The “How We Mean” chapter was of particular interest to me because it deals with the question of meaning. The conventionalist view holds that there is no such intrinsic connection between words and things, that meaning is arbitrarily assigned. I think I personally subscribe to this view more than the naturalist view, which maintains that there is an intrinsic connection between the sound of a word and the thing it refers to (the chapter gives the example of onomatopoeic words). For instance, if I have water and call it wine, most people would say that I am wrong, I wasn’t calling it by its name, water. But what if the majority of the people in the world begin calling water, ‘wine’? What if everyone calls water, ‘wine’? Then what used to be ‘water’ is now ‘wine’. That the names of things are contingent upon what society chooses to call them is another score for the conventionalist view. What we choose to call something, we decide upon as a whole, and determines what a thing is.
That being said, we still use words to establish a sense of the thing, and in the case of language learning, we most often turn to vocabulary. But the chapter is clear to point out: “vocabulary within sentences, always,” for it is “the interaction between words and sentence structure which actually conveys our ‘sense of sense’.” This is, of course, something I already know—that vocabulary learned in isolation, for example with flashcards, doesn’t help commit it to long-term memory. As I continue my language studies, I will try to learn words as they are embedded in sentences because as the chapter points out, the meaning (and nuance) of words change depending on the context.
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