I'm wondering what others think of the "Thomas theorem":

If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.

I just wrote a long thing on Scots earlier this week, and someone just asked me whether linguists would ever call Catalan a dialect or language (they wouldn't care too much, really, it's not a distinction they care much about). It made me think that what I find interesting isn't so much whether linguists wouldn't or wouldn't call Catalan, but rather what the Spanish state, Catalonian society, and Castilian-speakers think (and thought) Catalan is or isn't. The "objective reality" of the situation isn't nearly as interesting as the competing subjective realities, and their consequences. That's what makes Scots so interesting--it was considered a separate language (at least in Scotland) at one point, but a consensus slowly emerged that it was "just a dialect of English". This obviously had consequences for the way Scottish people communicate with each other and the world. Does the Thomas Theorem bring anything to mind for you?

Here is a question I have asked a few times: What name do you use for places? I've become somewhat increasingly suspicious that naming conventions are often ways to erase the heritage of certain populations: we often talk about "Bronze Age France" and "Iron Age Britain", but also "neolithic Mesopotamia" and "paleolithic Anatolia" (as opposed to Iraq and Turkey). Particularly given that naming conventions are rooted in nineteenth century scholarship.