Are Bound Dictionaries Obsolete in the Age of the Internet?

Reviewing the new APA College Dictionary of Psychology, Dana Dunn notes "This dictionary may well be one of the few resources that psychology students will keep and consult throughout their academic careers. As a relatively modest investment, it is to be recommended highly."

But are students really likely to use a paper dictionary, or is the Internet a juggernaut that will eventually make all such reference books obsolete?

Read the Review

Defining the Discipline for the Student Audience: A Concise and Direct College Dictionary
      By Dana S. Dunn
      PsycCRITIQUES, 2009 Vol 54(37)

Comments

[Eugene Taylor, PhD]

This is a very positive, well written, and thoughtful review of the APA's definition of psychology. The APA, however, does not acknowledge multiple epistemologies in the definition of psychology. Psychology is both an art and a science, for instance, but for the APA, psychology is only a science. One half of the picture must therefore always be missing.

At the same time, we must fix in our minds the function of dictionaries and the motives of those who write them. I prefer my students to use the Oxford English Dictionary, rather than Webster's. This is because mainstream psychology, driven by People of the Number, need to be exposed the the best scholarship available, exemplified by People of the Book. A good experimentalist is not, ipso facto, a good scholar. Had we higher intellectual standards, we would not be generating more and more professional jargon.

Finally, we must remark on the concept of the dictionary itself. In the late 1890s, William James, along with William Dean Howells, Mark Twain, and a number of other famous writers, proposed a literary society in which all members would agree to henceforth spell differently, "in order to end the tyranny of the dictionaries!" Going online is not going to solve our decent into standardization and social control. It will, in fact, make it worse. It is all too easy to convince the unwary student that if a thing does not have a name it must not exist, the foundation of linguistics, tho' not really true with regard to experience.

On the other hand, from the standpoint of an existential and phenomenological psychology of spiritual self-realization, words might also be vehicles for their own transcendence.