CONCEPT
The Fallacy of the Perfect Dictionary
The assumption that the meaning of a word can be specified in advance of its use — and the philosophical error that underwrites the naïve conception of what language models do with language.
The fallacy of the perfect dictionary is the assumption that each word in a language has a determinate meaning that can be catalogued, preserved, and retrieved without loss. On this picture, language is a system of fixed signs pointing to fixed meanings; understanding a sentence is a matter of retrieving the meanings assigned to its component words and combining them according to grammatical rules. The picture is intuitive, widespread, and — Whitehead argued — false. Meaning, in his framework, is not a content retrieved from storage but an event that comes into being in the act of expression.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Whitehead understood language as a living process of expression — a mode of prehension through which one occasion of experience communicates its achieved pattern to another. A word is not a container holding a meaning; it is an event, a momentary convergence of sound, context, history, intention, expectation, and