Descriptivism versus Prescriptivism
Dec. 5th, 2022 08:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
writerkitSo the "are hot dogs sandwiches" thing came out at work today and I was amused to watch one of the people who had never heard of it get drawn in, while I and the person who'd never heard of it watched. He had apparently not even known this was a thing, and was quite befuddled by it all. (I was like "Yes, this is a thing, and also a thing about is a pizza a something or other; yes, it is ridiculous; no, you don't need to participate.")
I have never liked these arguments, in large part because I don't like spending time having meaningless discussions, but I've also realized something else that bothers me about it: it's a prescriptivist approach to language. You can sit down and try to work out the definition of a sandwich in great detail all you like, but the fact is most people have a specific image category in their head when the word "sandwich" is said, and it's going to be very similar from person to person-- the fact that everyone has enough common ground to have this argument in a meaningful fashion is itself proof of that.
And trying to redefine it based on elaborate criteria is prescriptivist. So not only are you having a ridiculous argument that doesn't really matter, you're actively supporting a way of looking at language that is wrong and is wrong in ways that do matter, and therefore contributing to the degradation of very important linguistic norms.
I have never liked these arguments, in large part because I don't like spending time having meaningless discussions, but I've also realized something else that bothers me about it: it's a prescriptivist approach to language. You can sit down and try to work out the definition of a sandwich in great detail all you like, but the fact is most people have a specific image category in their head when the word "sandwich" is said, and it's going to be very similar from person to person-- the fact that everyone has enough common ground to have this argument in a meaningful fashion is itself proof of that.
And trying to redefine it based on elaborate criteria is prescriptivist. So not only are you having a ridiculous argument that doesn't really matter, you're actively supporting a way of looking at language that is wrong and is wrong in ways that do matter, and therefore contributing to the degradation of very important linguistic norms.
no subject
Date: 2022-12-06 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-12-13 06:43 pm (UTC)An even more productive approach is to focus on counter-examples.
The single most useful AI/cognition class I took in college was the one where the teacher came in and set the students one challenge for the day: "Define 'chair'". We spent most of an hour with the lot of us throwing definitions at the teacher, and him batting them away with counter-examples. By the end of the class, we still hadn't managed to come up with a prescriptivist definition.
That shaped my views on language and cognition ever since -- it's what made me descriptivist in language (and indeed, caution about how seriously to take definitions), and formed my understanding that thinking is pattern-matching, basically all the way down.
So basically, I can see the game being usefully educational mostly if you throw away the prescriptivist assumption, and demonstrate that the question is badly-formed.