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In the 1970s Bell Laboratories used an individual
differences multidimensional scaling technique (INDSCAL) in
order to analyze Communications situations. The protocol used
students to estimate the similarity between pairs of words. Each
pair of words represented a raw dimension. That study produced a
multidimensional space involving, among other dimensions, the
relationship between the participants and the situation. With
different repetitions, the process, accounting for variance
levels, produced from four to six different dimensions as a
parsimoniously fewer dimensional representation of the data. The
results of this technique showed a clustering of words in
various locations in the multidimensional space. Bell Labs, of
course, was interested in discovering telecommunications
exploitable characteristics of communication situations and
roles. The Multi-Dimensional Structure of Interpersonal
Communications.
This early result has been part of my Weltasnchaung since I first read the article in Industrial Research back in 1975 (Dr. Myron Wish, (Bell Labs), Industrial Research, 11/15/75). I refer to this multidimensional space as our Semantic Environment. Of course, semantic environment are not static. They evolve. Nothing validates this evolution more than the speed with which the usage of slang terms changes. Semantic environments also varies according to culture and location as language and dialects, as different languages show. Using this technique we can get an objectively repeatable window into the semantic environment for any portion of the population you can apply the measure to. The technique was referred to as subjective-objective measurement. We get an objective results from a subjective source, introspection.
I have generalized this perspective based on our knowledge of brain function. The “meanings”, otherwise known as semantics, each person has is the cumulative experiences the person has had in his or her lifetime. Each person's experiences are different, each person's understanding of the world is different, each person has a unique semantic environment into which any new experience is understood and checked. Jean Piaget's accommodation and assimilation apply in the growth and development of each individual's own private semantic environment. Individuals semantic environments pretty much determine how they understand any new experience whatsoever.
If you consider the words in the context of the writing of other words (in books, etc.) I refer to that as the symbolic environment. A Ted Talk by Mariano Sigman entitled Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health was Filmed in February, and posted this May. The resulting symbolic environment measured the words as written and edited by various people, a relatively non-introspective source. He traced the symbolic environment of the word 'introspection' back to the Iliad and Oddyssey as a possible measure of the development of consciousness, in the process providing some objective support for Julian Jayne's The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. (1976)
Because dictionaries are often used prescriptively, the symbolic environment evolves much slower than the semantic environment. The symbolic environment is not limited to words, it includes anything we use as a symbol for something else - logos, signs, icons, Etc. Semantic environment and symbolic environment both form a relatively compact topological space that ranges from the individual to the overall Society of human beings. We can, in principle, contrast the language of diplomacy at the international level right down to the language of any individual person at any time in history.
Ralph E Kenyon Jr.
http://xenodochy.org
May 29, 2016.