Thanks, I think I have a better idea of what you’re proposing now, but I’m still not sure I understand it correctly, or if it makes sense.
mice and elephants form a cluster if you project into the subspace spanned by “color” and “relative ear size”, but using a word to point to a cluster in such a “thin”, impoverished subspace is a dishonest rhetorical move when your interlocutors are trying to use language to mostly talk about the many other features of animals which don’t covary much with color and relative-ear-size.
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right? For example suppose an invasive predator species has moved into some new area, and I have an hypothesis that animals with grey skin and big ears might be the only ones in that area who can escape being hunted to extinction (because I think the predator has trouble seeing grey and big ears are useful for hearing the predator and only this combination of traits offers enough advantage for a prey species to survive). While I’m formulating this hypothesis, discussing how plausible it is, applying for funding, doing field research, etc., it seems useful to create a new term like “eargreyish” so I don’t have to keep repeating “grey animals with relatively large ears”.
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
(I continue to regret my slow reply turnaround time.)
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right?
Right. In Scott’s example, the problem was using the “eargrayish” concept to imply (bad) inferences about size, but your example isn’t guilty of this.
However, it’s also worth emphasizing that the inferential work done by words and categories is often spread across many variables, including things that aren’t as easy to observe as the features that were used to perform the categorization. You can infer that “mice” have very similar genomes, even if you never actually sequence their DNA. Or if you lived before DNA had been discovered, you might guess that there exists some sort of molecular mechanism of heredity determining the similarities between members of a “species”, and you’d be right (whereas similar such guesses based on concepts like “eargrayishness” would probably be wrong).
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
Um, watch out for cases where the data clusters in the “thin” subspace, but doesn’t cluster in other dimensions that are actually relevant in the context that you’re using the word? (I wish I had a rigorous reduction of what “relevant in the context” means, but I don’t.)
As long as we’re talking about animal taxonomy (dolphins, mice, elephants, &c.), a concrete example of a mechanism that systematically produces this kind of distribution might be Batesian or Müllerian mimicry (or convergent evolution more generally, as with dolphins’ likeness to fish). If you’re working as a wildlife photographer and just want some cool snake photos, then a concept of “red-‘n’-yellow stripey snake” that you formed from observation (abstractly: you noticed a cluster in the subspace spanned by “snake colors” and “snake stripedness”) might be completely adequate for your purposes: as a photographer, you just don’t care whether or not there’s more structure to the distribution of snakes than what looks good in your pictures. On the other hand, if you actually have to handle the snakes, suddenly the difference between the harmless scarlet kingsnake and the poisonous coral snake (“red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack”) is very relevant and you want to be modeling them as separate species!
Thanks, I think I have a better idea of what you’re proposing now, but I’m still not sure I understand it correctly, or if it makes sense.
But there are times when it’s not a dishonest rhetorical move to do this, right? For example suppose an invasive predator species has moved into some new area, and I have an hypothesis that animals with grey skin and big ears might be the only ones in that area who can escape being hunted to extinction (because I think the predator has trouble seeing grey and big ears are useful for hearing the predator and only this combination of traits offers enough advantage for a prey species to survive). While I’m formulating this hypothesis, discussing how plausible it is, applying for funding, doing field research, etc., it seems useful to create a new term like “eargreyish” so I don’t have to keep repeating “grey animals with relatively large ears”.
Since it doesn’t seem to make sense to never use a word to point to a cluster in a “thin” subspace, what is your advice for when it’s ok to do this or accept others doing this?
(I continue to regret my slow reply turnaround time.)
Right. In Scott’s example, the problem was using the “eargrayish” concept to imply (bad) inferences about size, but your example isn’t guilty of this.
However, it’s also worth emphasizing that the inferential work done by words and categories is often spread across many variables, including things that aren’t as easy to observe as the features that were used to perform the categorization. You can infer that “mice” have very similar genomes, even if you never actually sequence their DNA. Or if you lived before DNA had been discovered, you might guess that there exists some sort of molecular mechanism of heredity determining the similarities between members of a “species”, and you’d be right (whereas similar such guesses based on concepts like “eargrayishness” would probably be wrong).
(As it is written: “Having a word for a thing, rather than just listing its properties, is a more compact code precisely in those cases where we can infer some of those properties from the other properties.”)
Um, watch out for cases where the data clusters in the “thin” subspace, but doesn’t cluster in other dimensions that are actually relevant in the context that you’re using the word? (I wish I had a rigorous reduction of what “relevant in the context” means, but I don’t.)
As long as we’re talking about animal taxonomy (dolphins, mice, elephants, &c.), a concrete example of a mechanism that systematically produces this kind of distribution might be Batesian or Müllerian mimicry (or convergent evolution more generally, as with dolphins’ likeness to fish). If you’re working as a wildlife photographer and just want some cool snake photos, then a concept of “red-‘n’-yellow stripey snake” that you formed from observation (abstractly: you noticed a cluster in the subspace spanned by “snake colors” and “snake stripedness”) might be completely adequate for your purposes: as a photographer, you just don’t care whether or not there’s more structure to the distribution of snakes than what looks good in your pictures. On the other hand, if you actually have to handle the snakes, suddenly the difference between the harmless scarlet kingsnake and the poisonous coral snake (“red on yellow, kill a fellow; red on black, venom lack”) is very relevant and you want to be modeling them as separate species!