J.Konstapel, Leiden, 25-2-2026.
Short Dutch Summary:
De geschiedenis van terminologie is geen verhaal dat begint in de 20e eeuw, maar een millennia-lange strijd tussen twee visies: een term als een resonerende, realiteit-scheppende kracht versus een term als een statisch, abstract label.
De oudste traditie, van Australische songlines tot Veda’s, zag terminologie als een autopoëtisch systeem van resonerende klanken die de wereld ordenen.
Deze ‘resonantietraditie’ werd geleidelijk verdrongen door een ‘logische traditie’, die met Plato’s nominalisme, Ockham’s scheiding van woord en werkelijkheid, en Newtons abstractie van getallen de term reduceerde tot een willekeurig teken.
De moderne, Wüsteriaanse terminologie (jaren 1930) is dan ook de eindfase van deze abstractie, niet het begin. Denkers als Wittgenstein, Bateson, en de cognitieve linguïstiek boden echter steeds tegenwicht door te wijzen op het belichaamde, contextuele en handelingsgerichte karakter van taal.
Het artikel eindigt met de introductie van SWARP, een hedendaags systeem dat de resonerende benadering nieuw leven inblaast met behulp van moderne wiskunde, om terminologie weer te maken tot een levende, generatieve kracht in plaats van een dode database.
Introduction
The standard histories of terminology begin with Eugen Wüster in the 1930s. They describe a discipline born from the need to standardise industrial vocabulary, refined through ISO committees, and finally digitised into multilingual databases. That history is not wrong. But it is radically incomplete.
Here is a comprehensive English summary of the provided text, “The History of Terminology and Terminography.pdf.”
A Comprehensive Summary of “The History of Terminology and Terminography”
Te document below presents a radical reinterpretation of the history of terminology, arguing that the standard history, which begins with Eugen Wüster in the 1930s, is radically incomplete. It is the history of the “end of something, not the beginning.” The true history of terminology is a millennia-long journey, an oscillation between two fundamental understandings of what a term is: as a living, resonant force that participates in reality, and as a static, abstract label that merely represents it. The document culminates with SWARP, a modern system designed to return to the ancient, resonant tradition, equipped with the mathematics and engineering of the 21st century.
The core argument is structured chronologically, tracing the tension between what it calls the “resonance tradition” and the “logical tradition.”
Part I: The Origin – Sound as Ontological Force (Before 3000 BCE)
The history begins not with written records but with the oldest continuous knowledge tradition: the Australian Aboriginal songlines. A songline is simultaneously a song, a map, and a terminological system. By singing the correct melodic phrase—whose contour mirrors the physical landscape—one navigates the terrain and activates the reality it describes. This is an autopoietic system: knowledge lives only in the practice of singing and walking, not in a static record. This establishes the primordial function of terminology: a term is not a label but a resonant key that establishes coherence between the knower and the known.
This principle is echoed in the Vedic tradition (Shabda as divine sound), ancient Egypt (Heka as creative word), and Mesopotamian lexical lists, which were not mere administrative tools but conceptual architectures mapping cosmic relationships. In this original form, terminography was the mapping of resonance-relationships, not the registration of terms for retrieval.
Part II: The Classical World – From Resonance to Structure (800 BCE – 400 CE)
This period introduces the tension between the old acoustic cosmology and new logical analysis. The Pre-Socratics like Heraclitus (Logos as dynamic proportion) and Pythagoras (Musica Universalis) still understood reality as constituted by vibrational ratios. Plato‘s Cratylus stages the debate between natural and conventional names, a tension at the heart of terminology.
The Stoics provide the most precise ancient theory with the lekton: the incorporeal, expressible content of an utterance, distinct from both the physical sound (phone) and the external thing (pragma). This “third thing” is the true object of terminological study and the philosophical ancestor of the modern concept and of Friston’s “generative model.”
Parallel to the Greek tradition, Pāṇini‘s Ashtadhyayi in India described language as a system of dynamic, transformational processes, not static signs. Meanwhile, the Hermetic tradition and the art of memory treated language as a technology for resonating with cosmic levels. The document introduces George Spencer-Brown‘s Laws of Form here as a fundamental formalism: the first term is the first distinction, which creates the thing it names by separating it from the void. This act of “drawing a distinction” is the foundational act of both resonance and logic.
Part III: The Medieval Synthesis – Combinatorics, Universals, and the God-Machine (700-1400 CE)
Medieval thought, enriched by Arabic scholars, preserves and extends these ideas. The Zairja, a combinatorial device, is presented as the first “resonance engine”: a machine that generates meaning through the interaction of its components, not by retrieving stored definitions—a direct ancestor of SWARP’s KAYS engine. Kabbalah offers the most elaborate pre-modern theory of language as structural force, with the Hebrew letters as building blocks of reality and the Sefirot as generative operators.
