NAH, refers to the idea that lower-dimensional summaries or abstractions used by humans in day-to-day thought and language are natural and convergent across cognitive systems
I guess whether there is such convergence isn’t a yes-no-question, but a question of degree?
Very regularily I experience that thoughts I want to convey don’t have words that clearly correspond to the concepts I want to use. So often I’ll use words/expressions that don’t match in a precise way, and sometimes there aren’t even words/expressions that can be used to vaguely gesture at what I actually mean.
Nonetheless, our concepts are similar enough, and we have a similar enough understanding of how words/expressions correspond to concepts, for us to be able to communicate quite a lot (we misunderstand each other all the time, but nonetheless there is a considerable range of stuff that we are able to communicate fairly reliably).
I guess whether there is such convergence isn’t a yes-no-question, but a question of degree?
Very regularily I experience that thoughts I want to convey don’t have words that clearly correspond to the concepts I want to use. So often I’ll use words/expressions that don’t match in a precise way, and sometimes there aren’t even words/expressions that can be used to vaguely gesture at what I actually mean.
Nonetheless, our concepts are similar enough, and we have a similar enough understanding of how words/expressions correspond to concepts, for us to be able to communicate quite a lot (we misunderstand each other all the time, but nonetheless there is a considerable range of stuff that we are able to communicate fairly reliably).