Onomasiology/Semasiology

8The difference between the two disciplines is considered as having to do with the path used to link sign and concept. The terminologist follows an onomasiological path (from concept to sign) and the linguist a semasiological path (from sign to concept). This distinguishing criterion between onomasiology and semasiology was introduced at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Romanist Antoine Thomas27, then taken up in Germany by the Romanist Vossler, the Celtist Weisgerber, and the lexicographer Dornseiff, the author of an ideological dictionary (1934), and it has since spread widely28.

9A Pottier-like semantic analysis, for example, but also—it could be said—most of the work in lexical semantics after the 1970s and 1980s, such as that on prototype semantics and many others (Shank in particular), are indeed onomasiological.

10In fact, when the pairing of onomasiology and semasiology is used to explain the difference between terminology and linguistics, it is generally done all things being equal29, neglecting the difference between the semiotic postulates of terminology and those of post-Saussurian linguistics. For those linguists who reject the autonomy of terminology as a discipline, the term is not a type of sign that differs from the others and has no specific formal or semantic feature allowing its theory to be singled out within a general lexicology. As a specialty language, the only real specificity recognized for a terminology would be of a sociolinguistic type: that of the particular professional or scientific community that uses it.

11Now “the Wüsterian term is not a ‘restricted word’, as F. Rastier (1995) says, and the Wüsterian concept is not the mutilated Saussurean signified, deprived of its combinatorial capacities, simply because it is not the signified” (Savatovsky & Candel 2007: 8). And Wüster’s terminology is indeed based on a typology of signs (a theory of the different types of signs)30 that has been refined and made more complex from the 1931 thesis to the 1979 work via the seminal article “Das Worten der Welt” (1959-1960). “This question thus refers in reality to that of knowing if an autonomous referential semantics is possible within linguistics and, if it is, to what extent it could be constituted in spite of or against the Saussurean conception of the sign, that is to say Saussurean mentalism, for which a concept is identified with the image in abstentia of the thing”31 (Ibid.). It also refers, beyond terminology, to the rules that govern the practical devices of terminographies: for Wüster, onomasiology is first of all a principle of terminographic organization32.

Wiener Kreis and Wiener Schule

12But even more than his doctrine of the sign, it is—let us repeat—his anchoring in a philosophy of language that forms the strongest point of resistance to the reception of Wüster by linguists. And it is to this anchoring that I now turn. Wüster’s philosophical references are quite diverse33. I will focus here on one of them, which appears rather late in his writings “(mostly in his Nachlaß)”, but settles there insistently: the reference to that version of logical positivism (or logical empirism) represented by the Vienna Circle philosophers, and above all by Carnap.

13First, a possible misunderstanding should be ruled out. It has been and it is sometimes said that Wüster was a member of the Vienna Circle34. This is not the case. The Wiener Kreis, which was organized in 1929 under the name of Verein Ernst Mach, but which was the successor of an older group, founded by Schlick, was intended to be a sufficiently open and informal society to admit not only practitioners of various disciplines, but also researchers who were not yet recognized, or even who had not yet published. A circle, perhaps, but whose center was everywhere: Vienna certainly, but also Prague, Berlin—with Reichenbach—and soon, after the Anschluss, Paris, then Cambridge, Harvard, etc. A circle, no doubt, but without a circumference, with no requirement to share the same philosophical options to belong to it35: what common points, for example, between the Kantian idealism of a Neurath and the dominant nominalism or realism? A group of peers, therefore, rather than a school, with masters and disciples.

14The list of members of the Vienna Circle includes the names of mathematicians such as Hahn or Gödel; physicists such as Franck; sociologists such as Neurath; philosophers such as Carnap, Kraft, Schlick or Waismann, not to mention those whom the Circle wanted to annex to itself, such as Einstein or Wittgenstein, and the many “sympathizers”, but no mention of Wüster’s name. Wüster never appears either in the bibliographies of the works of the members of the Vienna Circle, nor in the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science (Neurath, Carnap & Morris), whose first issues were published much later, from 1938 onwards, then 1950 again and which welcomed the works of numerous collaborators, well beyond those of the first members of the Circle36.

