From Conceptpoor to Experiencerich

Mental events are representations

Mental events are representations of physical events. Our minds construct representations of events and objects in the world and in our bodies based on input received through the senses. For example, your mind constructs the sound of a ringing bell when the clapper strikes the side of the bell. This disturbance is encoded in sound waves that strike your ears. Your ears convert these sound waves into neural patterns that encode the original physical event in different form. Your mind constructs the sound you hear from this neural pattern, locating it at the point of the original disturbance.

We are conceptpoor

One consequence of the view that mental events are representations of physical events is that it's possible to see that we are "concept poor". To be concept poor (or "conceptpoor") is to lack adequate concepts to describe experience. To be conceptpoor with respect to experiences of a certain type is to lack adequate concepts to describe experiences of that type.

Color

The representations your mind forms are extremely complex and varied. Think of color words, for example. Think of all the different shades of color which have the same name: "green". We do distinguish shades of green by referring to them as "light green" or "dark green", but there's no generally accepted set of words to describe the many shades of green. We are conceptpoor in our color language in that we have only one widely accepted word, 'green', to describe a wide range of color experiences.

One result of being conceptpoor in relation to colors is that we tend not to notice differences in shades of colors. Because we call these colors all green, we see them as the same color, not noticing the tremendous variety in shades. The same argument applies to other colors such as red and blue. The Eskimos have nine different words for different colors (shades) of snow; we should try to be this discriminating in our own language.

Our language does contain color words to pick out color shades; for example, 'sky blue', 'pea green', 'maroon', 'ivory', 'lemon yellow', 'crimson', 'copper', 'livid pink', 'scarlet', 'rose', and 'apple green'. But these shade words do not form a complete or systematic set. Nevertheless, becoming aware of existing shade words is a good way to improve color awareness.

Emotion and feeling

The idea that we are conceptpoor can be generalized to other areas of experience as well. We have one word, 'love', to describe a whole range of emotional experiences. Yet there are many types of love and the experience varies greatly from one type to another. There's a big difference, for example, between love for one's parents and romantic love. Likewise, there are many types of fear and anger. Our emotions represent another area in which we are conceptpoor and our language blurs important distinctions in experience.

In the area of feeling, we use the word 'friend' to describe many different people we have different feelings for. There are work friends, play friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, hobby friends, animal friends, best friends, worst friends, casual friends, distant friends, college friends, computer friends, racquetball friends, dinner friends, phone friends, political friends, etc. Yet we describe them all as "friends" without noticing differences in friend types, and without noticing the shades of differences in our feelings for different friends.

Taste

Taste is another area in which we are conceptpoor. We have a few basic words such as 'salty', 'sweet', 'cold', and 'hot'. Yet there are many differences in how foods taste. Because we have the idea of sweetness in our minds, we tend just to think of something as tasting "sweet" without noticing differences in sweet tastes. Experience here forms a continuum, just as in the case of color. Taste, then, is another area in which we are conceptpoor.

We are Experiencepoor

Because we are conceptpoor, we are "experiencepoor". One way to be experiencepoor is to fail to notice the details of experience. We tend not to notice details of experience for which there's no name or ready description. And the details of experience are harder to remember if we don't remember their name or description. It's hard to remember what shade of green a tree is if you just remember that it's green rather than that it's apple green, since you probably call up a mental image of a generic shade of green.

This philosophical insight has a practical application. Ask yourself:

Do I fail to notice the details of my experiences because I lack adequate concepts to describe them?

Am I experiencepoor because I am conceptpoor?

Seek out new experiences and become experiencerich

One way to be experiencerich is to be aware of the details of your experiences. You can become experiencerich by becoming more discriminating in areas of experience in which our language doesn't provide tools to discriminate. Start being aware of the difference shades of green, red, blue, and other colors. Start noticing different variations in sweet and sour tastes, and in hot and cold foods. Reflect on the variety in your emotional experience, and on the differences in your feelings for different friends.

You can also enrich your life by seeking out new experiences. Your mind forms representations of bodily and physical events based on its input, so different input yields different representations. Try stimulating your tastebuds with new inputs: try foods you've never tried before just to see what they taste like. Try to meet new people and do things you've never even thought of doing!

Of course, the fact that an experience is a new experience may not be sufficient reason to justify having it if there are stronger reasons not to have the experience. Some new experiences are unpleasant or even painful. But seeking out new experiences makes you more discriminating within particular areas of experience, and within a broader range of experience.

By having new experiences you acquire new points of view of the world and thereby increase your knowledge and understanding of yourself and of the world around you. For example, try taking a different route to work or school. Or, try a new restaurant, try food you've never had, or start a conversation with someone you say "Hello" to but never converse with.

By taking new points of view you become aware of details and aspects of the world you didn't notice before, or you see the same thing in a new way. Seeking out new experiences also gives you a wider range in types of experience, making you more experiencerich in this sense as well.

One basic principle of experience is:

You can't know what an experience is like unless you've had the experience.

