The first is that it implies that the meaning of words is fundamentally subjective, or based on personal experience.
It isn’t exactly clear to me what this means or whether it is true. It depends on what ‘subjective’ vs ‘objective’ means. In my post on ELK, I define “objective” or “3rd person perspective” as a subject-independent language for describing the world.
For example, left/right/forward/back are subjective (framed around a specific agent/observer), while north/south/east/west are objective (providing a single frame of reference by which many agents/observers can communicate).
By this definition, lots of words have objective meaning rather than subjective ones.
Just because our concept of a word’s meaning is learned through experience does not necessarily mean it is synonymous with that experience. So the subjectivity of the experience doesn’t clearly imply the subjectivity of the meaning.
On my reading, you are here implying what I would call a correlative theory of meaning, in which the meaning of a word is synonymous with what subjectively correlates with that word, based on the personal history of the specific speaker.
For example, a polygon having three sides is entirely correlated with it having three corners, but these two phrases mean different things.
Smoke can heavily correlate with fire, without ‘smoke’ meaning fire.
It might be the case that when Sandy says “I’m feeling sick”, in a correlative sense that really means Sandy doesn’t want to go to school. This is good to know. But it is different from the literal meaning of the words.
As I think of it, correlation is the start, but not the endpoint and doesn’t capture how all words get their meaning. Many words get their meaning through metaphors, which is a topic I regretfully didn’t explore in depth in this chapter. So I think in practice humans start from a bunch of stuff that correlates, and then use these correlative words to build up abstract patterns via metaphor. Eventually we can layer up enough metaphors to say make fine grained distinctions that can’t be picked out straight from observation.
However I’ve not thought super hard about the details of how to account for every case of how words get meaning, so my goal here is just to sketch a picture of where meaning starts, not where all meaning comes from. I need to make the chapter say something to this effect, or bridge the gap.
As to subjective/objective, this is something that gets me in trouble a lot with folks, but I take the stance that we shouldn’t try to rehabilitate the concept of objectivity as I’ve seen too many people get confused by it. They too easily want to go to adopting a naive view-from-nowhere that they have to be talked out of over and over, so I lean heavily on the idea that it’s “all subjective/intersubjective”, but then things still have to add up to normality, so much like moral realists and anti-realist theories converge when they try to describe how humans actually treat norms, I think my view is, in the limit, convergent with views that choose to talk about objectivity rather than taboo it for talk only of subjective beliefs supported by others sharing the same belief to point to the likelihood that something is “objective” within some frame of reference such that everyone within that frame would agree.
However I’ve not thought super hard about the details of how to account for every case of how words get meaning, so my goal here is just to sketch a picture of where meaning starts, not where all meaning comes from. I need to make the chapter say something to this effect, or bridge the gap.
Yep, agreed. I think the current chapter isn’t very good about letting people know where you stand.
It seems like a failure mode I run into is the one where the other person is trying to explain a basic point to a broad audience, and I’m hoping to engage with their more technical actual beliefs, so I nit-pick the broad nontechnical explanations even though they’re broadly fine, because I want to get to the solid bottom of the issues rather than swimming in the watery surface.
So I think in practice humans start from a bunch of stuff that correlates, and then use these correlative words to build up abstract patterns via metaphor. Eventually we can layer up enough metaphors to say make fine grained distinctions that can’t be picked out straight from observation.
This sounds broadly true, but it’s not exactly clear to me what question this theory is trying to answer. As you mention, intensive and extensive definitions are another way. So overall the theory might be that there’s a broad grab-bag of ways that words get meaning. But then the theory doesn’t seem to predict anything very strongly.
As to subjective/objective, this is something that gets me in trouble a lot with folks, but I take the stance that we shouldn’t try to rehabilitate the concept of objectivity as I’ve seen too many people get confused by it.
Can you defend using the word “subjective” in that case? IE, why try to make one side of the distinction if you drop the other side as confused/confusing? How would you answer the suggestion of just dropping the subjective/objective distinction altogether?
I’m not sure quite what view I’m trying to forward here, but… In terms of the paragraph as-written (the one I was initially responding to), it seems to me like an obvious model which you need to address is that the meaning is objective, but we necessarily subjectively estimate the meaning.
