<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">Thanks Jon,<div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Yes, I would also follow your associations to overloading and computer formal-language theory; they seem very natural and close to hand to me as well. It’s challenging because the number of category terms proliferates fast, and each of them is in some way a window on aspects of the symbol-referent relation. But too many at once also become hard to juggle.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">I think I was trying to carve out some argument that it means _something_ for there to be a primary referent-role of a word to whatever it points to, and that there can also be aspects of reference that are somehow indirect, and derived from association proximity to other word-referent pairs. I have tended to think of the polysemy concept as trying to capture however much of a primary referent role there can be of a word to multiple targets, whereas the metaphorical aspect seems to me to be mainly about the aspects of reference inherited from the word overloading, or the way the word brings in a usage-context overloading, or priming neighborhood effects, etc. But not only that, also the framing DaveW gave a few days ago, that metaphor has an especially primary role in the transient, between initial unfamiliarity and the later solidification of primary-reference roles.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">But I take Nick’s post seriously here too. He and EricC have a lifetime commitment and a professional working knowledge of the full toolset of structured thinking in this area, and Frank has a considerable investment to have acquired significant chunks of it. I want to remember that they are choosing what questions they think are interesting not in a vacuum, but with a view to what those tools can do and have already done.</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">All best,</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class="">Eric</div><div class=""><br class=""></div><div class=""><br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On May 30, 2020, at 1:07 PM, Jon Zingale <<a href="mailto:jonzingale@gmail.com" class="">jonzingale@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div dir="ltr" class=""><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">Eric,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">Cool, I misunderstood is all. I very much appreciate what you</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">accumulate for a week and drop. I would be sorry to not have it,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">so please do what you need. Thank you for drawing my attention</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">to <i class="">polysemy</i> and its operational relation to <i class="">overloading</i>, which in</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">turn I am connecting to <i class="">polymorphism</i> (computing not biology).</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">What I am hearing is <i class="">polysemy</i> is not a <i class="">metaphor</i> and that both</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">have a role to play in our denotational language games. Further,</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">these games are only interesting if they assist in exploring new</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">domains. In the meantime, you advocate for not making the</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">collaborative explorations harder on ourselves than we need.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">Hell, there is a lot of work to be done so let's not rewrite Russell's</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">Principia.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333"><br class=""></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif;font-size:small;color:#333333">Jon</div></div>
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