Talk:Symbology

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is supported by WikiProject Anthropology. This project provides a central approach to Anthropology-related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as mid-importance on the importance scale.

Contents 1 DISCUSSION symbolic anthropology article 2 Is this real? 3 Removing... 4 Symbology - Changes 5 Game Reference 6 Requested move 6.1 Survey 6.2 Discussion

[edit] DISCUSSION symbolic anthropology article

July 8/9, 2006 There is an article for symbolic anthropology. But for some reason the link doesn't work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolic_anthropology I don't know...

... OK so I posted a question about how to fix this linking problem, I think it is item 119 at the bottom of the page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29

If you don't know how to fix the link problem, please don't take out VALID article links, even if they ARE red. Someone else may be able to figure out how to fix them. Thanks.

Also, please do a SEARCH for these links BEFORE you delete them. You will see that articles DO exist for these topics.

Just deleting nonfunctioning links does not help. There ARE articles on these topics! The help information tells us to go ahead and include links even if we don't know how to make them work, because someone else will know how. I am following the proper procedure by keeping in the red links.

[edit] Is this real?

Are there real symbologists, or is the fictional character in the Davinci Code the only one? Can anyone actually think of something real that's called symbology? In real life, wouldn't it be called iconography? 24.211.247.191 18:15, 11 December 2005 (UTC)

There is no such thing as symbology. It is just bullshit from the Da Vinci Code. Heraldry is probably the closest thing.

"If you have no imagination, how do you think you will ever truly know God? Because God is imagination, sweety."

If it is so much BS, then the Merriam Webster has been wrong for decades. Look it up in a dictionary - they still exist in paper form. Mine, copyrighted 1981 has an entry for symbology. Symbology is a real word, although it's use to describe an academic office may be questionable.

Symbology is a perfectly valid word; see dictionary.com for a def'n. If anything the Dan Brown usage is questionable and should be included last, if at all. As a further matter of fact this entry should actually go to Wiktionary. 66.131.51.64 17:13, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

Questionable? I think it is pretty well established that it is not an academic discipline. Just because it's a word doesn't mean that it's a discipline. Example: people don't study heraldry at universities, but it's still a word, a practice, if you will. This article should be merged with The DaVinci Code to avoid such confusion. Fuzzform 21:24, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

William Defoe calls the word "symbology" to task in the viloent comedy "Boon Dock Saints". When one of the bumbling officers ask what the "symbology" is he corrects him an says "symbolism".

I concur. has anyone acually ever even heard of a symbologist? although symbology may be a word and maybe even a practice, there is no way a renound university or even a community collage would offer "symbology" as a valid course. april 7, 2006

I think this usage problem should be added to the entry. This word is an interesting anomaly that warrants further discussion. I'm going to change the entry to reflect this.Asedzie 08:41, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

While it is not an academic discipline as such, 'symbology' is also a widely used term in military systems engineering to mean the set (or 'dictionary') of symbols used by a system. The word can also be used to mean the study of such sets of symbols, and what constitutes a 'good' symbology for a particular context. As such it is a subset of human-machine interface engineering. It seems pretty clear that Dan Brown's useage (as a separate academic discipline) is his own invention, but it does have uses in other disciplines. 202.20.20.129 05:46, 6 October 2006 (UTC)

I've made some revisions to the "Symbology in Fiction and Popular Culture" section on The Da Vinci Code. My goal was to clarify that while a university professor might indeed study symbology, he could not hold the title "Professor of [Religious] Symbology" because there is no such department/formal academic discipline. (Something like how one could be an English professor who studied the work of Jane Austen, but not hold the title "Professor of Jane Austen".) I hope this helps to settle things. CKarnstein 19:46, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Removing...

It could be said that Symbology has now successfully been appropriated into the English language, through the increased usage of the term and universal understanding of what it represents. Although prescriptivist linguists would decry such changes and additions to the English Language as abhorrent, linguistic change and introduction of new words is natural, and "symbology" now fills the void of what Dan Brown was trying to portray: a study of symbols.

"It could be said," yes, but per the verifiabiliy policy we only report what has been said by a reliable source. If someone has a good source citation for "symbology" having entered the language, by all means put it in the article.

A published dictionary would be a very good citation.

Another good citation would be a website of a college or university indicating that there is a department of symbology or that it has a professor of symbology.

I don't believe this word has entered the language--in its meaning as an academic discipline--and I don't believe it will, because there is no such academic discipline, and therefore no need for a name for it. It is as limited to Dan Brown's fictional world as "oyarsa" is to C. S. Lewis's. Dpbsmith (talk) 19:18, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

My paper copy of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, published in 1978, says on page 2220: "Symbology (unreproducable pronunciation instructions) 1840. The science or study of symbols; loosely, the use of symbols, or symbols collectively; symbolism. So Symbological a. Symbologist (rare)." Make of this what you will; to me it says that the Dan Brown sense of the word is valid, but shouldn't be taken as the word's most representative definition. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 212.84.106.40 (talk • contribs) 2006-05-19T16:17:56

In researching for my translation from the Spanish of the article Juan Eduardo Cirlot—whose Dictionary of Symbols traced from the work of Diel and Jung, among others, and made Cirlot internationally famous—I ran across a number of references to the word "symbology" in scholarly, non-mathematical contexts—to my great surprise, as I, too, thought the word was more or less invented as an academic discipline for Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. A simple search of the journal articles in JSTOR turns up references such as

• Journal of Marketing Vol. 25, No. 4 (Apr., 1961), p. 119.
• The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., Vol. 37, No. 2 (Apr., 1980), p. 356.
• Latin American Research Review, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Summer, 1968), p. 24.
• The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Winter, 1962), p. 234.
• The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 16 (1887), pp. 198-199.
• The Philosophical Review, Vol. 46, No. 1 (Jan., 1937), pp. 94-95.
• Bulletin of the American Geographical Society, Vol. 44, No. 4 (1912), p. 299.
• Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 6 (1877), pp. 1-85.
• The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 6 (Mar., 1929), pp. 150-159.

Well, the list goes on and on. That last reference, certainly not the earliest to be found, offers the following as a definition of symbology:

"Symbology is the science of implied relations. The simplest of these relations is that obtaining between two things. One of these is called the signifier and the other the significant. The symbologist is interested in the conditions under which each of the members of a couple imply or stand for the other. Symbology might be regarded as either an independent or an applied science..."

I think the case can be clearly presented that "symbology" as a word and as a discipline can be traced to earlier than Victor Turner as the present version of the article's lead would indicate. Robert K S 13:14, 22 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Symbology - Changes

June 28, 2006 The definitions, game reference, and discussion below demonstrate that this article started off on the wrong track. There is an academic use and history to the word and concept of "symbology". The original article muddies the water. It is unfortunate that the professor of Ecclesiastical History at Harvard made such comments. She should have asked the cultural anthropology professors at Harvard before sticking her neck out like that. A search on Google Scholar for "symbology religion anthropology" finds references. Not hard to do.

I've made dramatic changes to the article, and plan to make more when I get a chance.

Sorry to disappoint you, but yes there is such a concept in academia. And, as for whether or not there is anyone who is a symbologist... How about me?

[edit] Game Reference

Not sure how relevent the game reference is...

9 July 2006 I'm not sure how relevant the Da Vinci code reference is...

[edit] Requested move