Considered and Regarded: Indicators of Belief and Doubt in Dictionary Definitions

D; Considered and Regarded: Indicators of Belief and Doubt in Dictionary Definitions1 Joseph Pickett Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Lictionaries employ a variety of means to alert the reader that a given word's meaning or range of reference is limited to a certain belief system or field of endeavor. The most prominent of these restricting devices, the subject label, is external to the definition and can range from world religions (Islam, Hinduism) to academic disciplines (Physics, Mediciné) to sports (Baseball, Football), the arts (Dance, Music), and other fields and endeavors (Nautical, Computers ) . Other ways of achieving the same end are built into the wording of the definition, as with orienting prepositional phrases (In mathematics ) and even adjectives (A mathematical function ...). All of these devices have the added benefit of disambiguating polysemous words used in the defining language, as we just saw with the wordfunction. In fact, without the restricting device, the definitions might be nonsensical in some cases — "a pitch that curves before it crosses the plate," for instance, might leave people who are unfamiliar with baseball at a loss. When indicating a belief system, labels and other restricting devices are necessary because dictionaries operate under the assumption 1My thanks to Ian Brookes, Steve Kleinedler, and Michael Hancher for their advice on the linguistic sources mentioned in this paper. Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 28 (2007), 48-67 Indicators of Belief and Doubt in Dictionary Definitions49 that, unless otherwise indicated, definitions describe things that are real in the sense that they are derived from common human experience or the accumulated and publicly available store of knowledge. Thus, in reading the dictionary definition of snow, the reader is being told that snow actually exists somewhere in the universe, even if the reader has not experienced it personally, and that the phenomenon of snow can be learned about. But terms like Brahma, Eucharist, and id, while they can be learned about, are considered real only within their belief systems, and readers who do not subscribe to these belief systems would naturally be misled (and in many cases offended) without some kind of warning about the status of these words. There are many words that refer to the products or objects of belief but do not fit into a single belief system, or refer to things that are imaginary or the product of opinion or are otherwise not real, and lexicographers have developed a number of ways of dealing with these terms to call attention to their special status. The most common way is to use the past participle of a verb of private cognition or perception like considered, regarded, supposed, thought, believed, seen, perceived, and viewed. Another group of participles is used to emphasize the questionable status of a given word's referent or associated features or entailments . These words include held, maintained, reported, purported, claimed, alleged, posited, proposed, and so on, and they imply a public process of debate about the nature of things. Both sets of words evoke belief on the one hand, and doubt on the other. That is, when a definition says ¿5 thought to be or ¿5 maintained to be, radier than simply is, the definition overtly calls attention to the mediation of human belief. By the same token, the mentioning of belief at all in the definition tends to undermine its factuality, and thereby suggests that the belief is not fully secure and opens the door to doubt. Such phrases commonly appear in the definitions of scientific and pseudo-scientific terms for phenomena whose reality has been discredited, has not gained broad acceptance in the scientific community, or is otherwise controversial. In addition to the participles, adverbs derived from participles are sometimes used, words like supposedly, purportedly, allegedly, and so on. Adjectives too can play a role here — hypothetical, speculative, putative, and similar words. In entries that do not avail themselves of a subject label or other explicit orienting phrase, dictionaries do not say who is doing the purporting and the claiming and the disputing, of course. The reader is forced to accept it on faith that the editors know what they are talking about, and likewise the reader is expected to accept the sta- 50Joseph...