

Subject

n

Mdn

95% CI

n

Mdn

95% CI

Biology Chemistry Computing Electricity Law Linguistics Mathematics Medicine Music Pathology Philosophy Physics Psychology

19 38 3 13 28 7 9 26 16 25 29 13 212

1876 1860 1965 1885 1508 1874 1652 1630 1751 1730 1854 1907 1924

[1859, 1890] [1839, 1874] [1957, 1970] [1883, 1899] [1449, 1542] [1799. 1957] [1542. 1869] [1425. 1811] [1637, 1841] [1641. 1824] [1701, 1892] [1870, 1923] [1917, 1927]

81 62 97 87 72 93 91 74 84 75 71 87 388

1900 1866 1970 1893 1610 1940 1846 1859 1827 1846 1856 1895 1913

[1882, 1907] [1859, 1875] [1966, 1974] [1886, 1901] [1597, 1624] [1721, 1962] [1785, 1873] [1820, 1881] [1781, 1864] [1794, 1859] [1836, 1902] [1881. 1906] [1909, 1915]

Note.

Mdn = median; CI = confidence interval.

The data in Table 2 do not mean that the workers in subjects otber than psychology initially preferred to invent entirely new words rather than create new senses for old words. To

see why, examine Figure 1, which shows the frequency of occurrence of primary words and secondary word subject senses for all 12 subjects except psychology across four periods of

Primary Secondary

Date of Entry Figure 1. Number of primary words and secondary subject senses in 12 subjects as a function of date of entry.

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BENJAFIELD

the history of English. Figure 1 makes use of a customary way of dividing the history of English in terms of Old English (before 1125), Middle English (1125 to 1499), Early Modem English (1500 to 1699), and present-day Enghsh (after 1700; Traugott, 1989). This system was modified to better suit the distribution of the data. Because of the small number of Old English words, they were combined with Middle English words to form a single category. The Early Modem English (1500 to 1699) category was retained. Present-day English was divided into those words with dates of entry between 1700 and 1899, and those words with dates of entry in the 20th century. There are two important features of Figure 1. First, the subject senses of secondary words are always more frequent than primary words regardless of period. Thus, workers in the 12 subjects other than psychology generally preferred to invent a novel meaning for an existing word rather than create a new word. Second, the relative frequency of primary words decreases over time. The proportion of primary words goes from .43, 95% CI [.32, .55], in Middle English, to .26, 95% CI [.20, .33], in Early

Modem English, to .21, 95% CI [.17, .24], in 1700 to 1899, to .10, 95% CI [.07, .13], in the 20th century. Cohen's (1967) procedure indicates that the percentage of primary words differs across these periods (x = 49.29, df = 3, p < .001). The outcome of a Scheffé test was that the percentage of primary words in the 20th century was less than the percentages in the other three periods (p < .05). Moreover, the percentage of primary words in the Early Modern Period was less than that in Middle English (p < .05). Thus, there is evidence of a decline over time in the rate at which new words are invented. This is consistent with Petersen et al.'s (2012) finding that for the English language as a whole, "new words are needed less and less" (p. 8). As shown in Figure 2, psychology also has a majority of secondary word senses in each of three periods. Because of the small number of cases between 1500 and 1699, that category was combined with the period between 1700 and 1899. This left two categories, 1500 to 1899, and 1900 and later. The former has a proportion of primary words of .28, 95% CI [21, 34], whereas the corresponding value for the latter is

300

Primary Secondary 200

O 100

1500-1699

1700-1899

1900-

Date of Entry Figure 2. Number of primary words and secondary subject senses in psychology as a function of date of entry.