The reason for this is that there's no reliable method for inferring from our physiology or our brain state to the nature of our subjective experience. So you won't know what squid or mussels taste like until you try them, and you won't know what it's like to fall in love until you do.

If you follow these suggestions, you will have a richer and a more interesting and varied life. And you may wish to add this principle to your philosophy of life:

Seek out new experiences for their own sake, unless there is a stronger reason not to have a particular new experience.

Create new words to describe your experiences

Once you become more aware of the details of your experiences, you may want a method for remembering these details and for describing them to others. In some cases you may not be able to find the words to express yourself. In these cases, you might try creating new words to describe your experiences. For example, you might describe something that's hot (spicy) and sweet as "hotsweet". An example of a hotsweet taste is the taste of hot mustard with honey.

We use words to express points of view. The points of view we can express are limited by the words available to us. And if there is no way to express a point of view, we tend not to notice that it's a possible point of view. Hence, our language limits our experience.

Our language grows out of our experience. A word becomes part of a language when it is used by enough people to become accepted as a word by speakers of the language. But we need not wait for words to evolve; we can also propose new words which represent new points of view. These words will become part of the language if the points of view they are used to express are sufficiently significant that enough speakers of the language choose to express themselves using these words.

Three Rules of Language

The next three sections present three rules which are intended to enhance the power of our language to describe our experiences and express our points of view. These rules are:

The Twice as Much Rule
The Duonym Rule
The Rule of Degree

The Twice as Much Rule and the Rule of Degree address the fact that our experience is continuous while our language is discrete. Both rules provide greater flexibility in expressing points of view which require saying where on a continuum a quality or property lies.

The Duonym Rule is a rule for generating new words by combining existing words into a new word. Many aspects of experience are more complex than any single word reflects and the Continuousword Rule addresses this fact. The "Dictionary of Duonyms" which follows gives words with definitions created in accordance with the Continuousword Rule.

The Twice as Much Rule

We are conceptpoor due partly to the following fact:

Experience is continuous; language is discrete.

The word 'green' refers not to a set of discrete shades of green but rather to a continuous range of colors which shade into one another. But when we say "That's a green car", we say that it falls somewhere on the spectrum of green; we don't say where it falls. So language is and concepts are discrete in the sense that something is either green or it's not. Our experience is continuous and our language doesn't easily tell us where on the continuum an experience occurs.

In some cases we do have the ability to be precise. For example, we can say "It's 101 degrees out". But in the area of color, we don't even have words to pick out many of the different shades. Color charts which printers use to select different shades of ink and which designate shades by number reflect this fact. Our concepts are inadequate to describe and express our experiences and points of view.

If we are indeed conceptpoor and experiencepoor, is there anything we can do to improve our language? I propose the following rule which helps provide a way to express where a quality or property falls on a continuum:

1. To express the idea that something is "twice as much", or has a very high degree of some quality, repeat the word.

For example, instead of saying

"It's a hot day"

say "It's a hot hot day"

or "It's a hothot day".

A hot hot day is one that's twice as hot as you expected, twice as hot as usual, or just extremely hot.

Here's another example:

That's a red red car.

A red red car is one that's twice as red as you expected, twice as red as the normal shade for red cars, or extremely red.

Here are some other examples:

She's a sweet sweet girl.

He's a fat fat cat.

This is white white paper.

This is the final final version.

Here's the original original.

Think of the extension of a term (the class of things that fall under it) as follows:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  least 			most

The Twice as Much Rule enables us to select another point on the spectrum - one that's higher in degree. So here are the relative values of hot, hot hot, and hot hot hot days:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


     hot hothot	        hothothot

The Twice as Much Rule is one that is already used on an ad hoc basis in ordinary language. People sometimes repeat a word for emphasis, or they underline it. Alternatively, they say "It's a very hot day". But "very hot" is less precise because it just points to the upper range of the spectrum. So 'very hot' and 'extremely hot' suffer from the same defect as 'hot': they pick out a range, though it's a smaller range, on the spectrum of hot things. The Twice as Much Rule picks out a point that's twice what you'd expect, or twice the usual value or the norm. Of course, it doesn't pick out an exact number, and the speaker or listener has to figure out where it falls on the range.

I propose that we make the Twice as Much Rule into a general rule of language that can be used in a range of contexts.

The Duonym Rule

Many aspects of experience are too complex to express with a single word. Of course, many words do represent a complex of qualities. The words 'aristocrat', 'supercilious', and 'bungalow' are examples of such words. But often in our experience we encounter a complex of qualities that we would like to describe and for which no word already exists.

One solution to this problem is simply to describe the complex of qualities by listing them together. However, if this complex of qualities is one we often encounter, it is easier to refer to if a word exists to denote it. It is also easier to point out this complex of qualities to another person if you can do so using a word they understand.