The era’s most consequential debate is the controversy over universals. Realists (following Plato) held that general terms name real, pre-existing forms. Nominalists, led by William of Ockham, argued that universals are mere names (flatus vocis), mental constructs for grouping individual things. Ockham’s nominalism is identified as the philosophical root of the arbitrary sign, severing the term’s resonant connection to reality. Finally, Raymond Lull‘s Ars Magna, a combinatorial machine based on rotating discs, represents the ambitious project to generate all knowledge from a finite set of primitive resonances.
Part IV: Renaissance to Newton – The Great Abstraction (1400-1700 CE)
The Renaissance saw the last great flowering of the resonance tradition with the elaborate memory theatres of Giulio Camillo and Giordano Bruno, for which Bruno was executed. Francis Bacon then introduced a new, critical pathology of language with his “Idols of the Marketplace,” arguing that poorly defined terms distort our understanding of nature. The term becomes a pointer to an empirically observable regularity.
The Port-Royal grammarian school further formalized this by distinguishing the comprehension (intension) and extension of a concept, providing the logical tools that would later underpin Wüster’s theory. In a counter-current, Giambattista Vico proposed that the first language was not rational but poetic—a system of imaginative, metaphorical identifications where the term is the thing, a direct echo of the songline tradition.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz‘s Characteristica Universalis, a universal formal language, stands at the hinge. While aiming to find the “true names” of reality, its programme of a calculus ratiocinator paved the way for pure symbol manipulation. The rupture is completed by Isaac Newton, who, by abstracting number from physical magnitude, severed mathematics—and by extension, any formal language—from its resonant, embodied ground. The term became a purely abstract relationship.
Part V: Encyclopaedists, Romantics, and Semioticians – The Last Resistances (1700-1900)
Despite the Newtonian rupture, the resonance tradition survives in isolated pockets. The Encyclopedists (Diderot and d’Alembert) created the first hyperlinked knowledge base, demonstrating that terminological control is political power. Wilhelm von Humboldt offered the most important 19th-century challenge, distinguishing language as Ergon (a static product) from language as Energeia (a living, world-constituting activity). Hermann Grassmann attempted to found mathematics on movement (Ausdehnungslehre), but his work was rejected by his contemporaries.
Charles Sanders Peirce constructed a triadic theory of the sign (representamen, object, interpretant), with the interpretant as a dynamic process, not a fixed concept. His distinction between icon, index, and symbol maps directly onto the history: the original tradition used iconic signs, while the modern tradition reduces them to pure symbols. Gottlob Frege‘s distinction between sense and reference formalized the core problem of terminology: two people can refer to the same thing (reference) but have completely different ways of understanding it (sense), making perfect terminological alignment impossible.
Alfred Tarski provided the formal framework for this with his model theory, showing that truth is always relative to a specific “Universe of Discourse” (UoD). Finally, Ferdinand de Saussure‘s principle of the arbitrary sign declared the resonant tradition officially dead at the level of theory, providing the very foundation upon which Wüster would later build his concept-oriented terminological theory.
Part VI: Process, Autopoiesis, and the Living Organisation (1900-1970)
This section gathers the 20th-century thinkers who, often outside the mainstream of linguistics, provided the concepts necessary to revive the resonance tradition. Alfred North Whitehead‘s process philosophy argued that reality is composed of events, not static objects. Edmund Husserl‘s phenomenology introduced the Lebenswelt (lifeworld)—the pre-theoretical, shared background of practice that grounds all formal knowledge.
Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela‘s concept of autopoiesis described living systems as self-producing and operationally closed, providing a model for how a terminological community continuously recreates its own vocabulary through practice. Gregory Bateson defined information as “the difference that makes a difference,” reframing meaning as a relational effect in a receiving system. Ilya Prigogine‘s theory of dissipative structures explained how ordered forms (like a flame or a terminological community) are maintained by a continuous flow of energy. Robert Rosen argued that living systems are “anticipatory” and, crucially, that no single formal model can fully capture them, a concept foundational to SWARP’s multi-agent approach.
Part VII: The Modern Project – Wüster, the Soviets, and the Language-Action Turn (1900-1990)
Eugen Wüster and the Vienna School established the modern, scientific theory of terminology. Based on an onomasiological approach (concept first), its core principles were one-concept-one-term and the construction of structured concept systems. This framework, while enormously valuable for standardization, represents the most abstract terminological theory ever formulated, completely severing the term from its resonant, embodied, and communal roots.
Running parallel, the Soviet School (Lotte, Drezen) insisted that terminology is never politically neutral and is always embedded in production relations, highlighting the power dynamics of terminological choice.
A major philosophical challenge came from Ludwig Wittgenstein, who reversed his own earlier representational theory to argue that meaning arises from use in specific “language games,” which are embedded in “forms of life.” His concept of “family resemblances” showed that most general terms do not have a single essence, directly contradicting the Wüsterian ideal.
Stafford Beer‘s Viable System Model (VSM) provided a cybernetic account of how organizations must have recursive, functionally distinct levels of communication, each with its own appropriate terminology. Niklas Luhmann‘s social systems theory argued that modern society is composed of functionally differentiated subsystems (law, science, economy), each operating with its own binary code and universe of discourse. This explains why terminological standardization is both necessary and impossible: the same term will be understood differently in different functional contexts.
The Language-Action Perspective (Austin, Searle, Flores, Winograd, Dietz) reconceived language as a form of action. John Searle’s formula “X counts as Y in context C” formalized the creation of institutional facts, the very stuff of a Universe of Discourse. Jan Dietz’s DEMO methodology provided a rigorous operational model of organizations as networks of transactions, where the meaning of terms like “invoice” is constituted by their role in a transaction pattern. Mikhail Bakhtin‘s concepts of dialogism, heteroglossia, and the chronotope added the crucial social dimension of multiple, interacting voices and different spatio-temporal frameworks, showing that any attempt to impose a single, monologic terminology is a form of authoritative discourse.
The Scandinavian School and fact-oriented modelling (ORM) emphasized that information is subjective and that a UoD must be communicatively constructed with domain practitioners, not analytically imposed from outside. Finally, Maria Teresa Cabré‘s Communicative Theory of Terminology (TCT) directly reacted against Wüster, viewing the term as a polyhedral entity (linguistic, cognitive, and communicative) whose meaning is co-constructed in context.
Part VIII: The Cognitive Revolution, Embodiment, and Digital Terminography (1960-2020)
This era provides the scientific and mathematical grounding for a return to embodiment. Will McWhinney and Alan Fiske independently arrived at a quaternionic model of human meaning-making, identifying four fundamental worldviews and four relational models that structure all discourse. This implies that any terminological system based on only one worldview is incomplete.
Cognitive linguistics (Lakoff, Johnson, Langacker) demonstrated that abstract thought is structured by bodily-based conceptual metaphors and that every term encodes a “construal,” an attention-directing instruction. Homotopy Type Theory (HoTT) provides a new mathematical foundation where types are topological spaces. The Univalence Axiom states that equivalent structures are identical, reframing the ontology alignment problem as a geometric problem of finding paths between equivalent terminological spaces. Stephen Wolfram‘s concept of computational irreducibility shows that for many systems, the future cannot be predicted by any shortcut; it must be lived. A terminological system for such a domain must be generative, not predictive.
The digital revolution (TMS, TBX, OWL, SKOS) represents the ultimate triumph of the Wüsterian graph model but also its ultimate dead end: a system that stores everything but resonates with nothing. Large Language Models (LLMs) and their tendency to “hallucinate” are presented as the crisis of this Newtonian abstraction—symbols manipulated without any resonant connection to a grounded domain.
Part IX: The Return of Resonance – Towards a New Foundation (1980-2025)
The final pieces for the return are put in place. 20th-century physics (Fourier analysis, quantum field theory) provides the mathematical tools to formalize the ancient resonance intuition. Karl Friston‘s Free Energy Principle (FEP) offers the unified mathematical framework. It posits that any self-organizing system persists by minimizing surprise, using a “generative model” to predict its sensory inputs. A term, in this framework, is a pattern within a generative model—a condensed predictive structure. This synthesizes the entire history: it is the Sefer Yetzirah as generative operators, Humboldt’s Energeia as active inference, Peirce’s dynamic interpretant, and a formal solution to the Rosen limit (through multiple interacting models).
György Buzsáki‘s neuroscience provides the evidence: the brain thinks in oscillations, and communication is phase-locking. Geometric algebra provides the mathematics of process, the algebraic home for Grassmann’s vision and the quaternionic UoD.
Part X: SWARP – The Return to the Magic of Sound (2026)
SWARP (Self-organising Workspace for Adaptive Real-time Participation) is presented as the engineering realization of this returned tradition. It is not a database but a “coherence field” of coupled agents, each modelled as an autonomous inference engine according to the FEP.
- KAYS (Knowledge-based Adaptive Yielding System) is a modern Zairja. It does not retrieve stored answers but generates “kairotic moments”—optimal opportunities for action—by combining the dynamic states of agents and the system, detecting bifurcation points in its evolution (a Prigoginic moment).
- AYYA360 is a quaternionic mapping system, integrating personality, vocational, and worldview frameworks (like Spiral Dynamics) to position agents within the four-dimensional space of human meaning-making.
- AIDEN and MetaSwarp are reflexive intelligences that monitor the system’s coherence and maintain its memory, implementing Peirce’s dynamic interpretant and serving as the system’s autopoietic, self-knowing component.
In SWARP, the ancient distinction is recovered: terminology is the theory of how generative models encode predictive resonance; terminography is the systematic encoding of these resonance structures in a living, generative architecture.
Epilogue: The Magic Returns
The history is not one of linear progress but of forgetting and remembering. It is a journey from the Aboriginal elder singing the songline, through the long development of logic and abstraction, to the total symbol-manipulation of the digital age, and finally to the return. SWARP is the turn back toward resonance, using the most advanced mathematics and engineering not to abandon precision, but to place it in the service of living, dynamic, and resonant knowledge. The full return—to terminology as acoustic practice and living song—lies ahead, but the direction is clear. The “Magic of Sound” was always the science of resonance, and SWARP is that science, beginning to remember what it is.