Meta-

Meta (from the Greek meta- μετά- meaning 'after' or 'beyond') is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept that is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. Meta (from the Greek meta- μετά- meaning 'after' or 'beyond') is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept that is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter. In Greek, the prefix meta- is generally less esoteric than in English; Greek meta- is equivalent to the Latin words post- or ad-. The use of the prefix in this sense occurs occasionally in scientific English terms derived from Greek. For example: the term Metatheria (the name for the clade of marsupial mammals) uses the prefix meta- in the sense the Metatheria occur on the tree of life adjacent to the Theria (the placental mammals). In epistemology, and often in common use, the prefix meta- is used to mean about (its own category). For example, metadata are data about data (who has produced them, when, what format the data are in and so on). In a database, metadata are also data about data stored in a data dictionary and describe information (data) about database tables such as the table name, table owner, details about columns, – essentially describing the table. Also, metamemory in psychology means an individual's knowledge about whether or not they would remember something if they concentrated on recalling it. The modern sense of 'an X about X' has given rise to concepts like 'meta-cognition' (i.e. cognition about cognition), 'meta-emotion' (i.e. emotion about emotion), 'meta-discussion' (i.e. discussion about discussion), 'meta-joke' (i.e. joke about jokes), and 'metaprogramming' (i.e. writing programs that manipulate programs). In a rule-based system, a metarule is a rule governing the application of other rules. Any subject can be said to have a metatheory, a theoretical consideration of its properties, such as its foundations, methods, form and utility, on a higher level of abstraction. In linguistics, a grammar is considered as being expressed in a metalanguage, language operating on a higher level to describe properties of the plain language (and not itself). The prefix comes from the Greek preposition and prefix meta- (μετά-), from μετά, which meant 'after', 'beside', 'with', 'among' (with respect to the preposition, some of these meanings were distinguished by case marking). Other meanings include 'beyond', 'adjacent' and 'self', and it is also used in the form μητα- as a prefix in Greek, with variants μετ- before vowels and μεθ- 'meth-' before aspirated vowels. The earliest form of the word 'meta' is the Mycenaean Greek me-ta, written in Linear B syllabic script. The Greek preposition is cognate with the Old English preposition mid 'with', still found as a prefix in midwife. Its use in English is the result of back-formation from the word 'metaphysics'. In origin Metaphysics was just the title of one of the principal works of Aristotle; it was so named (by Andronicus of Rhodes) because in the customary ordering of the works of Aristotle it was the book following Physics; it thus meant nothing more than ' after Physics'. However, even Latin writers misinterpreted this as entailing metaphysics constituted 'the science of what is beyond the physical'. Nonetheless, Aristotle's Metaphysics enunciates considerations of natures above physical realities, which one can examine through this particular part of philosophy, e.g., the existence of God. The use of the prefix was later extended to other contexts based on the understanding of metaphysics to mean 'the science of what is beyond the physical'. The Oxford English Dictionary cites uses of the meta- prefix as 'beyond, about' (such as meta-economics and meta-philosophy) going back to 1917. However, these formations are parallel to the original 'metaphysics' and 'metaphysical', that is, as a prefix to general nouns (fields of study) or adjectives. Going by the OED citations, it began being used with specific nouns in connection with mathematical logic sometime before 1929. (In 1920 David Hilbert proposed a research project in what was called 'metamathematics.') A notable early citation is Quine's 1937 use of the word 'metatheorem', where meta- has the modern meaning of 'an X about X'. (Note earlier uses of 'meta-economics' and even 'metaphysics' do not have this doubled conceptual structure – they are about or beyond X but they do not themselves constitute an X).