If you’ve studied a lot of math, you might already have an answer in mind: just take a few words as axioms—words we assume to have particular meanings—and define all other words in terms of those. It seems like this should be possible. After all, it works in math, and math is just a special language for talking about numbers. If math can be built by assuming a very short list of obvious things and deducing everything else in terms of those few assumptions, why not all language?
FYI, there’s a concept like this in linguistics, called “semantic primes”—the few concepts that you supposedly need to build up the rest. I haven’t looked into it very much, and it seems kind of suspicious to me, but it could be worth referencing and analyzing here.
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.
FYI, there’s a concept like this in linguistics, called “semantic primes”—the few concepts that you supposedly need to build up the rest. I haven’t looked into it very much, and it seems kind of suspicious to me, but it could be worth referencing and analyzing here.
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.