Where does silencing collide?

In engineering acoustics, silencing means reducing unwanted sound as it travels through a duct or an exhaust, and the device that does it is a silencer or muffler. Stewart's 1922 Acoustic Wave Filters worked out the theory of chambers and side branches that let some frequencies pass while blocking others, which is the basis on which mufflers and silencers are designed. Later engineering acoustics extended this filter theory into methods for predicting how much noise a given silencer removes. Here the referent is the loss of sound energy in a flow of air or gas, measured in decibels, and it has nothing to do with switching off a gene, quieting a person's own voice, or blocking a speaker's words.[1]

Unit

The sound attenuation of a silencer, in decibels across a frequency range

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Quantified as the insertion loss or transmission loss between the inlet and outlet of the silencer

In genetics, silencing means shutting down the expression of a gene so that its product is no longer made, even though the gene itself stays present in the DNA. Napoli, Lemieux, and Jorgensen's 1990 Introduction of a chimeric chalcone synthase gene into petunia results in reversible co-suppression of homologous genes in trans reported that adding extra copies of a pigment gene unexpectedly switched off both the added and the native copies, the effect later grouped under gene silencing. Fire and Mello's 1998 Potent and specific genetic interference by double-stranded RNA in Caenorhabditis elegans showed that double-stranded RNA triggers this shutdown, the mechanism now called RNA interference. Here the referent is a molecular loss of gene activity, scored by how much messenger RNA or protein remains, not the muffling of noise, the quieting of a person's own voice, or the disabling of a speaker's words.[2][3]

Unit

The reduction in a gene's expression, from partial to complete loss

Recovery means

Some silencing is reversible, and expression can return when the trigger is removed

Measured by

Assayed by the amount of messenger RNA or protein remaining relative to an active control

In clinical and social psychology, silencing means holding back one's own thoughts, feelings, and needs in a close relationship in order to keep it intact. Jack's 1991 book Silencing the Self: Women and Depression introduced this idea from interviews with depressed women, describing a set of beliefs that lead a person to mute their own voice to preserve intimacy. Jack and Dill's 1992 The Silencing the Self Scale turned it into a measured construct linked to depression. Here the referent is a person's suppression of their own expression, rated on a questionnaire, and it is distinct from quieting sound in a duct, switching off a gene, or a speaker being deprived of the power to act through words.[4][5]

Unit

A person's degree of self-silencing in relationships

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Scored on the Silencing the Self Scale, a self-report questionnaire

In feminist philosophy of language, silencing means more than stopping someone from speaking: it is the failure of a person's words to do what those words are meant to do. Langton's 1993 Speech Acts and Unspeakable Acts, drawing on J. L. Austin's account of how utterances perform actions, argued that a speaker can produce the right words and still be silenced if listeners do not take them up in the intended way, so that an act such as refusing does not come off as a refusal. This is termed illocutionary silencing, the disabling of the action a speaker tries to perform in speaking. Here the referent is the breakdown of what an utterance accomplishes among listeners, analysed in speech-act theory, and it differs from muffling noise, switching off a gene, or a person holding back their own voice.[6]

Unit

An instance where an intended speech act fails to take effect

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Analysed conceptually through speech-act theory, not numerically scaled