army1987 comments on Be careful with thought experiments - Less Wrong

6 Post author: lukeprog 18 May 2012 09:54AM

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Comment author: [deleted] 19 May 2012 03:51:33PM *  3 points [-]

"Right" has several meanings and can be analysed as several different words: "right.1" means "conservative" (identical to "right.1"), "right.2" means "at the end of a sentence" (identical to "right.2"), "right.3" means "correct" (identical to "right.3") while "right.4" means "left", i.e. opposite to "right.4". Historically they were the same word which acquired metaphorical meanings because certain contingent facts, but now practically we have distinct homonyms and would better specify which is the one we are talking about.

This assumes connotations and denotations can be perfectly separated, whereas they are so entangled that connotations pop up even in contexts which aren't obviously related to language. An example I've read about is that The Great Wave off Kanagawa evokes in speakers of left-to-right languages (such as English) a different feeling than the Japanese-speaking painter originally intended, and watching it in a mirror would fix that. (Well, it does for me, at least.)