Like, at times you speak like the meaning is something we’re uncertain about (and therefore have subjective beliefs about). This suggests that the meaning is something “out there” to be learned. (I think people intuitively think like this a lot.) At other times you seem to treat the experience-with-the-word-so-far as that person’s personal meaning for the word (so, personal meaning can be fully known for that person, rather than uncertain).
IDK, it just seems to me like there’s more to say WRT this.
It isn’t exactly clear to me what this means or whether it is true. It depends on what ‘subjective’ vs ‘objective’ means. In my post on ELK, I define “objective” or “3rd person perspective” as a subject-independent language for describing the world.
For example, left/right/forward/back are subjective (framed around a specific agent/observer), while north/south/east/west are objective (providing a single frame of reference by which many agents/observers can communicate).
By this definition, lots of words have objective meaning rather than subjective ones.
Just because our concept of a word’s meaning is learned through experience does not necessarily mean it is synonymous with that experience. So the subjectivity of the experience doesn’t clearly imply the subjectivity of the meaning.
On my reading, you are here implying what I would call a correlative theory of meaning, in which the meaning of a word is synonymous with what subjectively correlates with that word, based on the personal history of the specific speaker.
I disagree with this theory of meaning and (as you know) prefer a teleosemantic theory.
For example, a polygon having three sides is entirely correlated with it having three corners, but these two phrases mean different things.
Smoke can heavily correlate with fire, without ‘smoke’ meaning fire.
It might be the case that when Sandy says “I’m feeling sick”, in a correlative sense that really means Sandy doesn’t want to go to school. This is good to know. But it is different from the literal meaning of the words.
As I think of it, correlation is the start, but not the endpoint and doesn’t capture how all words get their meaning. Many words get their meaning through metaphors, which is a topic I regretfully didn’t explore in depth in this chapter. So I think in practice humans start from a bunch of stuff that correlates, and then use these correlative words to build up abstract patterns via metaphor. Eventually we can layer up enough metaphors to say make fine grained distinctions that can’t be picked out straight from observation.
However I’ve not thought super hard about the details of how to account for every case of how words get meaning, so my goal here is just to sketch a picture of where meaning starts, not where all meaning comes from. I need to make the chapter say something to this effect, or bridge the gap.
As to subjective/objective, this is something that gets me in trouble a lot with folks, but I take the stance that we shouldn’t try to rehabilitate the concept of objectivity as I’ve seen too many people get confused by it. They too easily want to go to adopting a naive view-from-nowhere that they have to be talked out of over and over, so I lean heavily on the idea that it’s “all subjective/intersubjective”, but then things still have to add up to normality, so much like moral realists and anti-realist theories converge when they try to describe how humans actually treat norms, I think my view is, in the limit, convergent with views that choose to talk about objectivity rather than taboo it for talk only of subjective beliefs supported by others sharing the same belief to point to the likelihood that something is “objective” within some frame of reference such that everyone within that frame would agree.
Yep, agreed. I think the current chapter isn’t very good about letting people know where you stand.
It seems like a failure mode I run into is the one where the other person is trying to explain a basic point to a broad audience, and I’m hoping to engage with their more technical actual beliefs, so I nit-pick the broad nontechnical explanations even though they’re broadly fine, because I want to get to the solid bottom of the issues rather than swimming in the watery surface.
This sounds broadly true, but it’s not exactly clear to me what question this theory is trying to answer. As you mention, intensive and extensive definitions are another way. So overall the theory might be that there’s a broad grab-bag of ways that words get meaning. But then the theory doesn’t seem to predict anything very strongly.
Can you defend using the word “subjective” in that case? IE, why try to make one side of the distinction if you drop the other side as confused/confusing? How would you answer the suggestion of just dropping the subjective/objective distinction altogether?
I’m not sure quite what view I’m trying to forward here, but… In terms of the paragraph as-written (the one I was initially responding to), it seems to me like an obvious model which you need to address is that the meaning is objective, but we necessarily subjectively estimate the meaning.
Like, at times you speak like the meaning is something we’re uncertain about (and therefore have subjective beliefs about). This suggests that the meaning is something “out there” to be learned. (I think people intuitively think like this a lot.) At other times you seem to treat the experience-with-the-word-so-far as that person’s personal meaning for the word (so, personal meaning can be fully known for that person, rather than uncertain).
IDK, it just seems to me like there’s more to say WRT this.