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

.39, 95% CI [.34, .44]. The difference between these two proportions is .11, 95% CI [.19, .04], z = 2.72, p = .007. Thus, psychology appears not to follow the sequence shown by the other 12 subjects. Rather than declining over time, the proportion of primary words has been increasing in psychology. We have already seen that psychology has a relatively large proportion of primary words when compared with linguistics and computing. Both of the latter have vocabularies that have largely been formed in the 20th century. In our samples, the proportion of the computing vocabulary that was created in the 20th century is .99, 95% CI [.96, 1.00], whereas the cort-esponding value for linguistics is .72, 95% CI [.63, .80]. Psychology follows close behind with a value of .69, 95% CI [.65, .72]. For no other subject in our study was the majority of its vocabulary created in the 20th century, the closest being biology and physics, both with .47, 95% CI [.37, .57]. Linguistics and computing are the most modem of our subjects and their vocabularies rely on the invention of new senses for old words to a greater extent than does psychology. The majority of psychology's vocabulary was also formed in the 20th century, but its vocabulary has produced relatively more new words. There are many possible reasons for psychology's anomalous position relative to linguistics and computing. One likely candidate is the attempt on the part of some psychologists to avoid the use of metaphor because it was falsely regarded as unscientific. E. W. Scripture (1898; Benjafield, 2012, p. 60; Boring, 1965, p. 314), one of the spokespersons for the "New Psychology," ridiculed the use of metaphors, which he regarded as "absolutely meaningless as scientific terms" (p. 163). Nevertheless, ordinary language provided psychology with a ready-made set of metaphors (Richards, 1989). This ordinary-language vocabulary was always under challenge, not only by Scripture but most notably by the behaviorist revolution (Gentner & Grudin, 1985). Petersen et al. (2012) present evidence that, even in recent times, periods of unrest "may decrease the competitive advantage that old words have over new words, allowing new words to break through" (p. 7). Psychology has had a turbulent history since its beginning in the 19th century (Green, Shore, & Teo, 2001), with

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ongoing disagreements over virtually every aspect of the subject (e.g.. Ash, 2010). One might say that revolutionary (e.g., behaviorist, cognitive, humanistic, and so on) and counterrevolutionary pressures have provided the energy for the continuing creation of primary words. Computing has been such a fast-moving subject (Denning, 2010; Rosenbloom, 2012) that one wonders how it was able to use a preponderance of secondary words and avoid the use of primary words. However, as noted in the section on primary and secondary words, computing uses metaphor in order to create its "virtual ontology" (Colburn & Shute, 2008, p. 532). This reliance on metaphor entails the use of new senses for old words. Perhaps partly because of its close association with computing (MartinNielsen, 2011), linguistics has also used metaphor to a very great extent. In the 20th century, secondary words were used in computing 97% of the time, 95% CI [94, 100], with the corresponding value for linguistics also being 97%, 95% CI [93, 100]. Computing and linguistics had the most modern vocabularies of the subjects in our study, yet relied on old words. This result is consistent with the view that there is less need for new words as time goes on because we can increasingly make do with new senses for old words. Polysemy Table 3 lists polysemy values for all words, sorted from the lowest to the highest values. There is a large correlation between date of Table 3 Median Polysemy Values for Each Subject Subject Biology Chemistry Psychology Linguistics Medicine Pathology Philosophy Computing

Law Mathematics Music Electricity Physics

n

Mdn

95% CI

100 100 600 100 100 100 !00 100 100 100 100 100 100

3 3 3 4 4 4 4 6 6 6.5 6.5 7 8

[3,4] [2,4] [3,3] [3,5] [3,5] [3,5] [3,4] [4.5, 8] [4,8] [5,9] [4,8] [5,9] [7,11]

Note. Mdn = median; CI = confidence interval.

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BENJAFIELD

entry and polysemy across all 13 subjects, r^ = -.75, 95% CI [-.78, -.73]. Although this confirms earlier findings (Lee, 1990), it is still possible that this relationship holds for some subjects but not all. Consequently, correlations between date of entry and polysemy were computed for each subject. These correlations were all in the same direction, although they varied in magnitude. The largest correlation was for physics, r, = -.84, 95% CI [-.90, -.76], and the smallest was for pathology, r^ = —.56, 95% CI [ — .68, —.41]. This outcome is consistent with the hypothesis that simply the passage of time is an important factor in the growth of polysemy, regardless of the subject. The longer a word survives, the more meanings it will tend to acquire (Lee, 1990; Zipf, 1949/1965). The 13 subjects appear to differ in terms of polysemy (Kruskall-Wallis = 154.10, df = 12, p < .001). The Dwass-Steel-Chritchlow-Fligner test for all pairwise comparisons indicated that the vocabularies of physics and electricity are more polysemous than those for biology, chemistry, and psychology (p < .001). The degree of polysemy in such hard sciences as physics and electricity may surprise some observers. Indeed, polysemy is often regarded as a hindrance to the clarity assumed to be at the heart of communication. For example, Kwakkel and Cunningham (2009) believe that "polysemy is an obvious problem for information scientists because they are dealing with diverse document collections written by different authors for different purposes and different intended audiences," and they propose methods for "dealing with polysemy" (p. 2066). Polysemy may be a problem for information scientists whose task it is to sort out the variety of meanings that a word takes across many subjects. However, the key issue is whether polysemy is actually a problem for the practitioners of a particular subject. If polysemy is such a problem, why does it exist to the extent that it does in highly successful subjects such as physics and electricity? Is polysemy a problem in pbysics? As noted by Taylor (2003), whereas polysemy raises all kinds of theoretical and methodological issues for semanticists, and practical issues for lexicographers and for workers in natural language processing and automatic translation, speakers of a language rarely experience polysemy to be a problem at all. (p. 647)

