This is another post in my series on semantic granularity. The others so far, in chronological order, are:
John
and Mary both use the word 'happiness', and understand each other
perfectly in most conversations. They use it in propositions in such
a way that we would say that they both attach the same meaning to the
propositions used, are on the same page, etc. But in certain
relatively peripheral regions of application, they differ
systematically.
We
want to be able to tie John's peripheral uses of 'happiness' together
with his non-peripheral uses - we want to say he's using the word in
the same sense in both cases, but we also want to bundle his
non-peripheral uses with Mary's. However, we also want to be able to
make a semantic distinction between Mary's peripheral use and John's.
The
solution is two operate at two granularities. A relatively
coarse-grained bundling can tie all John and Mary's uses together -
roughly, by ignoring peripheral use features. But we can use a more
fine-grained bundling to describe the linguistic difference between
Mary and John - at this granularity, we say they mean slightly
different things by 'happiness'.
But
there is another sort of descriptive problem which we solve with
granularity shifts. For example, consider the normal uses made of the
word 'hard' in the phrases 'hard man' (meaning something like 'tough
guy'), 'hard wood' and 'hard test' (meaning a difficult test). We can
distinguish three different senses here - very roughly, (i)
toughness, (ii) solidity and resistance, and (iii) difficulty. Or
two, a literal sense ('hard wood') and a "metaphorical"
sense ('hard man', 'hard test'). Or we can bundle all these together.
Visually,
we can think of the first kind of fine-graining as a kind of
broadening of considerations which go into bundling, and the second
kind of fine-graining as a kind of narrowing.
This
is perhaps one of the things which have made granularity
considerations, although quite natural, seem difficult - or not even
arise as a serious possibility - from the point of view of analytic
philosophy. That two different, in a sense opposing, things can be
going on in shifts toward finer granularity, can make the matter
confusing. But once we see what is happening and master it, it just
reveals the richness and power of the approach.
From
these examples, it may look like the first, 'broadening' type of fine
graining is concerned with intersystematic distinctions –
distinctions between different sign systems (in the example above,
John's and Mary's idiolects) – and that the 'narrowing' type is
concerned with intrasystematic distinctions – between elements and
uses of some given sign system.
But
this doesn't generally hold. In the broadening case, for example, we
may have spoken about two very similar but subtly distinguishable
meanings of quite different words in, say, John's idiolect. 'Envy'
and 'jealousy', perhaps. Or 'rage' and 'fury'. Likewise, in the
narrowing case, where we, at finer grain, distinguish the meaning of
'hard wood' from 'hard test', we could instead make that distinction
between these words as used by two different people, or two different
words used by two different people.
One
thing we can say, perhaps, is that the 'broadening' type of fine
graining is about considering how more ground is covered, factoring
in more stuff about 'the lay of the land', where the 'narrowing' type
is more about marking off different regions. The first involves
making more distincions among expression-uses based on how the
expressions cover the ground they cover, the second involves making
more distinctions among expression-uses based on what ground they are
covering in that use.
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