Rosennean vocabulary and alternatives

["Judith Rosen" <***>]

This issue has come up so much, both while my father was alive and after he
died, because he truly did have idiosyncratic definitions for the words he
used. The words themselves are tricky in this tricky language called
English, but the definitions he gave them were even further afield than the
dictionary meanings. Words like "counterintuitive", "impredicativity",
"telic", "impoverishment", "acausal", and, of course, "Complexity", to name
just a few. It might be worth doing to create a definition list of his terms
with the way he defined them. Anybody out there interested? I would consider
including it in the chapter of additions to the republished books as a
glossary of sorts.

On this subject, Tim once said (I hope I have it right here, Tim-- correct
me if I'm wrong!)  that he felt the commonly accepted use of the
Aristotelian term "Cause" is actually a mistranslation of the ancient Greek
into English and the words "responsible for"  more accurately describes the
qualities Aristotle was trying to convey. Cause is a word that has many
connotations in English and one of them is the action or verb aspect--sort
of a synonym of the word "make". This leads to a lot of misunderstanding of
"Final Cause", which my father uses a lot with regards to biology and
complexity theory. People seem to misinterpret what he's saying to the
extent that they believe he is introducing the concept of intention or
volition into systems like a single celled algae or a yeast. That isn't what
he meant at all.  If you look at "final cause" from this direction: some
necessity in a living system being "responsible for" a function being filled
by some other aspect of the system, it makes much more sense, at least to my
mind.

Judith
Website address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com/