Sometimes there are just no words to express a new thought. We think with neural nets and sometimes there just are no conventional or already prepared neural nets to think with. Indeed the curators here suggest that all of education is essentially deleting old neural nets and building new one’s that have to be laboriously interconnected with existing neural nets. It has long been the practice of scientists, who often encounter or recognize or demonstrate, new, as yet, unthought thoughts, to create a new word for the thought. They most often create the new words using “dead” languages, whose daily use does not make them fuzzy with many meanings. That way they can define and control the initial meaning with accuracy.
The history of current science, as well as that all the way back to the Greeks and Arabs, is replete with many examples of new words that were created to capture new ideas or define new insights or new phenomena. “Neo” = “new” and “logisms” = “word.” Because of his many insights into life and living, Al also created neologisms. Here are some of his insights captured in his neologisms.
Significate
Notice how Al creatively changed the adjective “significant” to a command verb that does not normally exist in our language. This neologism highlights a missing concept in our worldview as expressed in our language. That we would be better served if we assigned relative importance to everything around us. He felt it was a sacred duty for each human being to decide what was most worth valuing. He called this the sacred act of “signification.” Click here for more information on this neologism. (Under construction)
Cogitans
Al felt that other workers insights and observations could not be captured unless a single word named that category of observations. These involved entire sets of insights, such as the case with the word “cogitates.” He used this word to organize no less than a 238-page notebook, 7 full manilla folders, and countless 3×5 card notes. There was so much material in his archives on “Cogitans” that we have devoted an entire sub-button to its entries. (see Thinking/Cogitans)
Athroismatics
The laws of aggregation /or/ laws of modularization. Associated with the concept of entification especially in astronomical and physical systems. Associated also with concepts like consilience, synthesis, self-organization, mutual containment and holography. Or the entire set of concepts associated with parts and wholes. See much more detail on this neologism in the isomorphism sub-button of the systems main button pull down menu.
Entification
The process of becoming a sustainable entity or part or individual instantiation. Any entity. Emphasizes the ontology of the entity, the way it appears in existence. Systems workers are especially sensitive to and research on the “becomingness” of entities in the world so they choose to emphasize this by making the noun into a verb. This neologism of Al’s seems related to the word “entitation” of neuroscientist Dr. Ralph Gerard, one of the four Founders of general systems theory in the last Century.
Ordinans
This concept explores zones of experience. It is about the problem of how to put meaningful order into our experience. Must we ultimately choose between closure with order and openness with chaos or is there some middle way? Is incompleteness the price of order [and consistency]? Is disorder [and inconsistency] the price of completeness? But perhaps in this contest between entropy and ordering, there is a clue to morphogenesis. Explore the “width of now” and the “width of here”.
Metontics
Al called this the frontiers of reality. A combination of all of the disciplines under a new umbrella word wherein we think Al subsumed all axiology or origin philosophy. A linking of the word “meta” for “beyond or above” and “ontology” the “study of becoming.”
Theontology
The meaning of “theo” generally means God, a supreme being worshipped in religion and spirituality. “ontology” means the study of the origins of things, or why they come into being. So we think Al meant direct creation when he talks about “theontology” or the coming into being by the action of an unknown and mostly unknowable supreme being. Click here for more information on this neologism. But since it is a neologism we do not know for sure and will have to study his recordings to see if this is what he meant. (Under construction)
These words reveal an underlying tendency or theme beneath Al’s lifetime work and journey. He was dedicated to synthesis, unification, and integration and pursuit of versions beyond anything conceived today and conventionally. There is an element of these themes in every new neologism he coined or advocated. This is also the theme of the Troncale website that can be found under Associated Websites.
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