Dilbert’s programme

Myths and legends of the market The JC’s guide to the foundational mythology of the markets.™ →Go uptown Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Mythology Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

Dilbert’s programme is a legal theory formulated by pioneering German jurist Havid Dilbert in the early part of the 21st century. Dilbert proposed it as a solution to an emerging foundational crisis in pedantry, as various attempts to codify the fundamental essence of punctiliousness had foundered, beset by paradox and inconsistency. Dilbert proposed to ground all existing theories of quibblery to a finite, complete set of definitions and legal propositions, and provide a proof that these fundaments of captiousness were consistent.

The “Dilbert programme”, as it become known, thus eschews the undefined use of any expression, however banal or self-evident, in any legal instrument, on the grounds that such uncertainty opens the way to an unstable state of Cardozo indeterminacy.

Thus, wherever Dilbert found nouns, noun phrases or even suggestive adjectives, he defined them. His research team identified a small class of cases where it was clear that, logically no better formulation of the referent was available than the referring expression itself/ exactly as they were, to avoid all doubt, of any type, kind or variety, even those small enough to cross the pedantry threshold into outright paranoia.

The Dilbert definition

Thus Dilbert is credited with inventing the “Dilbert definition” in which RE_n == r_n. In this case, the thing being defined (the “referent”) and the label defining it (the “referring expression”) are identical, as illustrated in the following example:

An insured person (the “insured person”) may cancel (“cancel”) a policy (the “policy”) by providing us as insurer (“us” or the “insurer”) a written notice (the “written notice”) of the cancellation (the “cancellation”).

Academic debate rages to this day as to whether a Dilbert definition qualifies as an unusually stable type of Biggs hoson, or whether it simply has null semantic content.

See also

• Cardozo indeterminacy.
• Definitions
• Biggs hoson