“Directly mentioning” passes the buck of “referring”, you can’t mention a planet directly, the planet itself is not part of the sentence. I don’t see how to make sense of a statement being “unpacked in finite number of recursions down to the lowest level containing no abstractions” (what’s “no abstractions”, what’s “unpacking”, “recursions”?).
(I understand the distinction between how the phrases are commonly used, but there doesn’t appear to be any fundamental or qualitative distinction.)
There has to be a definition of base terms standing for primitive actions, observations and grammatical words (perhaps by a list, to determine what to put on the list would ideally need some experimental research of human cognition). An “abstraction” is then a word not belonging to the base language defined to be identical to some phrase (possibly infinitely long) and used as an abbreviation thereof. By “unpacking” I mean replacing all abstractions by their definitions.
“Directly mentioning” passes the buck of “referring”, you can’t mention a planet directly, the planet itself is not part of the sentence. I don’t see how to make sense of a statement being “unpacked in finite number of recursions down to the lowest level containing no abstractions” (what’s “no abstractions”, what’s “unpacking”, “recursions”?).
(I understand the distinction between how the phrases are commonly used, but there doesn’t appear to be any fundamental or qualitative distinction.)
There has to be a definition of base terms standing for primitive actions, observations and grammatical words (perhaps by a list, to determine what to put on the list would ideally need some experimental research of human cognition). An “abstraction” is then a word not belonging to the base language defined to be identical to some phrase (possibly infinitely long) and used as an abbreviation thereof. By “unpacking” I mean replacing all abstractions by their definitions.