Terms such as 'couchpotato' and 'yuppie' come into vogue precisely because they capture a complex of qualities (e.g., young urban professional) commonly encountered by a large number of people. Terms of this type are often "coined" by someone taking a particular point of view and expressing it. For example, the term 'yuppie' was coined by a columnist for the Boston Globe, while the term 'brain trust' was coined by a New York Times reporter at a press conference held by FDR. George Orwell coined the word 'doublethink'.

Yet there are many common aspects of experience not easily describable in a single word. For example, what is a word for the margin of time you allow yourself when calculating when to leave for an appointment in case you encounter an unexpected delay (buffertime?)? What is a word for the experience of looking at a word and thinking it's not spelled correctly even though it is (wordperceptionitis?)? What's a word for someone who seems to spend all their time on the phone (phonehead?)?

The Duonym Rule proposes a way to form new words out of existing words by combining existing words and adding a new point of view. By using this rule, you can create new words which express your own point of view. If enough people share your point of view, your word may become an accepted part of the language.

The term 'duonym' or "dual word", refers to the idea of a single word made from two words. Like 'synonym', 'antonym', and 'homonym', it refers to a fundamental word category.

I propose the following Duonym Rule for generating new concepts:

2. To form a new word, join two words together to form a single word. The resulting word potentially refers to something that is the sum of its parts. To make this word more than the sum of its parts, add a new quality or idea. The new word now potentially refers to something that is more than the sum of its parts. If you have succeeded in identifying a unique and valuable aspect of experience, it may be adopted by the speakers of the language, in which case it will actually become a word in the language.

This rule has already been used to create a number of new words. For example, the word 'girlfriend' is more than the sum of its parts: a girlfriend is not just a friend who's a girl: she's a friend who's a girl with whom one has a romantic relationship.

Once a word is created, it acquires its own special connotations and emotive meanings. For example, the word 'redhead' has a use partly because redheads have a reputation for having a certain personality type ("Redheads are hotheads"). Whether this stereotype is true or not, the fact remains that we as speakers of English have found it useful (so far) to have a special word for redheads, and not for blackheads, brownheads, and blondheads. Maybe we should think of people as blackheads, brownheads, or blondheads.

Here are words that have already been created from two previously existing words:

baseball
catnap
coffeecup
dinnerplate
fruitcake
hotcake
pancake
teaspoon
watercolor

The Dictionary of Duonyms, which is contained in another file selectable from the "Philosophy Articles" page, contains other words that were created using the Continuouswords Rule.

You can also generate new words by stringing together words that fall at different places on the same spectrum.

Examples:

darlingdearest
honeypiesweetdarlingface
superspectacular
sweetangelcake
megawickedawesome

Try making up your own new words!

The Rule of Degree

I have already discussed in previous sections the fact that it is difficult to express degrees of a continuous quality or property. We can say "It's very hot", "That car is very red", or "This tea is not very sweet". But words such as 'very' and 'little' just pick out a subset of the continuum, like this:

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

little   not very       very

It is very difficult to be more precise with the traditional rules of language.

The Rule of Degree is intended to remedy this defect by providing a way to indicate where on the continuum from least to most a particular instance of an object or phenomenon falls. This rule is as follows:

3. To indicate where on a continuum a quality or property falls, place a number in parentheses after the word, giving it a ranking from 0 to 10. Here '0' means it has none of the quality, where '10' means it has the maximum amount of the quality.

For example, if ice cream is fairly good, though not as good as possible, write:

This ice cream is good (7).

To say a car is as red as it can be, write:

That car is red (10).

To say that you're just a little hungry, write:

I'm hungry (2).

To say that you're "about average" hungry, write:

I'm hungry (5).

To say that you're extremely hungry, write:

I'm hungry (9).

Sometimes we say "On a scale of 1 to 10, that's a 7". The Overline Rule provides a ready way to provide a scale for any appropriate word. To be appropriate, a word must admit of degree.

The Rule of Degree can also be used in conversation. Think of the distance between your thumb and forefinger (the finger next to your thumb) as equal to a scale from 1 to 10. You can show degrees of a word or quality in conversation by holding your thumb and forefinger an appropriate distance apart while saying the word. Here holding them as far apart as possible indicates the maximum amount or degree, while holding them close together indicates a small amount or degree.

Another method of applying the Rule of Degree is to hold both hands in front of you. Here the distance between your hands is equal to the line you draw above a word. Holding your hands far apart indicates a high amount or degree, while holding them close together indicates a small amount or degree. When Johnny Carson used to respond with another joke to the question "How hot was it?" or "How (blank) was it?, he was trying to do verbally what this rule does visually.

Still another method to apply the Rule of Degree in conversation is to say the number after the word. So if you're maximally hungry, say "I'm hungry ten." Or, if you're "about average" tired, say "I'm tired five." If a movie was absolutely terrible, you can say "That movie was terrible ten," or "That movie was a terrible ten," or "That movie was good zero." If your audience is unfamiliar with the Rule of Degree, you can say "On a goodness scale from zero to ten, that movie was an absolute zero."

Jesse L. Yoder
Flow Research

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