Thanks Jon, Yes, I would also follow your associations to overloading and computer formal-language theory; they seem very natural and close to hand to me as well. It’s challenging because the number of category terms proliferates fast, and each of them is in some way a window on aspects of the symbol-referent relation. But too many at once also become hard to juggle.
I think I was trying to carve out some argument that it means _something_ for there to be a primary referent-role of a word to whatever it points to, and that there can also be aspects of reference that are somehow indirect, and derived from association proximity to other word-referent pairs. I have tended to think of the polysemy concept as trying to capture however much of a primary referent role there can be of a word to multiple targets, whereas the metaphorical aspect seems to me to be mainly about the aspects of reference inherited from the word overloading, or the way the word brings in a usage-context overloading, or priming neighborhood effects, etc. But not only that, also the framing DaveW gave a few days ago, that metaphor has an especially primary role in the transient, between initial unfamiliarity and the later solidification of primary-reference roles. But I take Nick’s post seriously here too. He and EricC have a lifetime commitment and a professional working knowledge of the full toolset of structured thinking in this area, and Frank has a considerable investment to have acquired significant chunks of it. I want to remember that they are choosing what questions they think are interesting not in a vacuum, but with a view to what those tools can do and have already done. All best, Eric > On May 30, 2020, at 1:07 PM, Jon Zingale <[email protected]> wrote: > > Eric, > > Cool, I misunderstood is all. I very much appreciate what you > accumulate for a week and drop. I would be sorry to not have it, > so please do what you need. Thank you for drawing my attention > to polysemy and its operational relation to overloading, which in > turn I am connecting to polymorphism (computing not biology). > What I am hearing is polysemy is not a metaphor and that both > have a role to play in our denotational language games. Further, > these games are only interesting if they assist in exploring new > domains. In the meantime, you advocate for not making the > collaborative explorations harder on ourselves than we need. > Hell, there is a lot of work to be done so let's not rewrite Russell's > Principia. > > Jon > -- --- .-. . .-.. --- -.-. -.- ... -..-. .- .-. . -..-. - .... . -..-. . ... > ... . -. - .. .- .-.. -..-. .-- --- .-. -.- . .-. ... > FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv > Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6 bit.ly/virtualfriam > un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com > archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/ > FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
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