Latent Diversity in Human Concepts
Abstract
Many social and legal conflicts hinge on semantic disagreements. Understanding the origins and implications of these disagreements necessitates novel methods for identifying and quantifying variation in semantic cognition between individuals. We collected conceptual similarity ratings and feature judgements from a variety of words in two domains. We analyzed this data using a non-parametric clustering scheme, as well as an ecological statistical estimator, in order to infer the number of different variants of common concepts that exist in the population. Our results show at least ten to thirty quantifiably different variants of word meanings exist for even common nouns. Further, people are unaware of this variation, and exhibit a strong bias to erroneously believe that other people share their semantics. This points to one factor that likely interferes with productive political and social discourse.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Feb 16, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1162/opmi_a_00072
Entities
People
- Celeste Kidd
- Louis MartÃ
- Shengyi Wu
- Steven T. Piantadosi
Organizations
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Human Frontier Science Program
- Jacobs Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- University of California, Berkeley