I enjoyed the content of this post, it was nicely written, informative, and interesting. I also realise that the “less bullshit” framing is just a bit of fun that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Those caveats aside, I really dislike your framing and want to explain why! Reasons below.
First, the volume of work on “semantics” in linguistics is enormous and very diverse. The suggestion that all of it is bullshit comes across as juvenile, especially without providing further indication as to what kind of work you are talking about (the absence of a signal that you are familiar with the work you think is bullshit is a bit galling).
Second, this work might interest people who work on similar things. Indeed, this seems like something you are explicitly after. However, your casual dismissal of prior work on semantics as bullshit combined with a failure to specify the nature of the project you are pursuing in terms a linguist would recognise (i.e., your project is far more specific than “semantics”) could prevent engagement and useful feedback from the very people who are best-placed to provide it.
Third, on the object level, I think there is a gulf in numerosity (from more to less numerous) separating 1) human concepts (these might roughly be the “latent variables in probabilistic generative models” in your and Steven Byrnes comment chain), 2) communicable human concepts (where communicability is some kind of equivalence, as in your model), and 3) human concepts with stable word meanings in the current lexicon (like common nouns). I think your framing in this post conflates the three (even if you yourself do not). The reason I include this object level worry here is that, if my worry is indicative of how others might react, then it could be more of a turn off for potential collaborators to see these notions conflated in the same post as deriding other work as not capturing what semantics is really about (if you think my distinctions are reasonable, which of them do you think semantics is really about and what exactly do you worry linguists have been erroneously working on all this time?).
Again, interesting work, hope this didn’t come off too combative!
Again, interesting work, hope this didn’t come off too combative!
Not at all, you are correctly critiquing the downsides of a trade-off which we consciously made.
There was a moment during writing when David suggested we soften the title/opening to avoid alienating classical semantics researchers. I replied that I expected useful work on the project to mostly come, not from people with a background in classical semantics, but from people who had bounced off of classical semantics because they intuited that it “wasn’t addressing the real problem”. Those are the people who’ve already felt, on a gut level, a need for the sort of models the post outlines. (Also, as one person who reviewed the post put it: “Although semantics would suggest that this post would be interesting to logicians, linguists and their brethren [...] I think they would not find it interesting because it is a seemingly nonsymbolic attempt to approach semantics. Symbolical methods are their bread and butter, without them they would be lost.”)
To that end, the title and opening are optimized to be a costly signal to those people who bounced off classical semantics, signalling that they might be interested in this post even though they’ve been unsatisfied before with lots of work on semantics. The cost of that costly signal is alienating classical semantics researchers. And having made that trade-off upfront, naturally we didn’t spend much time trying to express this project in terms more familiar to people in the field.
If we were writing a version more optimized for people already in the field, I might have started by saying that the core problem is the use of model theory as the primary foundation for semantics (i.e. Montague semantics and its descendants as the central example). That foundation explicitly ignores the real world, and is therefore only capable of answering questions which don’t require any notion of the real world—e.g. Montague nominally focused on how truth values interact with syntax. Obviously that is a rather narrow and impoverished subset of the interesting questions about natural language semantics, and I would have then gone through some standard alternate approaches (and critiques) which do allow a role for the real world, before introducing our framework.
Thanks for the response. Personally, I think your opening sentence as written is much, much too broad to do the job you want it to do. For example, I would consider “natural language semantics as studied in linguistics” to include computational approaches, including some Bayesian approaches which are similar to your own. If I were a computational linguist reading your opening sentence, I would be pretty put off (presumably, these are the kind of people you are hoping not to put off). Perhaps including a qualification that it is classical semantics you are talking about (with optional explanatory footnote) would be a happy medium.
I would make a similar critique of basically-all the computational approaches I’ve seen to date. They generally try to back out “semantics” from a text corpus, which means their “semantics” grounds out in relations between words; neither the real world nor mental content make any appearance. They may use Bayes’ rule and latents like this post does, but such models can’t address the kinds of questions this post is asking at all.
(I suppose my complaints are more about structuralism than about model-theoretic foundations per se. Internally I’d been thinking of it more as an issue with model-theoretic foundations, since model theory is the main route through which structuralism has anything at all to say about the stuff which I would consider semantics.)
Of course you might have in mind some body of work on computational linguistics/semantics with which I am unfamiliar, in which case I would be quite grateful for my ignorance to be corrected!
I see. I’m afraid I don’t have much great literature to recommend on computational semantics (though Josh Tenenbaum’s PhD dissertation seems relevant). I still wonder whether, even if you disagree with the approaches you have seen in that domain, those might be the kind of people well-placed to help with your project. But that’s your call of course.
Depending on your goals with this project, you might get something out of reading work by relevance theorists like Sperber, Wilson, and Carston (if you haven’t before). I find Carston’s reasoning about how variousaspects of language works quite compelling. You won’t find much to help solve your mathematical problems there, but you might find considerations that help you disambiguate between possible things you want your model of semantics to do (e.g., do you really care about semantics, per se, or rather concept formation?).
