My question is, I think, more theoretical, than historical. I am dealing with a field of cognitive and emotion representation of some phenomemon, lets say health (H). Reading the articles on the field I find many synonyms. Articles have in their titles understanding/comprehension/ concept/notion/attitudes towards/perception of H but are devoted more or less to the same problem. It means that the contents of these notions somehow intersect and the researchers use them sometimes as exact synonyms.

For my purposes however it is important to be very precise in terminology and I would like to separate the contents of each term and to understand what do researches study exactly when they study say "understanding of health in teenagers" and "concept of health in teenagers". I need to find some differences in usage of this terms.

I tried to work with the dictionaries of English language and to try to find some differences in usage of this words. Say Webster's gives information that though "understand" and "comprehend" are synonyms, "understand" may stress the fact of having attained a firm mental grasp of something, "comprehend" may stress the process of coming to grips with something intellectually. But I am afraid that it is too prescriptive and does not reflect the real usage of the terms in psychological works.

The other thing I tried to do was to analyse the usage of these terms in real psychological articles.

In the first case I will probably have (or set myself) the norms of usage of this or that term and be able to say that "Thought X uses in his work the term "comprehension of H", in the reality he means "understanding"" or "I will use in my work the term "comprehension", and not "concept" or "notion" because this what I am going to study"". I just give the definitions of the terms myself and then follow these rules in my analysis.

In the second case I just can say that in psychology when researchers write "understanding" they usually mean X, and when they write "comprehension" they mean Y, I will study say "comprehension" of H.

Are there any other ways of clearing the notions I am working with? Are there any works in psychology and not in formal logics published about working with psychological terms and being exact about what you are going to write? Anything specific written about correlation between understanding/ comprehension/notion/concept etc? Is the work I am trying to do is really worth doing?

-- Irini Droussiotis (irina@link-sys.com), October 01, 2002

Answers

I do not know that people -- even psychological researchers -- use their terms with the kind of precision your proposal assumes. If you were to find reliable differences, that would be interesting, but my guess (for what it's worth) is that many articles that use a term such as "comprehension" might as well have used "understanding," etc. There was an English philosophical school in the middle of the 20th century that tried to do the kind of thing you're trying to do in order to get at the "real" meanings of words *as used*. It was called the "ordinary language" school. The "Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy" (http://www.utm.edu/research/iep/o/ordlang.htm) says the following about it: "Ordinary language philosophy the philosophical study of everyday language of life spoken by the average individual. It is a contemporary movement started in large part by Wittgenstein, although Locke and G.E. Moore are credited with setting its background. John Wisdom, Gilbert Ryle, P.F. Stawson, J.O. Urmson, Norman Malcolm, and J.L. Austin are all contributors to ordinary language philosophy.

"Ordinary language philosophy is a reaction against reformists such as Russell who claim that ideal language is needed to avoid the ambiguities, vagueness and vacuousness of terms. Ordinary language philosophers argue that this does not clarify the problem, but makes the language more remote and problematic. By contrast, ordinary language philosophy examines the way common language is used, and critiques the technical speech or jargon used when discussing philosophical problems. Even certain everyday terms become misused in philosophical language. Thus, many classic philosophical problems can be solved by returning to the use of the everyday meanings of words."

One ofthe latter-day descendants of this movement is the Berkeley philosopher John Searle.

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 01, 2002.