I give up. What am I?!
The title of this week's thought experiment makes it sound like a perfectly timed arrival for Easter and Spring. Let's see what it's really about though before we get too egg-cited.
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Professor Lapin and his assistant were very excited at the prospect of building a lexicon for a previously unknown language. They had only recently discovered the lost tribe of Leporidae and today they were to begin recording the meanings of the words in their language.
The first word to be defined was "gavagai". They had heard this word being used whenever a rabbit was present, so Lapin was about to write "gavagai = rabbit". But then his assistant interjected. For all they knew, couldn't "gavagai" mean something else, such as "undetached rabbit part" or "Look! Rabbit!"? Perhaps the Leporidae thought of animals as existing in four dimensions, over time and space, and "gavagai" referred only to the part of the rabbit present at the moment of observation? Or perhaps "gavagai" were only observed rabbits and unseen rabbits had a different name?
The possibilities seemed fanciful, but Lapin had to admit that they were all consistent with what they had observed so far. But how could they know which one was correct? They could make more observations, but in order to rule out all the possibilities they would have to know more or less everything about the tribe, how they lived, and the other words they used. But then how could they even begin their dictionary?
Source: Word and Object by W.V.O. Quine, 1960.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 139.
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Surely the iterative steps it takes to build knowledge, and the provisional nature of everything we "know," would answer the surface questions about dictionaries that Professor Lapin and his assistant have, but does this thought experiment have any further implications for how we understand the world and each other? I'll be back on Friday to try to extract some meaning from this problem of language. Hopefully by using some ordinary language as well. Till then, try to use your own words to express what this means to you.
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Professor Lapin and his assistant were very excited at the prospect of building a lexicon for a previously unknown language. They had only recently discovered the lost tribe of Leporidae and today they were to begin recording the meanings of the words in their language.
The first word to be defined was "gavagai". They had heard this word being used whenever a rabbit was present, so Lapin was about to write "gavagai = rabbit". But then his assistant interjected. For all they knew, couldn't "gavagai" mean something else, such as "undetached rabbit part" or "Look! Rabbit!"? Perhaps the Leporidae thought of animals as existing in four dimensions, over time and space, and "gavagai" referred only to the part of the rabbit present at the moment of observation? Or perhaps "gavagai" were only observed rabbits and unseen rabbits had a different name?
The possibilities seemed fanciful, but Lapin had to admit that they were all consistent with what they had observed so far. But how could they know which one was correct? They could make more observations, but in order to rule out all the possibilities they would have to know more or less everything about the tribe, how they lived, and the other words they used. But then how could they even begin their dictionary?
Source: Word and Object by W.V.O. Quine, 1960.
Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 139.
---------------------------------------------------
Surely the iterative steps it takes to build knowledge, and the provisional nature of everything we "know," would answer the surface questions about dictionaries that Professor Lapin and his assistant have, but does this thought experiment have any further implications for how we understand the world and each other? I'll be back on Friday to try to extract some meaning from this problem of language. Hopefully by using some ordinary language as well. Till then, try to use your own words to express what this means to you.
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