Looking into this a little more, it seems like the methodology was basically “some linguists spend 30 years or so trying to define words in terms of other words, to find the irreducible words”.
I don’t trust this methodology much; it seems easy for this group of linguists to develop their own special body of (potentially pseudo-scientific) practice around how to reduce one word to another word, and therefore fool themselves in some specific cases (EG keep a specific word around as a semantic prime because of some bad argument about its primativeness that gets universally accepted, or kick some word out via a bad reduction that goes unquestioned).
On the other hand, I think that objection in itself isn’t so bad as to reject the notion entirely; it merely says that (without a better methodology) the set of semantic primes will be somewhat arbitrary.
Looking into this a little more, it seems like the methodology was basically “some linguists spend 30 years or so trying to define words in terms of other words, to find the irreducible words”.
I don’t trust this methodology much; it seems easy for this group of linguists to develop their own special body of (potentially pseudo-scientific) practice around how to reduce one word to another word, and therefore fool themselves in some specific cases (EG keep a specific word around as a semantic prime because of some bad argument about its primativeness that gets universally accepted, or kick some word out via a bad reduction that goes unquestioned).
On the other hand, I think that objection in itself isn’t so bad as to reject the notion entirely; it merely says that (without a better methodology) the set of semantic primes will be somewhat arbitrary.