John,
I guess you didn’t notice that I took this exchange offlist, as it wasn’t relevant to the subject. But since you brought it back on … As I said in my reply to Dan, no part of my definition of “polyversity” was intended for use by specialists in linguistics. (By the way, I do not consider it disrespectful to say that a specialist is a specialist; perhaps you do, since you accused me of “belittling” Kilgarriff by saying that his article was addressed to NLP specialists.) “Polylogy” was a nonce-word for the part of polyversity that is not covered by “polysemy”, not a technical term for linguistics, and not a synonym for “synonym” either, because it was never meant to be applied to single words. If you looked at the many examples of that variety of polyversity that I give throughout Turning Signs, you would see that none of them are meanings expressible in single words. Nor did I ever say that such meanings could be expressed exactly; in fact I said the opposite. All of this should have been quite clear if you had actually read what I wrote in my chapter, or even the one section of it that I linked to — as I charitably assumed you had when you posted “I just read your article” — instead of merely doing a single-word search in it. You would also have seen that the concept of “polyversity” is introduced there in the context of the twin principles of “relevance” and “charity,” which in my view are essential to genuine dialogue. If you did read any part of my chapter, your reading did not adhere to those principles. And as I also said in the chapter, readings which ignore those principles (and ignore the polyversity factor inherent in language) tend to lead to a “dialogue of the deaf.” Getting back to the subject, since your response ignored everything I’ve said about definitions, including Peirce’s definitions, should we assume that you have no objections to it? Or are you just ignoring it because it’s about actual usage in philosophy (including Peirce’s) and not about formal or mathematical logic? If the latter, you might as well ignore these questions too. Gary f. -----Original Message----- From: John F Sowa [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: 15-Jan-18 10:37 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] definitions and ethics of terminology Gary, Now I understand why you were disagreeing with what I said. I admit that I should have added more explanation in my note of January 9th. (See below for a complete copy of that note.) >>> [you claimed] that "The word polyversity implies that there exists >>> discrete set of meanings," >> >> No. I said that *formal languages* such as logic have discrete >> meanings, but natural languages have a continuous range of meanings. > > The words I enclosed in quotation marks are copied directly from your > post. Are you now denying that you wrote them? I certainly did write and still believe that polyversity *implies* that there exists a discrete set of meanings or senses for each word. I realize that you intended to apply that word to natural languages. But as Dan Everett said, most linguists would reject polylogy. Therefore, they would reject polyversity, which assumes polylogy. Dan > Most linguists would reject polylogy because there are no two words > with the same meaning in practice. If they did use such a word it > would be synonomy Dan's point is what Adam Kilgarriff explained in detail. I also cited my natlog.pdf slides, which give more examples and citations. Those linguists and lexicographers are making the same point as Dan: exact synonyms don't exist in natural languages. NL meanings are continuous, and a finite set of word senses, as listed in a typical dictionary, is a tiny and discrete selection from a continuous infinity. In any specific context, the meaning of a particular word is just one selection from a continuous infinity. The probability that it exactly matches something in a finite set of previous selections is zero (except for special cases in math and science). John -------- Forwarded Message -------- Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] "I don't believe in word senses." Date: Tue, 9 Jan 2018 17:43:03 -0500 From: John F Sowa < <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected]> To: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] Gary, I just read your article. Peirce, Kilgarriff, Atkins, and I would not agree with the following claim: > I dealt with polysemy extensively in /Turning Signs/ — and went beyond > it in Chapter 2 ( <http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/dlg.htm> > http://www.gnusystems.ca/TS/dlg.htm) > 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. The word polyversity implies that there exists a discrete set of meanings (at most countably infinite). That is inconsistent with Peirce's writings about continuity and about the many ways that "meanings grow". The claim that meanings are discrete implies that it would be possible to assign a discrete set of word senses to each word or phrase of a language. That is inconsistent with the issues raised and analyzed by the lexicographers Sue Atkins and Adam Kilgarriff: <https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/I_dont_believe_1997.pdf> https://www.sketchengine.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/I_dont_believe_1997.pdf Since Peirce had extensive experience in lexicography, I'm sure that he experienced similar issues. If you don't have the time to read Kilgarriff's article, you might flip through some slides that illustrate the kinds of issues that must be addressed: <http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf> http://jfsowa.com/talks/natlog.pdf That file has 101 slides. But slides 4 to 20 are sufficient to show why the range of meanings must be continuous: Slides 4 & 5: A brief summary of issues about natural languages. Slides 6 to 17: A dozen examples selected from articles by various linguists, philosophers, computational linguists, and myself. Slide 18: A one-page summary of Kilgarriff's article. Slides 19 & 20: Examples of the "microsenses" or small variations in word senses that result from the continuous variations in the context of any text and the background knowledge of any speaker. John
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