Nerlich and Clarke (2001) observed that people have evolved an amazing ability to slide effortlessly up and down a scale of semantic options from being precise and monosemous in some circumstances to being vague and polysemous in others, depending on the conversational style and the situation of discourse, (pp. 4^5)

Piantadosi et al. (2012) have proposed that, rather than being a problem, linguistic ambiguity in general and polysemy in particular provide no barrier to communication "when context is informative about meaning" (p. 282). Their argument is that contextual information is usually sufficient to disambiguate the meanings of words. In this respect, they cite George A Miller's (1951) observation that words only appear to be ambiguous when they are taken out of the context in which they are used: Consider the verb "take." In the OED there are 317 definitions of this word, 317 verbal alternatives that can be substituted for it. . . . Why do people tolerate such ambiguity? The answer is that they don't. There is nothing ambiguous about "take" as it is used in everyday speech. The ambiguity appears only when we, quite arbitrarily, call isolated words the units of meaning, (pp. 111-112)

There are several excellent examples from the history of psychology that illustrate Miller's point. One of the best known is Karl Lashley's (1951, p. 119) "Rapid righting with his uninjured hand saved from loss the contents of the capsized canoe." Someone listening to this sentence cannot disambiguate righting from writing until the last two words are heard. However, there are also examples of ambiguous sentences that are not so easily resolved. Consider, "The police were ordered to stop drinking after midnight" (Neisser, 1967, p. 245). The disambiguation of stop would require more context than is given by a single sentence. In the physics sample, the most polysemous words are weak (OED Online, 2013, gives the physics sense as "one of the four known kinds of force between particles, which is effective only at distances less than about 10-15 cm., is very much weaker than the electromagnetic and the strong interactions, and conserves neither strangeness, parity, nor isospin"; date of entry, 1955), order ("a positive number characterizing a particular spectrum or fringe, equal to the number of wavelengths by which the optical paths of successive contributing rays differ";

i".

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

1704), and weight ("The relative weight of the atom of an element or the molecule of a compound"; 1836). Fxamples such as the foregoing demonstrate that the context provided by physics as a subject is, in most cases, sufficiently precise as to leave little doubt as to the intended sense of a word, provided the reader has sufficient background knowledge to understand the definition. Nevertheless, there have been occasions when controversy has arisen as to whether or not a name is appropriate. For example, the term positron was introduced by C. D. Anderson (1933) as the name for a positive electron. Anderson also suggested that the old electron be rechristened to "negatron." This was to avoid confusion with the name "electron" that was originally devoid of significance regarding polarity.. . . Immediately many scientists objected to the . . . disregard of mythology inherent in the word "positron." Prof. Herbert Dingle .. . suggested the name "orestron" for the new positive particle. This is mythologically correct for Orestes was the brother of Electra. ("New physics," 1933, p. 180)

We still have electron as well as positron, but orestron never caught on. As this example shows, there have been no hard and fast rules whereby physics arrives at its vocabulary. Even in such a well-defined subject, controversies can still arise over "what a thing should be called" (Cicero, 1878, p. 112). Polysemy in biology and chemistry. In biology, the system of Carl Linnaeus (17071778) was "a most concise and convenient method, a tool admirably adapted to bring order into the chaos of names of innumerable animals and plants previously known in each country simply by their vernacular names" (Agassiz, 1871, pp. 353-354). Although a systematic approach to nomenclature undoubtedly reduced polysemy in biology, there is more to its vocabulary than the names of animals and plants. However, the biological senses of polysemous words tend not to present competing definitions of the same thing, but senses that would easily be disambiguated in the context of their usage. For example consider cytogenetic (date of entry, 1842) originally meaning of or relating to the production of cells, to which a subsequent sense was added in 1927 meaning of or relating to cytogenetics. Chemists followed "the inspiration of Linnaeus" (Brock, 1993, p. 116) and, primarily due

