Words can be confusing, creating the illusion of disagreement or agreement. What a word is meant to mean is also very contextual. The following table define what is meant by key terms used herein. Noting and quoting Bakhtin, the word in language is half someone else's.
| TERM | DEFINITION |
|---|---|
| acculturation | a process by which a person acquires the culture of the society |
| affect, n. | an object-less or undirected emotion |
| belief, n. | a fact adhered to, or accepted as true |
| culture, n. | a system of rules for behaviour of a social group, how things happen |
| counterfactual | contrary to known or agreed facts; in comparison to a hypothetical state |
| cybernetics | The theory/science of communication and control in living organisms and machines |
| deception | social: persuasion based on contextual manipulation of previously learned associations, often using fiction or invention, with negative consequences |
| discourse | expression in words, the vocabulary and associated semantics whose use for a specific topic define a particular group |
| discursive | use of reason and argument rather than intuition |
| emotion | a general class of consciously accessible neuro-psychological states (anger, anxiety, fear, happiness, sadness) directed or undirected |
| enculturation | the process by which a person adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture |
| epistemology | the study of knowledge- how we know |
| ethics | philosophy: the study of right and wrong- how we should act |
| event | real occurrence of social risk |
| fact | 1. brute: an objective consensus on a fundamental reality 2. institutional: a specific instance of a general constitutive rule |
| feeling | individual, conscious experience of an emotion |
| framing | linguistics: the way language is used; how discourse is form(ulated) |
| iatrogenic | of adverse outcome, induced by the words or actions intended as mitigation |
| identify | establish which one or thing; c.f. identification being an instance of identify |
| knowledge | awareness about something; justified (true) belief |
| lemma | the canonical (most basic) form of an inflected word, e.g. run for run, ran, running |
| lexeme | a lemma, referring to a specific language, subject, design or group of people |
| lexicon | a specific set of lexemes type of vocabulary, referring to a specific language, subject, design or or group of people |
| logic | philosophy: the study of valid reasoning- how to reason |
| meaning, n. | representation, what a symbol refers to; signification, what something signifies beyond its face value |
| memory | a process to re-present in some form a prior experience, or construct in some form an expectation |
| object | any entity capable of participating in communication |
| objective | of or relating to a material object, actual existence or reality based on individual experience and general consensus c.f. subjective |
| ontology | philosophy: the study of beings or their being- what is |
| persuasion | An argument or statement intended to influence one's opinions or beliefs |
| phenomenology | philosophy: the study of our experience- how we experience |
| pragmatics | linguistics: the study of how context contributes to meaning |
| principle | guiding belief |
| register | a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation |
| representation | something that stands-for, or counts-as, something else to someone else - all in some context |
| rhetoric | use of language to persuade or convince |
| risk | possible error in prediction or perception of an adverse event, process or outcome |
| risk: social | risk associated with a (forming) group doing something untoward, to some other group or thing, based upon shared subjective belief(s) |
| rule | 1. constitutive: a guideline constituting a new form of socially acceptable behaviour 2. regulative: a prescription to regulate socially acceptable behaviour |
| semantics | the meaning of words, a subfield of semiotics |
| semiosic | adj. pertaining to semiosis |
| semiosis | any process, or use, of signs to communicate meaning |
| semiotic | adj. pertaining to semiotics |
| semiotics | study of sign process for communication of meaning biosemiotics: semiotics applied to prelinguistic meaning-making in biology |
| sign | anything that communicates intentional or unintentional meaning to the interpreter |
| sign: semiotics | 1. Peirce: the whole of: something (signifier, sign-vehicle) that means something else (signifed, object) to someone else (interpreter) in some context 2. Morris: something that acts as a stimulus to cause a response previously learned to some other stimulus 3. de Saussure: the whole created by the learned association between a signifier and a signified (what the signifier means) |
| social | involving the communication and acting upon of commonly held (social) facts |
| subjective | experienced by an individual mentally and not directly verifiable by others; formed or pertaining to personal mindsets or experience |
| surprisal | theory: the cognitive effort required to comprehend a word is determined by its contextual predictability and quantified as surprisal |
| SFL | systemic functional linguistics:an approach to linguistics that considers language as a social semiotic system |
| true, adj. | conforming to a rule, fact or pattern, to reality |
| uncertainty | an affective-cognitive condition characterized by anxiety about predictability of an expected future |
| vocabulary | the set of names for things, events, and ideas in a language, a collection of words, often explained, of a particular field, or for a specific purpose |
* compiled from various open sources including wiktionary.org