15One should however pay attention to the dates: Carnap’s Aufbau, the founding work, is from 1928, the manifesto of the Vienna Circle37 is from 1929, and it is not until 1931 that Wüster publishes his doctoral thesis. A thesis which, despite what its title might suggest, is not a work in terminography like The Machine Tool: an Interlingual Dictionary of Basic Concepts published later on in 1968, but in terminology. And what does this small industrialist from Upper Austria38, an engineer by training39 and a self-taught philosopher, have in common with those members of the European philosophy and science Gotha gathered in the Vienna Circle? Although Wüster continued to publish for a very long time and although his later works are contemporary with those of his successors in the Viennese School of Terminology, he began his work as a maverick. It was not until after the Second World War, first within international standardization organizations40 such as the ISA—which became the ISO—that the originality of his contribution was recognized. In contrast, the work of the Vienna Circle was intended from the beginning to be a collective production. In many aspects, despite its profound theoretical reorientation with respect to the principles of its beginnings, the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science—which, in passing, adopts a dictionnary mode of organization—continues this plural work ethic.

16Wüster’s terminology does not therefore “proceed” from logical positivism, but it joins it at a later stage. It suffices to take a look at the 1931 thesis index to notice, in a general way, the absence of references to works of logic, philosophy of language and semantics that one usually places under the banner of logical positivism properly speaking, or more broadly speaking, of the logicist movement41, except for those of Peirce—which only appears as a hapax—, of Couturat and Peano42. Wüster’s first references are above all those of the philosophy of the concept, which was much alive in Austria and Bohemia in the nineteenth century and until 1914. This philosophy is illustrated by authors such as Bolzano, Brentano, Meinong or Marty, representatives of an anti-Kantian conception of epistemology, catholic philosophers43 who were custodians of the logicist tradition of Scholasticism and who sometimes claim to be Aristotelian, like Brentano44, when, at the same time, in Wilhelmian Germany, neo-Kantianism was more dominant45. In the Einführung of 1979, these references are mostly abandoned46. The only real constant from one work to the next, the real common thread is Anton Marty47. The appeal to logical positivism48 appears most clearly in the articles of the 1960s and Carnap is cited almost constantly among the references of Wüster’s writings.

To haul language before the court of science

17What do terminology theory and logical positivism have in common? I will focus on three aspects: i. the langage reform and the use of the principle of parsimony; ii. the question of nominalism; iii. the problem of the definition of terms, i.e. the problem of the real definition.

18First, there is the idea that language should be brought before the “court of science”49. Within analytic philosophy, this idea was never more vigorously defended than by the members of the Vienna Circle, who posed themselves as advocates of a “scientific” language based on logic, whether it be, the exposition of pure formalisms, of course, or that of empirical theories. The topos of “language criticism” was widespread in the philosophical world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the beginning of the twentieth century50, at least since the publication of Mauthner’s Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache in 190151, to the point that Mauthner has sometimes been considered one of the forerunners of the Vienna Circle52. But the critical approach proper to logical positivism, or more generally to analytic philosophy, has little to do with Mauthner’s anti-logicist approach, even if the latter participates in his own way in the linguistic turn of philosophy by maintaining that all philosophical problems are in reality problems of language and that scientific language is entirely inadequate53. In the manifesto of the Vienna Circle, Carnap, Hahn and Neurath advocate the creation of a neutral form language, cleared of the forms inherited from natural languages and applicable to the expression of all sciences, whatever they are.

19To this end, Carnap sets out to deduce the philosophical consequences of the theory of types, as Russell had elaborated it. He proposes, in particular, not to subscribe to the distinctions classically made by the philosophy of language between categoremes and syncategoremes and, among syncategoremes, between variables and individual constants. He also suggests that we should be careful to introduce distinctions within the parts of speech in a more precise way than the tradition does. These are two preconditions for identifying what Ryle will call “categorial errors”, the main source of those metaphysical notions and statements that need to be eliminated from the language of science or philosophy.

The fact that natural languages allow the formation of meaningless sequences of words without violating the rules of grammar, indicates that grammatical syntax is, from a logical point of view, inadequate. If grammatical syntax corresponded exactly to logical syntax, pseudo-statements could not arise. If grammatical syntax differentiated not only the word-categories of nouns, adjectives, verbs, conjunctions etc., but within each of these categories made the further distinctions that are logically indispensable, then no pseudo-statements could be formed. If, e.g. nouns were grammatically subdivided into several kinds of words, according as they designated properties of physical objects, of numbers etc., then the words “general” and “prime number” would belong to grammatically different word-categories, and “Caesar is a prime number” would be just as linguistically incorrect as “Caesar is and”. (1937 [1934]: 22)

