This was the first chapter I wrote. Sadly it’s missing a lot of stuff like this that really needs to be referenced. I expect to have to rewrite it substantially. For example, I really want to talk about intensional/extensional definitions so I can later work this idea in to the text of chapter 5.
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.
This was the first chapter I wrote. Sadly it’s missing a lot of stuff like this that really needs to be referenced. I expect to have to rewrite it substantially. For example, I really want to talk about intensional/extensional definitions so I can later work this idea in to the text of chapter 5.
Thanks for this suggestion!
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.