N. J. Enfield, "Language Vs. Reality: Why Language Is Good for Lawyers and Bad for Scientists" (MIT Press, 2022)
New Books in Science, Technology, and Society
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Language as Capture in Reality
We don't have words that distinguish between all the detaileddiffer sbetween the various spoons in your drawer, some are slightly bigger. And his answer as to why that was is pretty simple. It's because people er don't care to make those distinctions or at least those distinctions are not recurrent enough people and there'd be any kind of pay off for making them. Whereas the distinction between forks and spoons, there's plenty of pay off, and it is recurrent. So what i try to say in that, so of first part of the book is that, you know, if you think about language as capture in reality and capturing kind of facts about the world, it's
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