3 ms·
Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the world. Think of something as basic as "chair." I
by turnsout 3y ago
Virtually every word has edge cases and gray areas, so there can be no 1:1 correlation between language and the world. Think of something as basic as "chair." Is a love seat a couch or a chair, or both? What about a bench? A stool? An ottoman? A small table? A tree stump? Reasonable people will give different answers, and some answers will be nonbinary ("it's very chairlike but not strictly a chair").
Once thought is encoded in language, it's in a lossy symbolic domain. It's in a messy shared vector space. And every human decoder unpacks the embeddings differently.