Does a dictionary “govern” the meanings of words?
Its “authority” depends not on the ability of its authors to govern the community of speakers of the language, or to prescribe rules of word usage, but on their ability to accurately describe the standard usage prevailing in that community. In other words, the compilers ‘speak for’ the community as a whole, not so much to guide it as to describe the verbal aspect of its guidance system. Part of this task, however, is to recognize that some usage habits are better than others for the coherence of the guidance system and for its communicative function. Since any instance of such recognition can only be based on the cumulative experience of one language user, and is as fallible as any judgment, the ‘experts‘ may disagree on which observable usages are standard and which are not.
The authors of a dictionary, by making implicit communal standards explicit, and by declaring some actual usage habits to be nonstandard (‘slang,’ ‘archaic,’ ‘rare’ etc.), are in effect prescribing usage habits for those who accept their descriptive authority. But that authority is based on the participation of the authors in the linguistic life of the whole community, not on their taking up a privileged position above it. If the dictionary is influential, the language tends to become what the authors describe – just as any cybernetic system (one self-governed by recursive or ‘feedback’ processes) develops self-control. Self-control (as opposed to remote control) is characteristic of living, semiotic and mental systems. As Gregory Bateson pointed out, ‘no part of such an internally interactive system can have unilateral control over the remainder or over any other part.’
Even in very simple self-corrective systems, this holistic character is evident. In the steam engine with a “governor,” the very word “governor” is a misnomer if it is taken to mean that this part of the system has unilateral control. The governor is, essentially, a sense organ or transducer which receives a transform of the difference between the actual running speed of the engine and some ideal or preferred speed. This sense organ transforms these differences into differences in some efferent message, for example, to fuel supply or to a brake. The behavior of the governor is determined, in other words, by the behavior of the other parts of the system, and indirectly by its behavior at a previous time.
The holistic and mental character of the system is most clearly demonstrated by this last fact, that the behavior of the governor (and, indeed, of every part of the causal circuit) is partially determined by its own previous behavior. Message material (i.e., successive transforms of difference) must pass around the total circuit, and the time required for the message material to return to the place from which it started is a basic characteristic of the total system. This behavior of the governor (or any other part of the circuit) is thus in some degree determined not only by its immediate past, but by what it did at a time which precedes the present by the interval necessary for the message to complete the circuit. Thus there is a sort of determinative memory in even the simplest cybernetic circuit.
The stability of the system (i.e. whether it will act self-correctively or oscillate or go into runaway) depends upon the relation between the operational product of all the transformations of difference around the circuit and upon this characteristic time. The “governor” has no control over these factors. Even a human governor in a social system is bound by the same limitations. He is controlled by information from the system and must adapt his own actions to its time characteristics and to the effects of his own past action.
Thus, in no system which shows mental characteristics can any part have unilateral control over the whole. In other words, the mental characteristics of the system are immanent, not in some part, but in the system as a whole.
— Gregory Bateson (1972, 315-16, his emphasis)
A beehive, for instance, is not ruled by a central authority; to imagine how it works, ‘a better image is the orderly growth of an individual body, brought about by communication between neighbouring cells. Work in the colony is organized by local communication between individuals.… global order can result from local rules’ (Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1999, 133). Such ‘local rules’ are legisigns, general enough to govern a recurring series of interactions, and ‘local’ in the sense that their form is determined by the ‘global order’ which is the whole system’s self-control. Similarly, social order results from the implicit ‘rules’ governing local interactions among people, whether they have been legislated or not.