Yelsgib comments on Feel the Meaning - Less Wrong

26 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 February 2008 01:01AM

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Comment author: Yelsgib 15 February 2008 07:29:23AM 0 points [-]

If labels associate to concepts, what does the label "word" associate to?

You should be very careful when using terms like "falsely believes that" when referring to the way people are thinking. "False" as a label only has an association in the context of "verifiable fact." This places the onus on you to show that the claim "words have meanings" lies in the context of "verifiable fact." You must show that an entity is _claiming_ implicitly or explicitly that the assertion "words have meanings" is "true" (a.k.a. consistent with the axioms of the context in which it is expressed). My claim would be that the statement "words have meanings" is actually the basis of a context - that the claim is "hollow" in the sense that the axioms of math are "hollow" (neither true nor false) but that it is useful in the very same sense - we can generate a set of deductively consistent (and more "powerful") claims from the claim.

I hope you'll forgive my constant use of quotes - I use them when I fear that my definition of a word might significantly vary from yours. I also hope that you'll forgive my somewhat idiosyncratic use of language - I expect that we are coming at the question of human intelligence from at least slightly different intellectual backgrounds.