It occurred to me recently that, by analogy with ML, definitions might occasionally be more like “boundaries and scoring-algorithms in thingspace” than clusters per-say (messier! no central example! no guaranteed contiguity!). Given the need to coordinate around definitions, most of them are going to have a simple and somewhat-meaningful center… but for some words, I suspect there are dislocated “bubbles” and oddly-shaped “smears” that use the same word for a completely different concept.
Homophones are one of the clearest examples; totally disconnected bubbles of substance.
Another example is when a word covers all cases except those where a different word applies better; in that case, you can expect to see a “bite” taken out of its space, or even a multidimensional empty bubble, or a doughnut-like gap in the definition. If the hole is centered (“the strongest cases go by a different term” actually seems like a very common phenomenon), it even makes the idea of a “central” definition rather meaningless, unless you’re willing to fuse or switch terms.
Bubbles in Thingspace
It occurred to me recently that, by analogy with ML, definitions might occasionally be more like “boundaries and scoring-algorithms in thingspace” than clusters per-say (messier! no central example! no guaranteed contiguity!). Given the need to coordinate around definitions, most of them are going to have a simple and somewhat-meaningful center… but for some words, I suspect there are dislocated “bubbles” and oddly-shaped “smears” that use the same word for a completely different concept.
Homophones are one of the clearest examples; totally disconnected bubbles of substance.
Another example is when a word covers all cases except those where a different word applies better; in that case, you can expect to see a “bite” taken out of its space, or even a multidimensional empty bubble, or a doughnut-like gap in the definition. If the hole is centered (“the strongest cases go by a different term” actually seems like a very common phenomenon), it even makes the idea of a “central” definition rather meaningless, unless you’re willing to fuse or switch terms.