 What does the word root mean? If I were to hold this up and say, this is a root, would I be wrong, would I be objectively wrong? It's tempting to think that words have objective meaning, that the reason we can effectively communicate is because there is an objectively correct way to use language as if there's some kind of cosmic dictionary that is objective out there that we can all refer to and know what we're talking about. Unfortunately things don't work that way. Words mean whatever you intend them to mean. So this video is gonna be an extension of what I've been talking about the past two weeks, trying to highlight the distinction between perception and conception. Just like you don't actually see physical objects in the world, you see blobs of color, which you assume come from physical objects in the world, you don't actually hear words, you don't actually see words per se. What you hear are sound waves that you interpret as words, or you see little dots of ink or little pixels on a screen that you put together conceptually, and you say, ah, this is a word. Words do not have mind independent existence, they depend on us, they depend on our conceptions. And given that they are mind dependent, they are intrinsically ambiguous. So the word root, right? Well, root, that sound, root, that could mean in English, that could mean the bottom most part of a plant that takes in nutrients from the soil. Root could mean to cheer for your favorite sports team. I'm rooting for, say, the Warriors over Cleveland to root for something. Root could also be actually part of a word. The root of the word is kind of the base part of the word that the rest, you can kind of break apart if you know Latin. But root also means a path. So I want, there's a root to the grocery store. Does that mean objectively there is a bottom part of a plant to the grocery store? No, there is a path, R-O-U-T-E. But root doesn't just have to be path. My goodness, this could be a root. This could be a root to good health, R-O-U-T-E. It just so happens that the word root can also be pronounced route. I could say this is a route to good health. There's a route to the grocery store. But the word route itself is ambiguous because route can also be spelled R-O-U-T. And what does that mean? Well, it means to beat handily. So the Warriors routed Cleveland. Right, so you've got root means this, root means that, root means this, root means that. It can be pronounced route, but route means this other thing. All of this is what you would expect if what words mean is whatever we intend them to mean. They are objects of our own conception. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not taking a nihilist position at saying there's no such thing as words. That's not what I'm saying at all. In fact, we can have effective communication if we roughly mean the same things by the sounds that we're choosing as words. This is how language works. It does imply, however, that language is not precise as many people would like it to be because the word, when I say I'm taking a route to the grocery store, what that brings to mind is not what that brings to mind for you. It may be close, but it's not gonna be some perfect one-to-one correspondence. Now some people take this just like they do with the non-direct perception of objects and they run with it and say, oh my gosh, nothing exists outside of our mind. Some people take this truth about the nature of language and they distort it and manipulate it and conclude all kinds of silly things that there is no such thing as effective communication. Nobody can understand what each other means. This is a hamburger. No, none of those things follow. I can specify, if I want to be silly and pedantic, to say what I mean by the sounds hamburger is this. If I say, I would like to take a drink of my hamburger right now, you're gonna understand what I mean. I can effectively communicate, that's only because I've given this a specific explicit defined definition that is not the conventional definition that we might find in something like a dictionary. So if we're gonna be super precise, root is a sound. It's not a word. What you're actually hearing are sound waves. You're not hearing words. But root as a sound also happens to correspond with this amazing mental space that we have and many of us share where it can have that particular word in English, or that particular sound in English, can have many different conventional definitions where I could say that something like the route to the store, I'm gonna take the root to the store, I'm gonna dig up the roots of my tree, I'm gonna root for my sports team. Everybody knows what those means if you speak English and we don't have to take this linguistic nihilist position that all of this is just unknown and impossible to communicate. Now, this might not seem important, but again, it comes up all the time in philosophy, especially in metaphysics. What types of things exist in the world? Do words exist in the world? Yes. Do words exist in the world separate of our conceiving of them? No. What differentiates pixels on a screen from words on a screen? The only thing that differentiates them is your mind because they meet certain conceptual criteria and you say, oh, now I'm looking at a word, I'm not just looking at pixels. Imagine if you will, some kind of weird computer program that just spit out human sounds. So it's like the Google Maps navigator and it turned left here. Imagine that program broke and it wasn't communicating, it wasn't navigating to your destination, it was just, just kind of sound like a language when I put it that way, but if you speak English, it probably didn't mean anything. I hope I didn't swear in another language. Now you could listen to that for hours. And let's say you recognize what you're hearing as sounds, you're not hearing words, you're just hearing sounds, but it might accidentally throw out root. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Did you hear a word in the midst of all the chaos and the sounds? Was there, in addition to the sounds, a word came into existence? Well, if we want to be philosophically precise, all it is is 100% of that program's creation of sound waves or just sound waves. That's all that's underlying there, but one accidental grouping of those sound waves corresponded to conceptual criteria I have in my mind, I go, oh, I recognize those sound waves, that's the word root. Just like you don't see objects, you see color blobs, you don't hear words, you hear sounds. If the color blobs correlate to your conceptual criteria of what an object is, boom, sure, there's the concept of an object you think you're looking at, and if the specific sound waves correlate to some conceptual criteria you have in your mind, boom, now you think you're listening to a word. So again, if you don't see how this is connecting, you don't see how this is relevant, that's okay. I've been talking a lot about this even for several months, but it's absolutely central to understanding the appropriate correct metaphysical relationship between the mind, our language, and the world.