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[–]Alan_Crowe 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

That was a fun read. Always good to see Plato and Hegel getting a kicking.

But a Platonist could push back. "Bed", "Apple", these words work strikingly well. Laurie Wastell has her origin story for the word apple, but it doesn't offer an account of what it is about the world that makes language, such as "bed" and "apple" such a run-a-way success. Doesn't the success of language require an explanation? Plato offers the realm of forms. What does Laurie Wastell offer?

I think we should start with biological reproduction. We look around and see lots of apple trees. There are apples on the boughs. Take an apple and plant it. In a few years there will be an extra apple tree. Biological reproduction has two characteristics that help make language work. First is fecundity. There are lots of apples. So one word "apple" can refer to a category with lots of members. Enough to make the category useful. Second is faithfulness. Reproduction doesn't just produce many apples, they are all very similar. The category is uniform enough to be useful.

Stepping forward in time, to 1859, Darwin publishes The origin of species. That adds nuance. The apples are not all the same, there is variability, and (as the article notes) we can select and produce crop varieties. But if reproduction is not inherently faithful, how come the category is uniform enough to make the word "apple" useful? Natural selection provides the answer. The apples fit into a niche in the environment, which selects and by selecting shepherds apples into close similarity.

We understand, in broad terms, why the word "apple" works. But why does "bed" work? Partly because beds are for humans, and the issues of reproduction and natural selection means that humans are similar, and hence impose similar requirements on their beds. Therefore beds are similar.

But there is also a practical issue. Consider a tribe of 100 people, each of whom want to have one each of one hundred items: cup, saucer, bowl, robe, toothbrush,... They could each make one of each, each person making this, and that, one hundred different things. But that ignores Wright's law. As a rule of thumb, making twice as many means 80% of the work, per item. If the tribe organize the work as every-one makes one hundred of a single item, then they swap, they get their cup, saucers, etc, with only a third or a quarter of the effort. That organization is the core of prosperity. Notice that experience curve effects depend on making the same thing over and over. One person makes a hundred beds, all the same. His intention is to be part of a collective, benefiting from experience curves effects. He is pursuing wealth. But he accidentally makes the word "bed" a run-a-way success. Indeed he accidentally makes Platonism seem plausible.

We can go a lot further than pointing out that words are just made up. We can point to important real world issues that make the process of making up words and using language, much more successful than one would naively expect.