29

to the work of Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794), adopted the principle that there should be explicit rules for the naming of their objects of study. An example of pre- and post-Lavoisier chemical nomenclature in English was provided by Samuel Latham Mitchill (1794; Duveen & Klickstein, 1954) of Columbia College, New York. He claimed that "a revolution has happened in [the language of chemistry] whereby the vague, ambiguous and ill-adapted style of antiquity has been overthrown and a precise, significant and modernized tongue established in its place" (p. 3). He then went on to list the new words that were to take the place of the old ones. Nonetheless, there are still many words for which their chemical senses reflect a smooth transition from their older meanings. For example, balsam originally meant an aromatic vegetable juice (date of entry, 1000), then added an alchemical sense of being a healthful preservative essence, of oily and softly penetrative nature, conceived by Paracelsus to exist in all organic bodies (1643), and subsequently acquired the more precise meaning of compounds, insoluble in water, consisting of resins mixed with volatile oils (1854). Polysemy in psychology. At least since the 19th century, there have been many calls for a purification of the vocabulary of psychology, a typical example of which is due to George Henry Lewes (1876; Ballantyne, 1994); The many difficulties which lie in the way of psychological investigation are complicated by the deplorable and inevitable ambiguity of communication, resulting from an absence of strictly defined technical terms. If the British Association, or the Royal Society, would call upon English psychologists to draw up a list of terms which they were prepared to employ in a strictly defined sense, it would have as great an effect on the study of psychical phenomena as the botanical nomenclature of Linnaeus, or the chemical nomenclature of Lavoisier, has had on botany and chemistry. Such terms as Sensation, Perception, Consciousness, Soul, Volition, &c. would not then be left in their present chaotic state, their meanings not only varying in various treatises, but varying in different parts of the same treatise, (p. 158)

Notice that Lewes's call for a revolution in psychological nomenclature does not urge psychologists to follow the example of Lavoisier as described by Mitchill (1794). Lewes does not call for the replacement of the old psychological vocabulary by a new one; rather, he calls for a more precise definition of the existing vocabu-

30

BENJAFIELD

lary. To a large extent, this is what psychologists have tried to do. The vocabulary of psychology is still built around a core of ordinary language words (Richards, 1989; Wittgenstein, 1980, p. 37) for which psychologists have provided alternative definitions. In many cases, however, there are several competing psychological definitions, resulting in continuing ambiguity rather than clarity. Polysemy need not be a problem in a subject unless there are contradictory meanings for the same words, which seems to be the case in psychology. Benjafield (2013, p. 46, Table 3) gives several examples of words that psychologists themselves find to be plagued by multiple definitions, including set (Gibson, 1941) and stimulus (Gibson, 1960). This is, of course, the perpetuation of the same state of affairs about which Lewes complained. All the same, the ambiguity of psychological vocabulary may be a virtue as well as a vice, in that it provides psychologists with a flexible vocabulary that cannot only be adapted to different situations but which is also "readily assimilated by ordinary readers" (Benjafield, 2013, p. 51). Summary and Conclusions We have considered three constructs that differentiate between psychology and other subjects. The first of these is the relative frequency of primary versus secondary words. Computing, linguistics, and mathematics make use of secondary words relatively more frequently than do chemistry and psychology. The subject senses of secondary words tend to be metaphorical, and so chemistry and psychology may be construed as having a less metaphorical vocabulary than the others. Reasons were given for regarding computing, linguistics, and mathematics as having a more abstract vocabulary than either chemistry or psychology. In the case of date of entry, psychology shows a pattern that is different than the other subjects considered as a whole. Subjects other than psychology show a tendency to increasingly invent new senses for old words rather than introduce new words. Psychology, however, appears to have been under more pressure to invent new words, perhaps because of the instability of its subject matter. Green et al. (2013) describe the early years of psychology as follows, referring to

the "raggedness" of psychology itself. .. . Fashionable topics and approaches, then as now, experienced a "flash" and then quickly faded away. Sometimes they briefly captured enough attention throughout the discipline to momentarily generate a cluster of their own.. .. After the initial excitement, however, people went back to what they were doing before, or moved on to something new. (p. 21, italics added)