I enjoyed the content of this post, it was nicely written, informative, and interesting. I also realise that the “less bullshit” framing is just a bit of fun that shouldn’t be taken too seriously. Those caveats aside, I really dislike your framing and want to explain why! Reasons below.
First, the volume of work on “semantics” in linguistics is enormous and very diverse. The suggestion that all of it is bullshit comes across as juvenile, especially without providing further indication as to what kind of work you are talking about (the absence of a signal that you are familiar with the work you think is bullshit is a bit galling).
Second, this work might interest people who work on similar things. Indeed, this seems like something you are explicitly after. However, your casual dismissal of prior work on semantics as bullshit combined with a failure to specify the nature of the project you are pursuing in terms a linguist would recognise (i.e., your project is far more specific than “semantics”) could prevent engagement and useful feedback from the very people who are best-placed to provide it.
Third, on the object level, I think there is a gulf in numerosity (from more to less numerous) separating 1) human concepts (these might roughly be the “latent variables in probabilistic generative models” in your and Steven Byrnes comment chain), 2) communicable human concepts (where communicability is some kind of equivalence, as in your model), and 3) human concepts with stable word meanings in the current lexicon (like common nouns). I think your framing in this post conflates the three (even if you yourself do not). The reason I include this object level worry here is that, if my worry is indicative of how others might react, then it could be more of a turn off for potential collaborators to see these notions conflated in the same post as deriding other work as not capturing what semantics is really about (if you think my distinctions are reasonable, which of them do you think semantics is really about and what exactly do you worry linguists have been erroneously working on all this time?).
Again, interesting work, hope this didn’t come off too combative!
Not at all, you are correctly critiquing the downsides of a trade-off which we consciously made.
There was a moment during writing when David suggested we soften the title/opening to avoid alienating classical semantics researchers. I replied that I expected useful work on the project to mostly come, not from people with a background in classical semantics, but from people who had bounced off of classical semantics because they intuited that it “wasn’t addressing the real problem”. Those are the people who’ve already felt, on a gut level, a need for the sort of models the post outlines. (Also, as one person who reviewed the post put it: “Although semantics would suggest that this post would be interesting to logicians, linguists and their brethren [...] I think they would not find it interesting because it is a seemingly nonsymbolic attempt to approach semantics. Symbolical methods are their bread and butter, without them they would be lost.”)
To that end, the title and opening are optimized to be a costly signal to those people who bounced off classical semantics, signalling that they might be interested in this post even though they’ve been unsatisfied before with lots of work on semantics. The cost of that costly signal is alienating classical semantics researchers. And having made that trade-off upfront, naturally we didn’t spend much time trying to express this project in terms more familiar to people in the field.
If we were writing a version more optimized for people already in the field, I might have started by saying that the core problem is the use of model theory as the primary foundation for semantics (i.e. Montague semantics and its descendants as the central example). That foundation explicitly ignores the real world, and is therefore only capable of answering questions which don’t require any notion of the real world—e.g. Montague nominally focused on how truth values interact with syntax. Obviously that is a rather narrow and impoverished subset of the interesting questions about natural language semantics, and I would have then gone through some standard alternate approaches (and critiques) which do allow a role for the real world, before introducing our framework.
Thanks for the response. Personally, I think your opening sentence as written is much, much too broad to do the job you want it to do. For example, I would consider “natural language semantics as studied in linguistics” to include computational approaches, including some Bayesian approaches which are similar to your own. If I were a computational linguist reading your opening sentence, I would be pretty put off (presumably, these are the kind of people you are hoping not to put off). Perhaps including a qualification that it is classical semantics you are talking about (with optional explanatory footnote) would be a happy medium.
I would make a similar critique of basically-all the computational approaches I’ve seen to date. They generally try to back out “semantics” from a text corpus, which means their “semantics” grounds out in relations between words; neither the real world nor mental content make any appearance. They may use Bayes’ rule and latents like this post does, but such models can’t address the kinds of questions this post is asking at all.
(I suppose my complaints are more about structuralism than about model-theoretic foundations per se. Internally I’d been thinking of it more as an issue with model-theoretic foundations, since model theory is the main route through which structuralism has anything at all to say about the stuff which I would consider semantics.)
Of course you might have in mind some body of work on computational linguistics/semantics with which I am unfamiliar, in which case I would be quite grateful for my ignorance to be corrected!
I see. I’m afraid I don’t have much great literature to recommend on computational semantics (though Josh Tenenbaum’s PhD dissertation seems relevant). I still wonder whether, even if you disagree with the approaches you have seen in that domain, those might be the kind of people well-placed to help with your project. But that’s your call of course.
Depending on your goals with this project, you might get something out of reading work by relevance theorists like Sperber, Wilson, and Carston (if you haven’t before). I find Carston’s reasoning about how various aspects of language works quite compelling. You won’t find much to help solve your mathematical problems there, but you might find considerations that help you disambiguate between possible things you want your model of semantics to do (e.g., do you really care about semantics, per se, or rather concept formation?).