BOK and terminology

Abstract

To this writer, it seems that a Civil Engineering Systems Body of Knowledge (‘Special Issue’ – Dias and Jowitt, 2020) cannot progress until there is agreement on the meanings of terms. Mature technical disciplines in the sciences, medicine and engineering have been able to develop because there is agreement on the meaning of terms. More recent disciplines such as popular management are not developing, and perhaps even going backwards, because terms are used differently by different people and differently by the same person within the one context; multiple uses and meanings for terms prevent understanding. Without agreement on meaning, the encoding and decoding present in two-way communication goes awry. Lay usage of terms and the multiple definitions found in dictionaries are not suitable for discipline-specific communication; for example, Carmichael (2016) shows the pitfalls with using dictionary meanings when referring to ‘risk’, Carmichael (2020a) highlights the confusion in using the term ‘objective’, and ‘uncertainty’ and ‘problem’ have different meanings among the Special Issue papers. The multiple meanings for words found in dictionaries are exploited by comedians, poets and playwrights, but inhibit a technical discipline’s development. And where English is not a person’s first language, the situation is exacerbated.