Particularly during the 20th century, this creative ferment produced many new words to describe the methods and subject matter of psychology (e.g., actenie [date of entry, 1935]; altemativism [1955]; computationalism [1979]; generativity [1951]; ipsative [1945]; metacognition [1972]; proactive [1933]; reparenting [1970]; Rogerian [1946]; subception [1949]; and underachiever [1953]). Polysemy found psychology once again keeping the company of chemistry, this time along with biology. The median polysemy values in these three subjects were markedly less than that of physics. Of course, psychologists have occasionally aspired to do for psychology what Newton did for physics (e.g., Hull, 1952/ 1964). However, psychologists seem to have produced a vocabulary that is more characteristic of chemistry than of physics, at least in terms of its proportion of secondary words and polysemy. The fact that psychology is similar to chemistry but lacks an explicit procedure for creating new names for its objects of study raises the possibility that the vocabulary of psychology is in a state similar to that of preLavoisier chemistry. Absent the appearance of people who can do for psychology what Linnaeus and Lavoisier did for their subjects, the possibility of psychology adopting a set of rules for naming psychological phenomena seems far-fetched. For one thing, it would require psychologists to move away from using ordinary language, which has been the main source of their core vocabulary (Benjafield, 2013; Richards, 1989). Currently, psychology's use of ordinary language makes of it a subject that is relatively easy for ordinary people to appreciate. The adoption of a new vocabulary might make psychology more similar to higher status subjects like biology and chemistry (Simonton, 2004, p. 65; Simonton, 2006, p. 103). This is an outcome that might appeal to many psychologists, but it would be achieved, if at all, at the cost of making the subject less accessible.

PATTERNS OF SIMILARITY AND DIFFERENCE

Future Research The constmcts employed in the present study pertain to relatively formal aspects of language, and brought out similarities and differences between the vocabulary of psychology and the vocabularies of biology, chemistry, computing, electricity, linguistics, mathematics, and physics. However, these constructs did not clarify the relationships between the vocabulary of psychology and the vocabularies of law, medicine, music, pathology, and philosophy. It appears that formal aspects of language, such as polysemy, old versus new words, and date of entry, are best suited for examining the relations between the sciences than those of the humanities or applied subjects. In order to investigate the latter, it might be better to use constructs relating to the content of subjects rather than their form. For example, examination of Anglophone works dealing with such topics as aesthetics (e.g., Kreitler & Kreitler, 1972; Scruton, 2007), rules of conduct (e.g., Baldwin, 1897; Hart, 2012), and suffering (e.g., Cassell, 2004; Miller, 2004) may yield constructs that will better discriminate between the vocabulary of Anglophone psychology and those of law, medicine, music, philosophy, and pathology. Psychology as a Pluralistic Subject A reviewer observed that the present line of research treats psychology "as a single entity when arguably it is more accurately described as a collection of loosely (and often very loosely) interconnected subdisciplines." Thus far, we have been considering psychology as one subject, but it could fruitfully be regarded as many subjects. As Sigmund Koch (1985, p. 939) noted, the issue of pluralism in psychology is an instance of "the eternal question of the one and the many." The hard question is, "How many psychologies are there?" Edna Heidbreder's (1933) classic text considered seven psychologies, but the psychologies of today are both more and different than they were then. The aforementioned reviewer suggested reanalyzing the 600-word psychology database in order to explore the "unity or lack thereof of the psychological subdisciplines." One way to do this would be to follow the lead of Green et al. (2013), who used cluster analysis to examine the vocabulary of early Psychological Review

31

articles. The clusters they found reflected different genres of psychology at the time. Similarly, a multivariate analysis of the 600-word psychology database may give some insight into the differences between the vocabularies that have been preferred by the various genres of psychology. The Formation of Primary Words As indicated in the Results section on primary and secondary words, another reviewer was concerned that the degree to which psychological language is metaphorical may have been underestimated in this study. This reviewer suggested that at least some primary words may have been created through figurative processes. This hypothesis certainly deserves further exploration. Perhaps we should leave open the possibility that the processes of word formation in psychology may be as many and various as they are in other settings (e.g., Szymanek, 2005). The reasons why each new word in any subject has the characteristics that it does may depend on the specific context in which the word is invented. Consider Stekauer's (2002, p. 104) example ofthe word unmurder, which was coined for use in the context of science fiction. It might also be revealing to explore the reasons why a psychologist chooses to invent a new word at all. As we saw earlier, in our discussion of Zipf's (1949/1965) work, the law of least effort inclines writers to propose new meanings for old words. Pecman (2012) has argued that the invention of new words by scientists may be a rhetorical device for "drawing attention to a particular innovative aspect of their research, a key facet of scientific communication" (p. 28). Although introducing a new word requires more effort, the payoff is that it signals the novelty and importance of the writer's work. An examination of the contexts within which primary words have been introduced might help to uncover the processes underlying the formation of primary words.

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