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A Human’s Guide to Words

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The third sequence, “A Human’s Guide to Words,” discusses the basic relationship between cognition and concept formation.

—Rob Bensinger,
Minds: An Introduction

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153. The Parable of the Dagger
154. The Parable of Hemlock
155. Words as Hidden Inferences
156. Extensions and Intensions
157. Similarity Clusters
158. Typicality and Asymmetrical Similarity
159. The Cluster Structure of Thingspace
160. Disguised Queries
161. Neural Categories
162. How An Algorithm Feels From Inside
163. Disputing Definitions
164. Feel the Meaning
165. The Argument from Common Usage
166. Empty Labels
167. Taboo Your Words
168. Replace the Symbol with the Substance
169. Fallacies of Compression
170. Categorizing Has Consequences
171. Sneaking in Connotations
172. Arguing “By Definition”
173. Where to Draw the Boundary?
174. Entropy, and Short Codes
175. Mutual Information, and Density in Thingspace
176. Superexponential Conceptspace, and Simple Words
177. Conditional Independence, and Naive Bayes
178. Words as Mental Paintbrush Handles
179. Variable Question Fallacies
180. 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong