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by dredmorbius 940 days ago
Ideas, both names and concepts, are interfaces. They are useful, though they are also limited in the sense both that the label is not the thing (the map is not the terrain), and that simply having a name for a thing is not the same as having a deep understanding for it, though having a language for discussing the thing can itself help substantially in achieving that understanding. It can also lead to cargo-cult or fad-based ("buzzword bingo") aping, however, and you want to be on the watch for that.

Feynman illustrates the distinction between naming and knowing in an lecture (I believe also appearing as an essay in one of his books):

See that bird? It’s a brown-throated thrush, but in Germany it’s called a Halzenfugel, and in Chinese they call it a Chung Ling and even if you know all those names for it, you still know nothing about the bird. You only know something about people; what they call the bird. Now that thrush sings, and teaches its young to fly, and flies so many miles away during the summer across the country, and nobody knows how it finds its way.

<http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/what_is_science.html>

I find Feynman a bit too dismissive of the value of shared terminology, though his broader point has merits.