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Tedav comments on Open Thread for February 18-24 2014 - Less Wrong
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Is anyone else bothered by the word "opposite"?
It has many different usages, but there are two in particular that bother me: "The opposite of hot is cold" "The opposite of red is green" Opposite of A is [something that appears to be on the other side of a spectrum from A]
"The opposite of hot is not-hot" "The opposite of red is not-red"
Opposite of A is ~A
These two usages really ought not to be assigned to the same word. Does anyone know if there are simple ways to unambiguously use one meaning and not the other that already exist in English?
(Basically, are there two words/phrases foo and bar so that one could say "The foo of hot is cold, but the bar of hot is not-hot")
The antonym of hot is cold.
The negation of hot is not-hot.
That is a very good suggestion.
While better than anything I came up with on my own, I'm not sure that antonym is a perfect fit though.
For one, while hot/cold works, I'm not sure that red/green works.
Plus, antonym has a different connotation - it is the antonym of synonym. Antonym implies a word with the "opposite" meaning, not a concept with the "opposite" meaning.
I wouldn't be comfortable talking about the antonym of a concept.
Does anyone know if there are any languages that don't have this problem?
I sometimes use "negation of X" to refer to the logical operator NOT-X.
The other-side-of-a-continuum relationship I don't have a single word for. I might say that the "complement" of green is red, but that's specific to color. I often use "opposite" when I want a generic term here, with the understanding that I'm using it colloquially.
"Complement" is sort of a word for the second one.
I think complement can mean both too. E.g. red and green are complementary colors, whereas the sets "red" and "not-red" are complements.
My sense of the word complement is that if two things are complements, they sum to 1, or some equivalent.
A is the complement of ~A because P(A or ~A) = 1
Red and green are considered to be complementary colors because together they contain all primary colors of pigments. [although, that is based on the societal understanding that the primary colors are Red, Yellow and Blue. This is actually incorrect. For pigments, the primary colors are really Magenta, Yellow, and Cyan. For light, they are Red, Green, and Blue.]
Not any more than I'm bothered by a million other ambiguous words. (Also, as a mathematician, I'm comforted by the fact that there are many precise notions of "opposite" in mathematics.)
I'd say that opposite means the opposite side of the spectrum, and not means something other then.
The opposite of hot is cold, and not hot is not hot.
For a psychological basis, check out the research on how humans basically represent everything on a single scale (book recommendation: Thinking, Fast and Slow).
In Esperanto, prefix "mal-" means the opposite, "ne-" means the negation.
English equivalents would be "anti-" and "non-".
Slightly off-topic, but the actual complement of red is cyan, and the complement of green is magenta.
I actually acknowledge that deeper in the thread [in the response to PECOS-9], noting that this is the publicly understood complement, despite being wrong: society teaches that the primary colors are Red, Yellow, Blue and not Magenta, Yellow, Cyan.
Often when people want to emphasize that what they mean is not the complement of the referent, they say "diametrically opposed" or "direct opposite" or "antipode": "the complement of hot [in the set of all temperature perceptions] is not-hot, but the direct opposite of hot is cold".
The complement of hot is not-red?
Thanks, fixed :)