Gary, I admit that I was annoyed by your note -- because you were dismissing or belittling experts in lexicography and other fields such as NLP. Many people working on NLP have PhDs and research contributions in philosophy, linguistics, logic, and mathematics -- fields in which Peirce was a major contributor. To dismiss them out of hand "blocks the way of inquiry."
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.
I know Len Talmy. I have cited his work for years. I discussed related issues with him at conferences and workshops, including the 1993 Wittgenstein Symposium on Cognitive Science, where both of us were invited speakers. Re conceptual alternativity: I won't claim that my interpretation is identical to Talmy's, but I believe that his intent was quite different from polyversity. I also believe that the difference can be determined by reading his book and citing appropriate passages. If you doubt that, I'd be happy to send Talmy an email note with a one-page statement by each of us and a request for him to decide.
I invented the word for a specific philosophical purpose. Your using it for a very different purpose violates Peirce’s ethics of terminology.
Re polyversity: I used the definition in your note:
I dealt with polysemy ... by coining the word “polyversity” to include not only polysemy (the tendency of a word to have various meanings) but also the tendency of a meaning to be expressible in various linguistic signs.
Re purpose: In his ethics of terminology, Peirce said that one should not coin a new term if there is already a widely used term with the same definition. The original purpose of the (often anonymous) person who coined any term is irrelevant. Any use that is compatible with the definition is appropriate.
“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.
The quoted sentence is not a narrowing of Peirce's principle. It's an application of his principle to show how natural languages (NLs) differ from the rigidly defined formal languages (FLs).
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.
The word 'nonsense' is a rhetorical ploy for ignoring the details. Formal languages are regimented to have a finite set of meanings (interpretations) in any finite range. You don't need markers. But NLs have infinitely many meanings in any range, no matter how small. You can, of course, mark a finite set of points on a continuous line. But the probability that the meaning of the next NL phrase or sentence you encounter will match any marked point is zero (except for NL statements about a formal system in math or science).
Not being a practitioner in the NLP field, I don’t care what’s forbidden in that discipline.
The people who work in NLP do not forbid anything. They address the task of taking unrestricted NLs and mapping them to notations that are forced to be restricted by the nature of formal logics and the digital computers that process them. The reason why Peirce's semeiotic is so fundamental to NLP is that he understood both sides of the issues. He invented the formal logic that is used in computer science, he was a lexicographer who wrote or edited over 16,000 definitions for the Century Dictionary, he wrote an article about logical machines in 1887, and he recommended electricity instead of mechanical linkages for implementing those machines.
I’m just a philosopher trying to communicate with others about the nature of verbal communication. And I do care about that.
That's a worthy endeavor. In fact, it's the principle focus of NLP. Marvin Minsky, one of the founders of artificial intelligence, included Peirce's article in the 1963 bibliography of AI. Many people working on AI and NLP have a higher regard for Peirce's semeiotic than the typical 20th c analytic philosopher. John
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