It would certainly facilitate communication, though, if people could agree on what words mean rather than having personal definitions. No doubt it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on precisely where the boundary between yellow and orange lies, but tigers aren’t even a yellowish orange.
The words stand for abstractions and abstractions suffer from the abstraction uncertainty principle i.e. an abstraction cannot be simultaneously, very useful/widely applicable and very precise. The more useful a word is, the less precise it will be and vise versa. Dictionary definitions are a compromise—They never use the most precise definitions even when such are available (e.g. for scientific terms) because such definitions are not useful for communication between most users of the dictionary. For example, If we defined red to be light with a frequency of exactly 430THz, it would be precise but useless but if were to define it as a range then it will be widely useful but will almost certainly overlap with the ranges for other colours thus leading to ambiguity. (I think EY may even have a wiki entry on this somewhere)
It would certainly facilitate communication, though, if people could agree on what words mean rather than having personal definitions. No doubt it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to agree on precisely where the boundary between yellow and orange lies, but tigers aren’t even a yellowish orange.
The words stand for abstractions and abstractions suffer from the abstraction uncertainty principle i.e. an abstraction cannot be simultaneously, very useful/widely applicable and very precise. The more useful a word is, the less precise it will be and vise versa. Dictionary definitions are a compromise—They never use the most precise definitions even when such are available (e.g. for scientific terms) because such definitions are not useful for communication between most users of the dictionary. For example, If we defined red to be light with a frequency of exactly 430THz, it would be precise but useless but if were to define it as a range then it will be widely useful but will almost certainly overlap with the ranges for other colours thus leading to ambiguity.
(I think EY may even have a wiki entry on this somewhere)