Post #1445026

2025-12-27 16:26 UTC

@kissane I've been thinking about this for three days now and I've only scratched the surface of how it relates to stuff I'm working on, but here's maybe my first usable insight. The meaning of a given term or concept is an entrenched semantic-memory trace that is abstracted from multiple events in episodic memory. But the weird thing about being linguistic creatures is that the episodic events our semantics are abstracted from

Replies (2)

@vivtek@indieweb.social 2025-12-27 16:28

@kissane usually *aren't our episodes*. They're either narrative (or narrative frames) received from people around us (or news sources or storybooks or whatever), or they're even more abstract than that, they're just semantic structures *abstracted from* narrative in cases where we haven't even heard the narrative. But we can't actually tell the difference. I'm pretty sure (although I don't have literature to back it up) that we treat episodic traces from our own

Open ##1445027
@kissane@mas.to 2025-12-27 19:00

@vivtek If you're looking to dig into the literature on this, the places I'd go to would probably be The Knowledge Illusion (Fernbach and Sloman), about which I had to cut 500 words, and which has a great bibliography, and The Extended Mind—probably the original 1998 Clark & Chalmers paper although the recent popsci (non-derogatory) book by Annie Murphy Paul may be good too, idk, and certainly more up to date.

Open ##1445031