Thankyou, I will start to have a read. At first glance, this reminds me of the phenomena of reference magnetism often discussed in philosophy of language. I suspect a good account of natural abstractions will involve the concept of reference magnetism in some way, although teasing out the exact relationship between the concepts might take a while.
To OP: Are you familiar with discussion here of natural abstractions? eg, selected and manually sorted from https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/natural-abstraction :
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vDGvHBDuMtcPd8Lks/public-static-what-is-abstraction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cy3BhHrGinZCp3LXE/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-intro
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dNzhdiFE398KcGDc9/testing-the-natural-abstraction-hypothesis-project-update
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n2urKnXbevj2ryvGY/agency-as-a-natural-abstraction
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/BzYmJYECAc3xyCTt6/the-plan-2022-update
deep in the weeds: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/N2JcFZ3LCCsnK2Fep/the-minimal-latents-approach-to-natural-abstractions
disagreement, in the direction of thick concepts: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NK4XxyrjFWt83m3dx/take-4-one-problem-with-natural-abstractions-is-there-s-too
Thankyou, I will start to have a read. At first glance, this reminds me of the phenomena of reference magnetism often discussed in philosophy of language. I suspect a good account of natural abstractions will involve the concept of reference magnetism in some way, although teasing out the exact relationship between the concepts might take a while.