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anandjeyahar comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
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This feels like a combination of words that are supposed to sound Wisely, but don't actually make sense. (I guess Lewis uses this technique frequently.)
How specifically could being "definite" be a a problem for language? Take any specific thing, apply an arbitrary label, and you are done.
There could be a problem when a person X experienced some "qualia" that other people have never experienced, so they can't match the verbal description with anything in their experience. Or worse, they have something similar, which they match instead, even when told not to. And this seems like a situation described in the text. -- But then the problem is not having the shared experience. If they did, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, and somehow make sure they refer to the same thing when using the label. The language would have absolutely no problem with that.
Yes.. If they had the shared experience, they would just need to apply an arbitrary label, however given how we learn language(by association based on how they are used by people around us on what we see as objective events/experiences), I am not too confident the labels will match even after having the shared experience. My previous comment assumes this, but did not make it explicit. And I derive the
quote from that assumption. I may be wrong about the assumption (since it seems to be more of a thought experiment than a practical experiment at the moment) but nevertheless I assign fairly high probability/confidence on that.