Population thinking

From dKosopedia

Population thinking refers to assumptions that meaning is created by use among a population, rather than being assigned or discerned by experts or a more informed elite.

in open tags

In response to a blog entry of February 17, 2006 along these lines Jed Harris and Craig Hubley began debating the relative roles of population thinking and elitist actions in an open tagging system. A summary of open tagging issues also appears at openpolitics.ca. Their key agreement:

"existing compilations such as Wikipedia already encode an enormous amount of “world knowledge” and expert judgement about a huge range of topics. It seems likely that we can mine such compilations to improve our services in various ways."

use theory of meaning

Harris also posted on language and populations in March 2006, mostly refuting any simple use theory of meaning.

Regarding the "assumption of “universal meaning”: William Lycan in Some objections to a simple ‘Use’ theory of meaning says “[A rule for the meaning of a name must be] a rule that every competent speaker of your local dialect actually obeys without exception, because it is supposed to constitute the public linguistic meaning of the name.” “A rule that every competent speaker… obeys” is universal in just the sense I mean.

Now, this simply isn’t an accurate way to look at how people actually use language. I hope any readers can see this if they think about some examples of creating and understanding expressions, but I’m not going to argue for it now – maybe in another post. I can imagine all sorts of responses: Chomsky’s competence stance, claims that we have to talk that way to have a meaningful (!) or useful (!) theory, statements that it is some sort of harmless idealization (of a different sort from competence), etc. However given the messes in the philosophy of language now which are (in my opinion) largely due to this background assumption, and the concrete results in linguistics and machine learning that show we can get along just fine without it, I reject any such claim. Again, I’m not going to try to substantiate these bald claims right now – but I’m confident I can, and the Steels paper in the earlier post is a good example.

As my earlier post says, what we actually have is a population. To take the story further, each member has dispositions (rules if you will) about how to use a term, how to compose terms to create more complex meanings, or decompose expressions to recover their meanings, etc. But the dispositions of each member of the population will in general be different in all sorts of ways from those of other members. There is no requirement that these dispositions be completely describable, any more than your disposition to shape your hand as you reach for a cup is completely describable – though they might be remarkably consistent in some ways. As a result, no matter how narrowly we define the circumstances, two members of the population will quite likely differ in some details of their use of expressions in those circumstances.

Even with no total agreement in any particular, language works because (again as mentioned in the earlier post) people can resort to context and can create more context through interaction while trying to understand or make themselves understood. This resort prompts us to adjust our usage dispositions over time to bring them closer together, when we find such adjustment helpful and not too difficult. However it also implies the meaning of any given expression may depend in an unbounded way on its context.

I’ll end this with comments on two related issues. First, even apparently consonant ideas, such as Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances”, typically embed the background “universal meaning” assumption. In Wittgenstein’s metaphor the word “game” refers to a particular family, held together only by those resemblances – but the family is treated as a universally accepted meaning for the term, albeit not conveniently delimited by necessary and sufficient conditions. My use of overlapping (and largely consonant) dispositions is not equivalent to this, as I hope is obvious, perhaps with a little thought. However of course overlapping dispositions can easily give rise to meanings that fit Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances”, and the relationship between two different speakers usage dispositions for a given term should perhaps be seen as a family resemblance.

Second, such things as Gettier problems and difficulties with vagueness seem to me to arise quite directly from this assumption of universal meaning. Given the context dependence of meaning in my proposed (very fundamental) sense, it is not surprising that unusual contexts induce incoherence in our intuitions about meaning. The interpretation of our claims that we’ve seen a barn will depend on whether the listener knows there are lots of fake barns about (and knows that we know or don’t know). A population with varying dispositions about the boundaries of Everest will produce something very like supervaluation, and our actual use of language will take that into account. And so forth."