UPDATE: GLOSSING IS REAL AFTER ALL IT JUST ISNT A SOCIOLOGY THEORY AND ISN'T BY TALCOTT PARSONS

I am sooooo happy about that because it sounded like exactly what I want to read about and now it's real!!!

Original post below:

Something that drives me crazy as a librarian is how often I find claims that interest me, locate the primary source through my librarian skills even when the links are troublesome to track down, and discover that the source said no such thing.

The big dramatic end to my ML phase was using interlibrary loan to acquire a copy of Grover Furr's "Bloodlies" and compare it next to my copy of Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder. It took months to acquire this book but I had seen it cited by MLs online over and over again to back up so many claims that radically differed from common understandings of WWII so I wanted to read it for myself. And upon acquiring it (and it was a hefty boy) I discovered that it was totally crap. It could not be used to substantiate all of the claims that were being made by all these people online and acquiring access to the text was so tremendously difficult I doubted any of them had actually read it. If they had read it, they'd have to be on something to perceive it as a reputable text. It felt like reading House of Leaves. I unsubscribed from Proles of the Round Table. Clearly their information was shit.

A particularly surreal example today was pertaining to the concept of a "Gloss," seemingly coined by famous sociologist Talcott Parsons. I first encountered this concept on the wikipedia page for "Reality Tunnel" which is a useful concept that comes from unhinged New Age writer Robert Anton Wilson referring to how you construct your understanding of reality based on selective intake of information. Under "Similar Ideas" was the following paragraph:

Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons used the word "gloss" to describe how the mind perceives reality.[5] We are taught, he theorised, how to "put the world together" by others who subscribe to a consensus reality. "The curious world of Talcott Parsons was where society was a system, comprised of interactive subsystems adhering to a certain set of unwritten rules."[6][7]

The main citation, [5], for this quote is this interview supposedly from Psychology Today, but I can't find any sources saying what issue it was in nor does Psychology Today mention this article anywhere. Within the interview, the concept of a "gloss" comes up in this paragraph, citing famous sociologist Talcott Parsons.

CASTANEDA: Exactly. I have come to understand sorcery in terms of Talcott Parsons'
idea of glosses. A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance,
this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated
perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we
had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the
world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that
corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on. The world is an agreement. The
system of glossing seems to be somewhat like walking. We have to learn to walk, but
once we learn we are subject to the syntax of language and the mode of perception it
contains.

No specific text is cited here. I searched far and wide for anywhere stating in what text Talcott Parsons writes about and develops this theory of glossing and everywhere I found using the concept at all was machine-created web pages copy-pasting either exactly the same wording and definitions as used in this interview, or from wikipedia. And, of course, either no citations are given, or it cites this interview with Castaneda. It is worth noting at this point that Carlos Castaneda's entire body of work as an anthropologist has been called into question and his writings about shamanism are now considered to have been entirely fictional. This man makes stuff up.

Citation [7] is The Social System by Talcott Parsons. So I acquired an old dusty copy of it from special off-site storage through my library. Once again, getting the primary source was a tad difficult. I acquired the text. It is on my desk right now. I have been perusing it.

The word "gloss" appears only twice in the entire book and it is not to develop a theory or concept called "glossing" it is literally just being used colloquially in referencing to "glossing over something." There is no such theory by Talcott Parsons called "glossing." There is no definition of "a gloss." There is no "total system of perception and language." It is simply not in this text at all. There are a couple chapters on belief systems and instutionalization of ideologies which I found interesting. But the concept of "a gloss as a total system of perception and language" is fictional. It's not here.

And so ironically this misinformation about the contents of this book has created an entire theoretical concept being references on tens and tens of web pages with very little human involvement and none of which are actual creative or new texts utilizing this theoretical concept. They're just phony encyclopedias claiming this is a notable theory of Talcott Parsons' that he simply never created, as far as I can tell, doing the research I can.

The concept of an idea, even when "cited" can still lead to a dead end. It's not real.

I want to emphasize this:

The theoretical concept I was searching for that discusses how societies determine what is and is not real turned out to not be real

My search for knowledge continues.