With all due respect to the immortal Scott Alexander, I think he’s getting the moral deeply wrong when he characterizes category boundaries as value-dependent (although I agree that the ancient Hebrews had good reason to group dolphins and fish under their category dag, given their state of knowledge). For what I think the correct theory looks like (with a focus on dolphins), see “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”.
Indeed, words don’t mean things on their own, people use words to mean things. But with enough shared context, it’s a reasonable approximation to say that words mean things. Up until they don’t. Scott A expressed it rather well when discussing whether whale is a fish. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/
With all due respect to the immortal Scott Alexander, I think he’s getting the moral deeply wrong when he characterizes category boundaries as value-dependent (although I agree that the ancient Hebrews had good reason to group dolphins and fish under their category dag, given their state of knowledge). For what I think the correct theory looks like (with a focus on dolphins), see “Where to Draw the Boundaries?”.