20Carnap’s interest that is here expressed in the notion of class, in the logic of classes, requires a quick clarification. Of course, Fregean and post-Fregean logic is based on the calculus of propositions, whose stake is not so much the extension of concepts as the truth functions, the course-of-values of propositional functions. Frege and Russell thus distance themselves from the algebraists, who, from Boole to Peano, passing by Schröder, etc., had built their formal languages on classes and the notion of inclusion in a class, however without abandoning the class calculus. It is simply subordinated to the calculus of propositions, or, in other words, it is reinterpreted in terms of the calculus of propositions, by establishing correspondence rules between the operations allowed on classes and those allowed on propositions, such as inclusion on the one hand, and formal implication on the other. Thus, for Russell, in any symbolic expression, letters can be understood as classes as well as propositions. The relation of formal implication, which characterizes propositions, then replaces the relation of inclusion which characterizes classes.

21This is the reason why Carnap, in accordance with post-Fregean and post-Russellian logic, does not entirely renounce a reflection on object classes and the logic of the concept to which it belongs, even if the calculation of the truth value of logico-linguistic expressions henceforth escapes the logic of classes, such as in the most completed version of Peano. Without being able to dwell on it, we refer here to the debates on the difference between formal implication and material implication, as well as to the question of knowing why it is appropriate to include the rule of separation, the modus ponens, among the first propositions of the logical formalisms54.

22In a way, in terminology à la Wüster, one does not have to ask whether it is the class or the proposition that is foundational: the proposition and propositional functions—as well as their linguistic side: the syntactic units55—are by nature outside the scope of terminology. The expressions of language with which terminology is concerned are infra-propositional.

23What Wüster seems to find in Carnap, on the other hand, is an approach that is satisfactory for his own enterprise, i.e. an extensionalist approach to concepts and classes, useful for his conception of definition and of the term/concept correspondence. It is also useful for the methods of tyding up the descriptive language, which give a theoretical basis to his own reductionism. Wüster uses a metaphor to describe the type of reduction on which to base terminology: “in language, low energy consumption is called convenience and low ‘head loss’ accuracy; a means of communication is more accurate the more the set of ideas actually evoked in the partner matches the intended set of ideas.”56 (Wüster 1931: 85).

Nominalism

24Logicist reductionism is usually associated with nominalism. A common view of terminology theory is that it is also a nominalism57 insofar as it uses a principle of reduction resulting from lexical and grammatical restrictions governed by the logic and norms of a given scientific community. This view stems from a certain misunderstanding of what is meant by “nominalism”. If nominalism is a doctrine for which the concept cannot be assigned independently of the use of the word, then we are not dealing with nominalism in terminology. What terminology claims to assign is the word independently of its use, and that is what it calls a term. As Alain Rey indicates, “Terminology would [otherwise] be no more than a chapter of general lexicology, and the positions of Wüster or the Soviet terminologists would be purely illusory” (Rey 1979: 32). “Terminology is concerned with signs (words and larger units) only insofar as they function as names, denoting objects, and as indicators of concepts. Terminological systems exclude any linguistic sign whose classificatory denotative function [...] is null or derivative.” (Ibid.: 24).

25Does terminology belong to nominalism? The answer is therefore no: if one constructs each term from the corresponding concept, then terminology escapes modern nominalism, for which language consists of names and descriptions. But this answer requires some clarifications. On the one hand, nominalism is a flag that covers many cargoes. On the other hand, the possible confusion comes from the fact that the theory of terminology shares a certain number of features with nominalism, but this sharing is obviously not enough to make it a nominalistic theory.

26Among these features, we find an identical recourse to the principle of parsimony, which is part of the ethics of terminology, to use Peirce’s formula, and aims at de-cluttering science and philosophy from their superfluous entities. Many logico-philosophical currents of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the post-Peircean pragmatists, notably Vailati and Peano, to the various schools of Analytic Philosophy, agree on this point, but disagree on the nature of the entities to be eliminated. The question of nominalism is associated with that of ontology, and this is also the case when we speak of terminology. As a general rule, ontology is indeed placed at the center of analytic philosophy, but it is a negative ontology: the beings we are led to commit to by language are subjected to a reduction—depending on the different theories, sometimes a maximal reduction, sometimes only an optimal reduction. This has nothing to do with what has been called “ontologies” (in the plural) in the post-Wüsterian terminology, which on the contrary leads to an anti-nominalistic conceptual entropy, as can be seen in some electronic dictionaries, such as WordNet, developed since the mid-1980s.

