User talk:Msh210/specificity

Details

I strongly agree with the overall idea, but the devil is in the details.

> Polo is the ball game in which two teams of players on horseback use long-handled mallets to propel the ball along the ground and into their opponents' goals.

Are you sure? Perhaps there is in fact more than one such game. I think the most cautious definition would be one like this:

1. A particular ball game, in which two teams of players on horseback use long-handled mallets to propel the ball along the ground and into their opponents' goals.

This approach makes clear that it's one specific ball game, and describes it, rather than potentially suggesting that the term "polo" denotes any ball game matching that description.

But even this approach has a problem. Polo is indeed "a particular ball game", but any particular game of polo is also "a particular ball game". The problem with "particular" is that it's not particular enough; some particulars are more particular than others, and "particular" doesn't distinguish them. (In this specific case, I tend to doubt any confusion would arise; the problem is that when writing a given definition, it's really hard to think of all the ways the definition is liable to be misinterpreted. This is clear in many RFD discussions, when an editor asks "isn't sense #x the same as sense #y?". Well, presumably whoever added the later-added sense saw a distinction; presumably either they misunderstood the earlier-added sense, or the current RFDer has misunderstood the later-added sense.)

> As another example, someone may write "A hat" as the definition of either chapeau or fedora. But a chapeau is a hat whereas a fedora is a particular hat, so while "A hat" is a good definition for chapeau, fedora should have it instead with a specifying adjective: "A kind of hat".

Like how a genre is a kind of literature? :-)   I think you mean:

1. A particular kind of hat.

But then, horror is a kind of novel, but I don't think novel:horror::hat:fedora. Rather, novel:horror novel::hat:fedora. So maybe it's better to write:

1. A hat of a particular type.

But that probably has its own problems, that I just haven't seen yet.

—Ruakh_TALK 18:57, 8 February 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, I was never really satisfied with my polo example, and now you've pointed out other things for me to be dissatisfied about. Thanks for that. Perhaps I'll fix it up one of these days.—msh210℠ 19:59, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

Interesting. It would be nice to have some standardized wording(s) that is at once not too cumbersome and not likely to make for messy philosophical confusions and ensuing discussions. We might consider the defining styles used by OED, MW, Encarta, Collins, Longman etc. in both "unabridged" and advanced learners' dictionaries, starting with nouns. With a sharp enough analysis one could find problems with almost any formulation. Our formulation need only be good enough for non-philosophers and ordinary-language philosophers.

For most nouns this intersects with countability/uncountability, doesn't it? Even in this case uncountable "polo" implies the game generally known as polo in general discourse. A countable sense of polo would imply some similar set of games but with significant differences. "Polo" sense 1 and "water polo", "motorcycle polo", and "sheep polo" might be a hyponyms of "polo" sense 2. In the contexts of each of the varieties of sense 2 polo, "polo" would refer to the specific variety and could be used uncountably and countably.

Given that Wiktionary does not have any explicit limits on its ambitions or target users, the only things that seem to save us from a foolish proliferation of senses in this and similar ways is attestation and common sense. I wouldn't want to rely solely on common sense. (See 21st century.) DCDuring TALK * Holiday Greetings! 17:10, 5 January 2010 (UTC)