Argthtjtr

In the sciences and in mathematics there are a great number of words and terms in use that do not, in any literal sense, describe the concept they are meant to describe.

Let's explore the use of "reaction" as it used in chemistry or physics: Yes yes, we all know the commonly USED meanings of the word. We can and do infer rather than decode all the time. That "re" prefix seems to just be crazy to use if you're wanting to be accurate - which I assume is important to most scientists. So why is inferred meaning OK in this case? Wouldn't using a word that, when decoded, actually defined the thing be better for scientists to do, even if that word was relegated to science and was not in common use in the general public? But scientists do use it to mean "interact" as well as "re-act" (act again) and also "a series of interactions" and "the results of n interactions"...

Another one to explore is the term "irrational number" - which i know has its own questions in these stacks but not in the same context as my question. When you look at the etymology of it it sure seems to me that early USE of the term for maths (as the originators of the concept groped for greek words to describe it) led to our modern definition: 'not able to be represented as a ratio'. Past a certain point going back in time it was really just referencing rationality of thought. But, mathematicians have so long used it that it has actually morphed meaning. On it's own, morphing is no biggie, languages change, word use changes yadda yadda. But in a field where clarity and precision are so very important, it seems really weird that the term survives in this sense. Why has a term not been created to separate the two ideas, rationality of thought vs ratio-ABILITY of numbers?

There are only two examples - there are so many more.

And to be honest here, this strange use of English within mathematics is the primary reason I found maths so challenging when I was young... None of the words used to describe the numbers and what the numbers were doing made any logical connection to what was actually being done with them!

EDIT: To clarify part of what I'm getting at here - a base tenet of science and maths is the formulation, testing, and modification of hypotheses. Yet that approach is not taken with the English usage. It is never asked "we began using this term because we were struggling to describe X - but why are we still using it when we know it to be inadequate?" We would not continue to use a theory if evidence appeared to show it to be wrong, yet we can show many of these words to be 'wrong' (by word-part breakdown or by use morph) and everyone seems to just shrug and say "yeah it doesn't really describe what hat is, but F*** it- it is just too much trouble to find or create a word that actually means X."

So I ask the crowd:

Why do fields that highly value precision in so many ways continue to use very imprecise language having had ample opportunity to 'clean up' their specific field's language?

This is a very interesting question and gets to the heart of a lot of problems with understanding the meanings of words.

You say that words used in mathematics and science are vague and distort the real meaning of the original word. One half of this the case, the other the opposite.

Math and science use existing terms or invents new ones from existing parts in order to label new concepts. If an existing word is used, there is sometimes an attempt to have it be evocative or metaphorical but often sadly falls very short, distorting the original meaning. Irrational numbers aren't at all irrational. Imaginary ones likewise; it's replacement, complex, more true but only partly, and for further math it goes on and on. Similarly in other sciences, power, force, capacitance, any technical term is its own thing only suggested by the informal generic term.

But math and science vague? No, that's exactly what they're not. The whole point of knowledge is to reduce vagueness. The vocabulary that is used for the new precise concepts is often Fixed. The term is then not vague at all. When used in the technical context, the label is as precise as possible. This is called a stipulative definition; whatever preconceptions one may have of a vocabulary item is only a nice story, but the label (in the technical context) is stipulated, said to be only attached to the precise concepts. 'Irrational' may mean informally something vague like crazy, but in math it means exactly not expressible as a fraction. That is very precise and not vague at all.

From the outside, when you don't know what these stipulated meanings are supposed to be, when you're just being exposed to them and haven't learned them properly, they seem just as vague as the informal terms, or really, even more vague because the concept hasn't been learned well. Technical meanings don't need to be cleaned up because they're cleaning up the informal definitions (or even making up totally new but very precise ones).

Of course mathematicians and scientists are people too mostly and they will use their technical vocabulary a little loosely sometimes, and sometimes a technical word's meaning will slip a little. But that tiny bit of give is not characteristic of technical usage. All the vagueness and connotation drift and tenuous associations is in the world of informal and non-technical vocabulary.