[posterboy]

> > ... We should, instead, travel with the word’s uses through “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”

This is untenable. It's part of the identity of certain words that they change meaning, but that's the exception. In all other cases you can find a center of mass, so to speak, although describing that with fever words than the word you try to describe is mostly impossible. I need to be able to reject when somebody talks bullshit, like Wittgenstein does there, professionally.

[dmreedy]

It's absolutely untenable for the practical purposes you're after. Unfortunately, that doesn't disqualify it from being true. The more we examine language, the more it seems to be the case that there's really no guaranteed 'centers of mass', that they can shift between corpora, that they are different between times, geographies, social registers, and even between individual people. Some semantic units may be more volatile than others, but they're still all defined relative to each other within the head of a given speaker, and non-rigorously at that. And on top of that, they've got pretty complicated, non-rigorous connections to whatever the driving hardware underneath looks like.

It'd be nice to have some formal process for deciding what's bullshit and what's not. But, it doesn't seem to actually. exist in any objective sense. The words that make the most sense to you are your own. And everyone else always kinda seems like they're full of bullshit.