27Thus, we find a radical version of nominalism in Goodman, who, by requiring “that everything admitted as an entity be an individual” (Bochenski, Church & Goodman, 1956. 17), rejects propositions as well as classes and properties. In a perspective that in many ways foreshadows some of the current work on meronymy, Goodman admits only individuals or aggregates of individuals in his ontology. An aggregate of individuals cannot be conceived as a class: two aggregates are distinguished from each other when at least one of the objects they aggregate is different; two classes can gather the same individuals and yet differ from each other because the hierarchical relations between the whole and the part or between the genus and the differentia within the class lead us to assume properties in our ontology.

28Quine’s extensionalism thus leads him to assume the existence of universals that are not susceptible of being individually named. Quine does not reduce universals to words. On the other hand, he brings classes into his ontology but eliminates intensional entities, such as concepts or propositions. Extensionalism and nominalism share the refusal to multiply abstract entities with no reason.

29Repositioned in this overall context of the different types of nominalisms within logical positivism and analytic philosophy58, Carnap’s intensionalism, especially developed from Meaning and Necessity (1947), represents a version of nominalism, probably even weaker than Quine’s, and which for this reason makes it more acceptable for a terminological enterprise like Wüster’s59. This weakening is linked, in Carnap’s case, to the use of a principle of logical tolerance which amounts to admitting a plurality of logical languages within the same ontology60.

30But among all the aspects of the theory of terminology, the problem of definition must above all attract our attention if we want to try to measure its logical and ontological scope. If defining means delimiting—among linguistic signs—distinct entities whose precise value we seek to fix (the terms), the fact of creating or admitting a term, on the one hand, and that of defining it, on the other, form one and the same operation. The question of definition is, needless to say, central to lexicography, generally speaking. But in the work of the ordinary lexicographer, defining is only one operation among others. Not to mention encyclopedic dictionaries, where recourse to definitions appears random and most often contingent. On the other hand, in specialized lexicography and even more in terminology, definition is necessary. It is the first and principal means of distinguishing a term from related terms in the same field. This does not mean that the terminologist relies on a rigorous theory of definition in all cases. At least in Wüster’s case, we are dealing with an attempt to specify what the definition of terms should be.

31This attempt must be briefly placed in the modern history of the theory of definition. In the logico-linguistic tradition, from Port-Royal at least, to Frege, Russell, Carnap and beyond, to define is first to apply a rule of rewriting allowing to establish a relation of equivalence between a sign or a term and a series of signs or terms supposed to be known. This equivalence relation is based on substitution. The substitution of definiens for their definiendum, in a recursive process, guarantees the use of terms salva veritate. De jure, any term can be defined, even if the terms recognized as primitive in a given domain escape definition de facto, because definition would be based on a circular operation, consisting in admitting within the definiens a definiendum already demarcated.

32Let us note in passing that, if the logicians of the end of the nineteenth century, Frege or Peano, asked themselves anew the question of the definition of the primitive terms of their ideography, it is not only to insist on its circular character, but because such definitions cannot be constructed in the formal language of that ideography (Frege’s Darlegungssprache)61. They can only be constructed in the ordinary language. This one then plays the role of an auxiliary language (a Hilfssprache), inevitable substitute of the formal language, but inconvenient substitute, given its imperfections. Hence the Peanian project of creating a well-made language, inspired by Leibniz, the Latino sine flexione—well-made as much as an ordinary language can be. This point must be briefly recalled because it is an important element of the context in which Carnap and Wüster worked, each for his own account62. In both cases, the recourse to international auxiliary languages—it is no longer Latino sine flexione, like for Peano, or Ido, like for Couturat, but Esperanto—does not only aim at providing the scientific community with an interlanguage of communication, that is to say at rationalizing the division of scientific work. It aims, moreover, regarding languages that cannot, by nature, appeal to the canonical notation of ideographies, I mean the observational language of the physical sciences, in Carnap, or the technical terminology, in Wüster, to subject these languages to the principle of parsimony.

33Unlike nomenclatures in chemistry or logical symbolism, which, as is especially the case of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, must be understood in a double meaning, as a writing, a notation system of concepts (a calculus ratiocinator), and at the same time a system of conceptual notation, of a characteristic type, aiming at the conceptual content (a lingua caracterica), a Wüster-like terminology, forced to operate with the signs of the ordinary language, can only retain the second meaning of the Begriffsschrift: its definitions will be understood only as an arrangement of characteristic marks.

