I disagree. Communication can be noisy, and if a bit of noise replaces a word with a word in a totally different semantic class the error can be recovered, whereas if it replaces it with a word in the similar class it can’t. See the last paragraph in myl’s comment to this comment.
Humans have the luxury of neither perfect learning nor perfect recall. In general, I find that my ability to learn and ability to recall words are much more limiting generally speaking than noisy communication channels. I think that there are other sources of redundancy in human communication that make noise less of an issue. For example, if I’m not sure if someone said “chlorate” or “perchlorate” often the ambiguity would be obvious, such as if it is clear that they had mumbled so I wasn’t quite sure what they said. In the case of the written word, Chemistry and context provide a model for things which adds as a layer of redundancy, similar to the language model described in the post you linked to.
It would take me at least twice as long to memorize random/unique alternatives to hypochlorite, chlorite, chlorate, perchlorate, multiplied by all the other oxyanion series. It would take me many times as long to memorize unique names for every acetyl compound, although I obviously acknowledge that Chemistry is the best case scenario for my argument and worst case scenario for yours. In the case of philosophy, I still think there are advantages to learning and recall for similar things to be named similarly. Even in the case of “Pascal’s mugging” vs. “Pascal’s wager”, I believe that it is easier to recall and thus easier to have cognition about in part because of the naming connection between the two, despite the fact that these are two different things.
Note that I am not saying I am in favor of calling any particular thing “Pascal-like muggings,” which draws an explicit similarity between the two, all I’m saying is that choosing a “maximally different name to avoid confusion” strikes me as being less ideal, and that if you called it a Jiro’s mugging or something, that would more than enough semantic distance between the ideas.
I disagree. Communication can be noisy, and if a bit of noise replaces a word with a word in a totally different semantic class the error can be recovered, whereas if it replaces it with a word in the similar class it can’t. See the last paragraph in myl’s comment to this comment.
Humans have the luxury of neither perfect learning nor perfect recall. In general, I find that my ability to learn and ability to recall words are much more limiting generally speaking than noisy communication channels. I think that there are other sources of redundancy in human communication that make noise less of an issue. For example, if I’m not sure if someone said “chlorate” or “perchlorate” often the ambiguity would be obvious, such as if it is clear that they had mumbled so I wasn’t quite sure what they said. In the case of the written word, Chemistry and context provide a model for things which adds as a layer of redundancy, similar to the language model described in the post you linked to.
It would take me at least twice as long to memorize random/unique alternatives to hypochlorite, chlorite, chlorate, perchlorate, multiplied by all the other oxyanion series. It would take me many times as long to memorize unique names for every acetyl compound, although I obviously acknowledge that Chemistry is the best case scenario for my argument and worst case scenario for yours. In the case of philosophy, I still think there are advantages to learning and recall for similar things to be named similarly. Even in the case of “Pascal’s mugging” vs. “Pascal’s wager”, I believe that it is easier to recall and thus easier to have cognition about in part because of the naming connection between the two, despite the fact that these are two different things.
Note that I am not saying I am in favor of calling any particular thing “Pascal-like muggings,” which draws an explicit similarity between the two, all I’m saying is that choosing a “maximally different name to avoid confusion” strikes me as being less ideal, and that if you called it a Jiro’s mugging or something, that would more than enough semantic distance between the ideas.