Dilbert’s programme

Myths and legends of the market The JC’s guide to the foundational mythology of the markets.™ Go Premium Index: Click ᐅ to expand: Mythology Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Dilbert’s programme is a legal theory formulated by pioneering German jurist Havid Dilbert, in the early part of the 21st century, which Dilbert proposed as a solution to the foundational crisis in pedantry, when attempts to clarify the foundations of mathematics were found to suffer from paradoxes and inconsistencies. Dilbert proposed to ground all existing theories to a finite, complete set of definitions and legal propositions, and provide a proof that these axioms were consistent.

Dilbert therefore eschews the undefined use of any expression, however banal or self-evident, in any contract, on the grounds that any such lacunae opens the way to an unstable state of Cardozo indeterminacy.

Thus, wherever Dilbert found undefined words, he defined them, where no better formulation presented 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.

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

• Definitions
• Biggs hoson