The real definition

34But that is not all. As we know, the classical doctrine considers two types of definitions: the nominal definition and the real definition (or definition of a thing). In the real definition, definiens and definiendum are no longer in a relation of equipolence, as in the nominal definition, but they maintain a relation of container to content. The defining features, i.e. the real characters, and the sequence of definitions, arranged in a calculation, offer an organized and hierarchical representation of the states of the world. This image supposes a preliminary division of the world of objects and their properties, and it is from this understanding of the definition that logical positivism inherits from Leibniz through Frege and Russell. Apart from the difference—and this is important for what concerns us—that the Leibnizianism of Frege and Russell, if it does consist in realizing a universal characteristic, makes the setting up of a general semantics very unlikely, if not impossible. A characteristic is indeed a project that aims at confusing classification (leading to an encyclopedic dictionary) and analysis of signifiers. As Granger indicates, “if the very nature of objects and experiences (which can be identified with the system of referents of the Peircian interpreters) is adequately represented by the articulations of language, the science of reality will be confused with a syntax and a semantics, the latter being then only a combinatorial ensemble of elementary traits from which beings would be constituted—a rigorous image of a combinatorial ensemble of elementary marks constituting syntagms.” (Granger 1979: 127)

Carnap’s Explication

35But such an approach is only compatible with a realistic extensionalism, of the Platonic type (this is what we find in Frege and Russell) and it is only suitable for logical and mathematical objects. The problem becomes otherwise difficult to solve when we consider the physical objects and concepts that empirical sciences deal with, and requires that we go back to the question of the definition of terms.

36This is notably the case of Carnap when he tries, in his Logical Foundations of Probability (1950), to base the philosophical method on what he calls a procedure of explication, that is to say on a revisited examination of the theory of real definition.

The task of explication consists in transforming a given more or less inexact concept into an exact one or, rather, in replacing the first by the second. We call the given concept (or the term used for it) the explicandum, and the exact concept proposed to take the place of the first (or the term proposed for it) the explicatum. The explicandum may belong to everyday language or to a previous stage in the development of scientific language. The explicatum must be given by explicit rules for its use, for example, by a definition which incorporates it into a well-constructed system of scientific either logico-mathematical or empirical concepts. (Carnap 1950: 3, § 2 [‘On explication’]).

37This question of explication, understood as the definition of theoretical terms, constitutes an obstacle that is difficult to overcome. For Carnap, when one sets out to define, the explicandum is not given in exact terms, because if it were, there would be no need for explication. If the terms of the explicandum are not exact, one cannot rigorously formulate the problem posed by its definition. But “we are asked to provide an exact solution.” This is one of the reasons why the explication is enigmatic (“puzzling”). Hence Carnap’s idea of not aiming at recapturing such a concept in itself, for example that of “probability”, as in the 1950 work, but to construct a “quasi-concept” that takes its place and maintains an equivalence relationship with it.

38But what kind of equivalence? Intensional equivalence is not possible: it would only shift the difficulty to the level of the properties of the concept. What remains is extensional equivalence. But this does not rely on a uniform procedure as initially envisaged by Carnap in the Aufbau. A procedure allowing to logically “constitute” the world by generating the different domains of objects, according to an ascending process—a process repeated at each ontological level, starting from the elementary experience (the Erlebnis) until reaching the most abstract domains, those of the logico-mathematical forms. In the Logical Syntax of Language, this is now an issue for Carnap, that of restricting his investigation to “theoretical terms”, that is to say to those used in the sciences.

The Wüsterian definition

39In relation to the difficulties of the theory of definition, as Carnap had made them explicit, Wüster’s conception of the definition of terms is that of a real definition, i.e. a characteristic—as we have seen above. Wüster retains from the Aufbau the idea that the construction of terms proceeds from a successive integration of the different levels of ontological stratification. But this on the conditions (1) of multiplying the modes of relation that the real properties maintain in the terminological definition, (2) of not sticking to the container/content relations (to the hierarchical relations of genus/species, or to the integral relations between whole and part), but (3) to also admit, as we see in The Machine Tools: an Interlingual Dictionary of Basic Concepts (1968b), relations of a functional type, relations directly dependent on the terminographic device, on the specific cross-referencing system of the terminological dictionary63. Besides, a link by references completes the organization by conceptual entries.

