John,
I may have misinterpreted Talmy. You also may have misinterpreted Talmy. We would have to ask him to find out — and even then we couldn’t be sure. What I can be sure of is that you’ve misinterpreted my book chapter. This is polyversity in action. You have assigned a meaning to the word “polyversity” which is quite directly opposed to what my book says about it. This is not fair, given that I invented the word for a specific philosophical purpose. Your using it for a very different purpose violates Peirce’s ethics of terminology. You have apparently overlooked the main point I made in my post, which was a simple exercise in critical common-sensism (as Peirce called it). You say that “Continuity in meaning is fundamental to the flexibility of natural languages.” I would go much further, and say that continuity is fundamental to semiosis itself. But I would never argue that we should completely avoid talking about signs (or objects, or interpretants) as if they were discrete entitities, for the purpose of analyzing semiosis. That would be nonsense. Yet you are claiming that we should avoid talking about meanings as if they were discrete “senses” of a word. Using the idea of continuity to justify such nonsense is like saying that because there are no discrete points on a line, it is forbidden to mark a point on any line for any purpose. If that isn’t blocking the road of inquiry, I don’t know what is. I wrote that “I can’t seem to avoid using that word” referring to the immediately antecedent word, which was “sense.” And if we’re looking to Peirce as an authority, I repeat that Peirce quite often discussed the various “senses” of various words, and I am quite prepared to prove that if necessary. In any case, I intend to continue giving examples of various senses of words (like “fluke” in my Chapter 2) in order to illustrate the variability of the relations between words and meanings. Not being a practitioner in the NLP field, I don’t care what’s forbidden in that discipline. I’m just a philosopher trying to communicate with others about the nature of verbal communication. And I do care about that. Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa [mailto:s...@bestweb.net] Sent: 10-Jan-18 15:45 To: peirce-l@list.iupui.edu Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] "I don't believe in word senses." (was Lowell Lecture 3.11 Gary, Continuity in meaning is fundamental to the flexibility of natural languages (NLs). But the formal languages of logic, mathematics, and computer science gain precision by reducing or eliminating that flexibility. They do so by severely restricting the range of meanings. Since teachers use NLs to explain formal languages, it's possible to constrain NLs to limit the meanings to a smaller set. But that requires tight discipline and more verbose expressions. > [Kilgarriff's article is] intended for specialists in the field of NLP > [Natural Language Processing] ... The article does touch superficially > on other fields such as cognitive linguistics and lexicography, but > provides no information that would be new to anyone who has given much > attention to the philosophy of language. The article was indeed written for readers working on or with NLP. But Kilgarriff had a BA in philosophy, a PhD in linguistics, and years working in linguistics and lexicography. The sentence "I don't believe in word senses" was by Sue Atkins, who devoted her career to lexicography, first with Collins and later at Oxford. In 2010, Atkins and Kilgarriff founded the Master Class in Lexicography. As for NLP, anybody working in lexicography today uses computers to process huge volumes of data on the WWW. > you didn’t notice that [the web page] is an early chapter in a book > dealing with cenoscopic philosophy and not with NLP. I'm aware of your project. But Atkins and Kilgarriff did not begin their careers in NLP, and their conclusion is a corollary of Peirce's philosophy. Like his semeiotic, it is revolutionary for lexicography, NLP, and 20th c philosophy of language: 1. Lexicography has traditionally listed multiple word senses for every word or term in a lexicon. The fact that dictionaries don't agree on the number or kind of senses has been a concern for years, but a finite set of senses for every word was always the goal -- i.e., they hoped for polyversity. 2. For most versions of NLP, the goal is to map language to some computable form, often some version of logic. To support that mapping, many of them use ontologies based on the tradition from Aristotle to Kant to the present. That tradition was strongly influenced by philosophers, especially those with a background in logic. They usually develop a lexicon with a finite set of senses for each word. Polyversity would apply. 3. Anthologies with the title "Philosophy of Language" are dominated by the mainstream of 20th c analytic philosophy. Many of them start with something by Frege and include Russell's "On Denoting". More recent selections are by philosophers and linguists who use or develop representations in logic. Even if they don't use computers, their representations can be and have been adopted by NLP practitioners. Polyversity would apply. >> The word polyversity implies that there exists a discrete set of >> meanings (at most countably infinite). > > GF: Nonsense. It implies variation in the relations between symbols > and their immediate objects and associated concepts; and as my chapter > says of a word, “what it denotes can vary with the user's purpose.” As the chapter says, polyversity includes "the tendency of a meaning to be expressible in various linguistic signs." Everyone agrees that it's possible to have approximate synonyms, but there are few if any exact synonyms within a single NL or between different NLs. > But we don't seem to have an established word for the tendency of a > single meaning to have many different expressions. This obviously > happens all the time; how else could you explain what a word means by > using other words? There are many ways of teaching and explaining that don't depend on exact synonyms: examples (special cases); examples of similar cases with explanation of the differences; examples of opposites; examples of generalizations... These examples could be verbal or nonverbal (pictorial, physical, or analogous). The possibility of exact synonyms is true of formal logics, which have at most a countable number of denotations. Logicians often criticize the flexibility of natural languages as "sloppy". They want polyversity, and they deplore the lack of it in NLs. > A basic understanding of polyversity, as I call it, is much more > relevant, and does not involve any “claim that meanings are discrete” > in any formal or mathematical sense... (whatever that means). Peirce was a mathematician. He used the term 'continuity' in its mathematical sense: the real numbers are continuous, and the integers are discrete. If meanings are discrete, they are analogous to the integers. If they are continuous, they are analogous to real numbers. This distinction is essential for understanding Peirce. If meanings are discrete, then in any range R there is a finite number, say N. If a word or phrase has a meaning within that range, the probability that it is exactly synonymous with one of those meanings is 1/N. But if meanings are continuous, then in any range of any size, there are infinitely many. If some word W has a meaning in that range, the probability that a paraphrase means exactly the same as W is zero (1 divided by infinity). That implies that you might have approximate synonyms in NLs, but not exact synonyms (except for special cases). For examples, see slides 4 to 20 of <http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf> http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf . From the web page: > Maybe what i call polyversity is the same as what's called conceptual > alternativity in cognitive semantics (Talmy 2000, I.258). No. Talmy was not talking about polysemy or its inverse. He used the word 'window' for a kind of pattern that focuses attention on certain aspects of a scene. Conceptual alternativity is the option of using different patterns (windows) to focus on different, but related aspects of a scene. Those aspects are not synonymous. I checked the indexes of both of Talmy's volumes, and they don't mention the words 'synonym', 'synonymous', 'polysemy'... In fact, Talmy presented many examples of different languages with different patterns (windows). As a result, accurate translations between them may be difficult or impossible. For extreme examples, see Dan Everett's work on Pirahã. > I can’t seem to avoid using that word [polyversity] ... but Peirce > didn’t avoid it either. I believe that you misinterpreted Talmy, and I cannot believe that Peirce meant what you're claiming. John
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