Re: Semantic precision and (vs?) context / pragmatics / culture

Sai Emrys, On 04/07/2006 00:57:
> To those of you who have "semantic precision" or some variant as a
> desideratum...
>
> How do you deal with the issue of context / pragmatics? Namely, it
> seems to me to be inevitable that any finite piece of communication
> must be underspecified, and rely at least partly on
> a) linguistic context
> b) social context (especially for social 'messages' that overlie it)
> c) indexing rather than specifying the referent of any named object.
>
> ... at least. I'm sure the cognitivists in the audience can flesh this
> out more.
>
> To clarify (c), what I mean is that no thing can be (AFAICT)
> completely defined in a contextless manner. Inevitably at some point
> it's just a reference to "that thing we both know that I'm pointing to
> enough for you to recognize which thing I mean". (Again, philosophers
> in the audience can chip in here about things like qualia,
> inten(s/t)ionality, etc.)
>
> Do you consider this a problem? Do you even agree with what I said above?
A Lojban slogan, credited to John Cowan, is "the price of infinite precision is
infinite verbosity". Which is true, for a certain sort of precision, namely the
sort that your message is asking about -- the closeness of correspondence
between sentence meaning and some state of affairs that the sentence/utterance
is intended to describe. Any representational system, especially a 'digital'
one, has a level of granularity (e.g. number of pixels in a picture;; number of
words in a lexicon) that limits the maximum closeness between the
representation and what is represented.

When I state "semantic precision" as a desideratum, I mean that a propositional
thought should be linguistically expressible without distortion or ambiguity.
That is, the limitations of the language should not force the speaker to say
something that is not quite what the speaker wishes to say.

--And.