40In this respect, the difference between nominal definition and real definition, as it is used by Wüster in his terminographic practice, seems to be distinct from the difference between definition by extension and definition by intension, to which some commentators, such as Helmut Felber (2001) and Gabriel Otman (1996), appeal when they identify Wüster’s definition as a definition by intension, the only one capable of fixing the relationships between the concepts. An intensional type of definition would consist in hierarchizing, by genus proximum and differentia specifica in a way, the restrictive properties of the concept to be defined by distinguishing them, at each level of abstraction, from the restrictive properties of other concepts of the same level. An extensional definition would consist in serialising, for the same level of abstraction, all the objects of the class denoted by the concept to be defined. The intension/extension distinction, when applied to the concept, is thus insufficiently operative. And this is the lesson that Wüster draws from his reading of Carnap.

Conclusion. Terminology and material culture

41The functional relations mentioned above are particularly important for Wüster, because they characterize in a privileged way the particular field to which he mainly devoted his activity as a terminographer. I am referring to the field of technical objects. Wüster’s commentators do not often ask themselves what, in the general theory of terminology is closely related to the standardization of this particular field. More broadly speaking, the global name of techno-science used in specialty languages today—the name by which all fields of application are identified—reduces the consideration of the technical to that of the scientific. However, the first and most important fields of objects on which Wüster focused his standardization work are those of material culture. This emphasis on material culture undoubtedly represents a certain risk for the consistency of a general theory of terminology: Wüsterian terminology and—to a large extent—contemporary terminology in general have most often dealt with concrete objects domains with easily delimited boundaries, of which the Machine Tool (1968b) is in a way the type. However, the solutions to the issues encountered in the terminography of these domains are most often difficult to transfer to those relating to the abstract objects that pertain to legal, philosophical or scientific domains, as is shown, for example, by the numerous reformulations proposed by Wüster, regarding the terminology of terminology itself64. But this is the price to pay for participating in the construction of a philosophy of everyday cultural and professional practices—a field more or less left untouched by philosophical reflection since Kant’s Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).

42Vienna and Austria offered a favorable terrain for the cross-fertilization of scientific and material culture, of the world of industrial production and “organic intellectuals”, and this has been the case since the nineteenth century – exchanges favored by the influence of the spirit of the Enlightenment within a large population, as Carnap, Hahn and Neurath (1929) had noted in the preface to the manifesto of the Vienna Circle concerning the dissemination of scientific knowledge within popular culture. In a way, that was quite rare for the time, when it came to the preface of a Scientific Conception of the World (this is the real title of the manifesto), the thinkers of the Vienna Circle did not intend to limit their transformational aim to the intellectual tools put at the service of science, but to extend it to the social and economic order, to the organization of ways of life (the Lebensfragen) by promoting popular education and by proposing to reform the methods of scientific and technical education. It was also a question for them, two years after the publication of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, of pleading in favor of a type of epistemology proper to the Naturwissenschaften, in particular by reforming the language and by seeking to clear it of all metaphysics.

43In many respects, a terminologist who contributes to the rationalization of language and standards of industrial production participates in his own way in the same kind of endeavor—an enterprise that belongs to what Wüster called “language planning” and that we call now “language policy” or “aménagement linguistique.”

44Beyond the Viennese or Austrian context, the Vienna School of Terminology worked in a favorable context in this respect: the German-speaking countries differ in this regard from the other European countries, with the possible exception of Russia, in that from the end of the nineteenth century onwards, a true thought of the technical object developed there, as well as attempts to articulate cultural history, material culture and linguistic analysis. This is shown, for example, by the creation in 1909 of a journal such as Wörter und Sachen, in which linguists such as Hugo Schuchardt, Rudolf Meringer or Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke, linked to the “Wörter-u-Sachen” movement, published. In contrast to an atomistic approach to language, represented in Germany by the neo-grammarians who segmented their research by level of linguistic analysis, giving priority to phonetics and morphology, the linguists of the “Wörter-u-Sachen” movement which favored a holistic approach to the facts of language by insisting on their semantics and their anthropological anchorage. A similar holistic approach can be found in Weisgerber, whose influence on Wüster was even more direct65.

45To Wüster’s approach to technical culture can be opposed both that of Heidegger (1927), who reduces technology to Zuhandenheit and technical objects to utensils, whose only purpose is practical and consists in meeting human needs, and that of Max Horkheimer (1991 [1949]) in the field of critical philosophy, who will analyze the regression of reason into an ideology controlled by technology.

46Wüster is immersed in this technical culture, and his conception relies on a reciprocal relationship between language and material culture: the standardization of objects is not possible without linguistic standardization and vice versa. In the terminology of technical objects, a functional relationship is a finalized relationship. The definitions in Wüster’s dictionary always lead to a what for? and it is probably in this aspect that Wüster as terminographer best illuminates Wüster as terminologist.