3 ms·

Try handing an inflated ballon or unbroken sheet of copier paper to the same people and ask them how many holes it has; I doubt you'll find much disagreement be

Try handing an inflated ballon or unbroken sheet of copier paper to the same people and ask them how many holes it has; I doubt you'll find much disagreement between the answers. This implies that there is a definition of some kind. English word definitions are probably better analogized as overlapping probability distributions, than as mutually exclusive sets of discrete values.

ColinWright 8y ago
Now give a straw to those same people and ask how many holes there are and you'll get a range of answer, which implies that whatever you think is the definition, it's not working. Just because you get agreement over some small range of examples, that doesn't then mean that it's a wide-ranging, usable definition. Start sphere that has a small hole in the top and ask how many holes there are, you'll get the answer "One". Now make the hole a little bigger, then a little bigger, then a little bigger again. Keep going, and eventually you can turn this into a disk, or a shallow bowl, and now the (natural language) answer is "Zero". When did it change? People will disagree because there really is no "proper" usable consistent definition. Not in natural language. And with regards a probability distribution - are you going to say that at some point the object I've described above has a half a hole? That's actually an intriguing prospect, to say "What's the probability that this thing has a hole?" Probabilistic linguistics. Interesting.
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  Names come from people, so the probability being distributed is the probability that you'll get a given name from a given person for a given thing. Take your sphere-to-disk example. The bigger the hole gets, the less likely it is that a given person will describe it as a hole. But at various points you'll get spikes where most people say "hole," "bowl," "disk," etc. Personally I think it's silly to take this as proof that the definition of hole "isn't working". Probability distributions are good enough for quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics, but not language? Also look around: people communicate about holes productively (i.e. to accomplish work) all the time, so obviously the definition is working just fine under many conditions. Language is one of those things that works way better in practice than in theory.
- nitrogen 8y ago
  Probabilistic lingustics makes (make?) a sort of intuitive sense to this layperson. In some contexts a word conveys a lot of information, but in others, it conveys less.
- mcphage 8y ago
  > And with regards a probability distribution - are you going to say that at some point the object I've described above has a half a hole? That's actually an intriguing prospect, to say "What's the probability that this thing has a hole?" Not "half a hole", but "kinda a hole". As in, "Is this a hole? Well, kinda. Not really, but it sort of is."

ColinWright 8y ago

Now give a straw to those same people and ask how many holes there are and you'll get a range of answer, which implies that whatever you think is the definition, it's not working. Just because you get agreement over some small range of examples, that doesn't then mean that it's a wide-ranging, usable definition. Start sphere that has a small hole in the top and ask how many holes there are, you'll get the answer "One". Now make the hole a little bigger, then a little bigger, then a little bigger again. Keep going, and eventually you can turn this into a disk, or a shallow bowl, and now the (natural language) answer is "Zero". When did it change? People will disagree because there really is no "proper" usable consistent definition. Not in natural language. And with regards a probability distribution - are you going to say that at some point the object I've described above has a half a hole? That's actually an intriguing prospect, to say "What's the probability that this thing has a hole?" Probabilistic linguistics. Interesting.

snowwrestler 8y ago
Names come from people, so the probability being distributed is the probability that you'll get a given name from a given person for a given thing. Take your sphere-to-disk example. The bigger the hole gets, the less likely it is that a given person will describe it as a hole. But at various points you'll get spikes where most people say "hole," "bowl," "disk," etc. Personally I think it's silly to take this as proof that the definition of hole "isn't working". Probability distributions are good enough for quantum mechanics and fluid dynamics, but not language? Also look around: people communicate about holes productively (i.e. to accomplish work) all the time, so obviously the definition is working just fine under many conditions. Language is one of those things that works way better in practice than in theory.
nitrogen 8y ago
Probabilistic lingustics makes (make?) a sort of intuitive sense to this layperson. In some contexts a word conveys a lot of information, but in others, it conveys less.
mcphage 8y ago
> And with regards a probability distribution - are you going to say that at some point the object I've described above has a half a hole? That's actually an intriguing prospect, to say "What's the probability that this thing has a hole?" Not "half a hole", but "kinda a hole". As in, "Is this a hole? Well, kinda. Not really, but it sort of is."