Opening page…
What does a name change?
When you give something a name — a pet, a car, a machine — what changes: the thing, what you owe it, or you?
Naming can change a relationship without changing the thing named.
Your answer
A little context
The car was just the car until someone started calling it Betty. Now there's a pang when it fails its inspection, and selling it feels like a betrayal. There's an old warning about strays: don't name one unless you mean to keep it, and anyone who has ignored it knows why. Nothing about the car or the stray changed when it got a name, and yet something did.
Nearby questions
- Have you ever made up a word because no real one fit?Families and friends keep words nobody else knows. Wittgenstein doubted a word could mean anything if only one person could check it.
- Can you think without words?Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of his language meant the limits of his world. Yet everyone has felt something they had no word for.
- Is the sentence 'This sentence is false' true or false?If it's true, then it's false. If it's false, then it's true. The puzzle is more than two thousand years old.
- When you say 'I'm fine', are you lying?A story improved in the telling, a confident guess, an 'I'm fine' at the dinner table: plenty of what we say isn't trying to inform anyone.
- Should AIs be allowed to talk to each other in a language we can't read?A shared language can create a private world that outsiders cannot enter.
