Categories: What makes soup soup?
← Course contents · Using LLMs in this course
The following video is humorous, but at the same time, it makes a deep philosophical point.
(If you have trouble understanding the Scottish accents, I'm afraid the subtitles won't help much. Apparently, YouTube's voice recognition software also has trouble with Scottish accents.)
The point is that the idea of categories based on necessary and sufficient conditions simply doesn't work. (If you want a an introduction to the philosophy behind this concept, Hank Green provides a great one in this Crash Course video. For a much deeper dive in the the cognitive science of categories, see the Handbook of Categorization in Cognitive Science. So, let's say you defined a noun as "a word that denotes a person, place or thing" and you defined a verb as "an action word". Take a moment to think about what kind of word could be more of an action word than action. And then think about whether action is a verb or a noun (hint:check a dictionary).
And it's not just action. Consider the definition of violation. It's a noun, and it's an action. The same is true of many nouns, from blow to cue and signal to sin. They are defined as actions, so this pretty much destroys the standard "a noun is a person place or thing and a verb is an action word."
This illustrates a common thinking trap. Here's another illustration. Give it a try.
But maybe we can save something here. Can you think of any words denoting things that are verbs? I'll wait.
Me neither. So, I guess we can say that nouns and verbs both denote actions, but verbs do NOT denote things, or people or places, for that matter. We need a noun for that. This leads us to the following conclusion:
- it's false that "nouns only denote persons, places, and things" (also actions, characteristics, properties, states, etc), but
- it's true that "persons, places, and things, are only denoted by nouns."
So, we've identified three issues when it comes to defining nouns, verbs, adjectives, and other lexical categories.
- A simple definition with necessary and sufficient conditions will include things that don't belong (gravy is made from stock but it's not soup) and exclude things that do belong (gazpacho is served cold but it's still soup).
- We can't just make our definition fit the examples we have in mind. We need to try to disprove it.
- Sometimes we need to restate our ideas to accurately express what we want.
As language teachers, we use categories like Noun and Verb a lot. But categorizing words is a tool, not the end goal. The purpose is to be able to make general statements about the world or, in this case, about language. If you have the wrong categories, then you'll have more "rules" and more "exceptions" than you need. Having the right categories means you can say more with less, and this makes life easier for your students.
If you have any questions, make a note of them. Add them to the discussion board or bring them up with a classmate. You can also send an email to Brett or bring it up in class on Tuesday.