Yes, I’d extend and say: they are not perfect descriptions like engineering specifications for a machine part or mathematical terms. They are looser, sometimes with related meanings and not very related meanings. Dictionaries give us a kind of short cut, but in a sense they are misleading. I really don’t want to mention Wittgenstein, so I won’t 
. But language is fuzzy, flexible and yes, context dependent. The verb ‘run’: There was running water and The boys were running are both literal. Some might think the water use is, or at least was, a metaphor, but actually that’s the older etymology. There is some connection to movement in both.
I meant that you and greenfuse seem to be the ones working yourselves up over something that I saw as settled many posts ago. Pseudoai seems quite content.
Sure, but “run” still works in both cases by virtue of meaning the same thing, of being the same word with the same one meaning. That meaning allows it X range of applications, and even unexploited X range of potential applications. Custom will place limits, but they are still limits on a single word.
People forget that dictionary entries are written by a human being trying to come up with the most universal, practical and useful description of a word for as wide an audience as possible.
Not revelation from God. But if that’s their thing power to them.
I do think it says a lot about modern child rearing.
There is context to everything.
You can make this argument for some words and concepts, and then there are those which would get you not only fired but probably also put in front of a judge for endangering or even killing other people.
Cause for instance nothing in structural engineering is just “eyeballed” “by a human being”.
This ties back to our discussion about metaphysical concepts.
Yes there are words and concepts which are hardly specific, but on the opposite there are terms and concepts where specificity is the entire reason for their existence.
So there some truth to what you are saying, but generally speaking language and words do not exist for people to go around and screw them up and down till they mean entirely different things.
But what changes is not the word or its meaning, but its application.
A foot, I am sure, used to be a very approximate measure. Now it’s perfectly standardized. But this reflects nothing on the word or its meaning, the reason why it is used for that unit. That one meaning for that one word is the reason the word was good for both applications each in their time. Custom eventually forbade the approx. foot, but that changed nothing about the word or its meaning.
I’m not saying words don’t have genealogies or evolutions in time. I am saying, first, that genealogy is set in stone and, second, the speed is so slow as to be static in practice. Like a glacier is actually flowing, but in practice is a static block of ice.
Sure. Words change overtime depending on a multitude of things. Technology and understanding develops, new discoveries, things that change perspective.
My contention is that that is not how words change. The change is muuuch slower. What you mention are only changes in application. But application of the same word with the same meaning
Even about that slow change I am hesitant.
Make an example.
Would it be bad if everyone learned in kindergarten that words can have multiple meanings, and as a consequence philosophy forums would have 20% less comments?
Merriam-Webster
violence
3a: intense, turbulent, or furious and often destructive action or force
the violence of the storm
Any word really. Let’s say foot again, because why not. Can you find me an instance in any point in the past where the word was used such that the change can be said to be in the basic meaning of the word, rather than what it’s being applied to?
A foot as in the bottom of a limb and a foot as a measure are apparently very different, but the difference is in application, not in meaning. Can a difference be found in meaning? With any word (other than cases like “can” where it’s spelled the same but isn’t the same word)?
I think it would be even more beneficial if children in kindergarden weren’t presented dictionaries as some kind of bible.
They aren’t. Any other smart comment?
No, that’s it.
They’ve learned it already, but they may not have noticed. Bat Wave Ring Park Foot Can Kind Back Dress Light Watch are some where big differences come in. But those are in a sense easy. You can still think that words with closer meanings are somehow wrong. Violence of the inanimate and the animate. There people want to have a precise definition. And understandably. We’re all gonna fall on the precision spectrum somewhere and think someone went too far with what they thought was a literal use of the word.
But I think we likely do have the Platonists vs. the Pragmatists (even Wittgenstein of the Investigations clumped with them) The latter group are in the we made it, we make it, we are making it, and if we take a word to mean X, then X is at least one of the things that word means, even if that seems to fit poorly with the Y interpretation of that word that we also have.
One problem English has is that it’s a mishmash of other languages (borrowed genealogies). But that doesn’t mean words can’t be untangled. If a word is used for something, you can bet there is a reason.
Tbf the issue is not the mishmash part. The issue is that english is an extremely highly polysemous language, meaning that it is a lot less specific language with words having dozens of multiple meanings.
The counter example is monosemy with languages like german or turkish where the language has few words with multiple meanings, and employs specific, unique words for everything.
And then there is this: Lojban - Wikipedia
But German is an interesting case because all the ultraspecific German words, if you go back not more than a long century, were written as separate words. I don’t think it’s so much a collection of specific words as a way of formulating combinations
On the other hand, that much is probably true for all words. I once put a very serious amount of thought into what the atom is, and concluded it has to be the letter. But between the letter and the syllable there is definitely already a jump in ossification. A letter’s meaning is so broad that there can be no fast rules for combining them, it is purely usage and custom, some “sense for what feels right.” Then with syllables you get much more structured grammatic rules.
Words are fairly new in human history.
For me, with English at least, the problem is definitely inheritance. For example, it has a host of Latin words. But it doesn’t have a Latin history, it has no instinctive feel, or a very reduced one, for how Latin words are supposed to be used. So the application range sort of explodes or shifts sideways.
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Never really anything to stop you from posting in German if you can’t say it in English.
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