Quote Originally Posted by William F. Owen View Post
All true, but when MDs talk about trauma, or toxic shock they all have a clear and universal understanding.

Military theory does not have a clear agreement of definitions or applications of such words that are clearly important. Just read back through the thread and see how different folks have different meanings for different words. - then ask a doctor or physicist if they have the same problem.

If I asked for a definition of "Shock action" on these boards I would get a range of opinions. Not a definition on which all agreed. I bet people even have differing definitions of what Military Theory is. MDs all know what Pathology is, or Psychiatry is not.
Having worked at a state agency that licenses and disciplines physicians, I can tell you that not all MDs agree as to the meaning of trauma and toxic shock, pathology and psychiatry nor what each field of practice includes. For exmple, trauma is divided into diferent levels, based on the kinds of treatment that may be required. It gets even more exciting when the MDs in question received their training in Med schools that are not located in the US.
Physicists are also prone to miscommunication. As a simple example, the gulf between theoretical and experimental physicists is quite striking. And mathematicians are not much better. Take geometry for example--is that Euclidean geometry, non-Eucklidean geometry, Reimannian geometry, Cartesian geometry, plane geometry, solid geometry, or some other form of geometry that we have in mind? How about 'number'?--real, whole, rational, irrational, cardinal, ordinal are some of the possible ways of qualifying that concept. Each of these adjectival appendages serve to form a more narrow domain of discourse that provides a semantic context for a lexicon or vocabulary.

The same thing happens in military theory--it is indexed to a cultural domain of discourse. Perhps that domain is nationality based; perhaps it is branch or arm of service based; perhaps it is source of enlistment/commissioning based. Most likely it is a mixed bag of all of these and other bases as well. Once you discover the domain of discourse in play, less misunderstanding occurs. Note that I said 'less', not 'no' misundersatanding occurs
Language learning is an individual activity (and learning military terminology is a form of language learning just as much as learning Mandarin Chinese is). Each one of us carries along a little extra baggage (part of our individual experiences tied to learning the words we know--a phenomenolgical or emotional 'charge' if you will) with every word in our individual lexicons. I wonder that we are able to order a cup of tea satisfactorily and would submit that at root we really are not so able. Deep down, we are not satisfied with the product unless we make it ourselves because only each one of us really 'knows' how we like our tea.

Sorry for the discourse on philosophy of language, but I think it is important to get clear on how hard it is to communicate with each other.