A Debate about Words
dstrohmaier.com
dstrohmaier.com
* Empirically, words seem to be tools which we use to make ideas appear in other people's minds.
* To know what a word means we need to understand the mental state the speaker intends to create in their audience (which I think may be different from the state the speaker had when they used the word! and involves having a model of how other people think!)
* We can convey a rich amount of meaning in as few as zero words.
Words are units of language, that can be used to build larger composite language constructs. (And words, _when written_, are themselves built from smaller syntactic units, letters, at least in non-idiographic writing. But words exist independent of writing, writing is just one way to represent words and language.)
And as with everything human, context is important. The same word can have different uses, and the receiver depends on context to determine which meaning the word should carry. That context can come from the grammar (is it a noun or a verb?), pronunciation (it's really a different word then, it just happens to be spelled the same), and general social context (where are we, and what are we talking about?)
It's all pragmatic. It's what we have made to work. Building larger things from smaller things is how we've made language scale to thousands of words, millions of books, which can all still be read my most people. (And maybe understood.)
The article seems to be about a discussion that is really about proper names. That's a more philosophical discussion because it touches on "identity", what it means to be "the same".
But even names are usually just context dependent designators for an entity that all the participants already (are expected to) agree on what is. That's why using a name is enough to designate it.
Language isn't deep. If it was, it wouldn't work. Anything that two people can agree on, can be used to transfer meaning.