The Complex Web of Language.
AI is Expanding the Social Nature of Language.
When considering how society works or fails, it is worth considering how language works or fails too.
Words are a window into human psychology, society and culture.
Philosophers and linguistics of language distinguish between semantics and pragmatics.
The semantics of a sentence is its literal content and the pragmatics of a sentence are what is used to communicate a context.
The distinction between semantics and pragmatics allows us to capture and reconcile two things that might be meant by meaning.
The 1st is that language is meaningful in the sense that it makes claims about the world that may be true or false and that the meanings of sentences are in some sense equivalent to the circumstances in which they might be true.
The 2nd is that the things we mean by our words and the things that we aim to do with them far outrun these bare truth conditions.
The philosopher Paul Grice made 4 maxims of human conversation
to codify pragmatics:
