Naming as Method

There is a prejudice in intellectual culture against coining terms. It is seen as self-aggrandizing, as branding rather than thinking. The prejudice is understandable — there are too many people inventing jargon to obscure the fact that they have nothing to say. But the prejudice is also wrong, because naming is not decoration. Naming is method.

Consider the term "sunk cost fallacy." Before it had a name, the phenomenon existed — people threw good money after bad, stayed in failing relationships, continued wars they could not win. But without a name, each instance was a separate story. You could not see the pattern. You could not teach the pattern. You could not build tools to detect and correct the pattern ¹.

The name "sunk cost fallacy" did three things simultaneously. First, it compressed a complex behavioral pattern into a portable unit. Second, it created a handle that others could grab — once named, the pattern became transferable, teachable, actionable. Third, and most importantly, it drew a boundary around a phenomenon, distinguishing it from adjacent but different patterns like loss aversion or endowment effects.

This is what I mean by naming as method. A good name is a tiny machine. It compresses, it transfers, and it distinguishes. When I coined "Agency Quotient," I was not trying to add a line to my CV. I was trying to build a tool — a cognitive handle that would let people think about autonomous capacity the way IQ lets them think about processing capacity and EQ lets them think about social navigation ².

The test of a coined term is not whether it sounds clever. The test is whether it does work. Does it compress a real pattern? Does it transfer to new minds without losing its essential content? Does it draw useful boundaries? If yes, the name is a contribution. If no, it is noise.