> If you follow the dependency tree of definitions in the dictionary, eventually you reach the words that are simply one-to-one with the outside world.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but this part is wrong. There is no word in any human language (or, perhaps, in any modern human language at least) that corresponds 1:1 to an object of physical reality. They only correspond to mental constructs in the human mind (some of them shared with many or all humans, as far as we can tell). But neither basic words like "rock" nor advanced scientific terms like "electron" correspond directly to objects in the world.
This is true in two ways: for one, when digging into what we mean by these words, we often discover that the mental image doesn't correspond well with physical reality. For example, grains of sand are rocks in some sense, but few people would recognize them as such.
For another, we have mental constructs that we attach to objects that have no analogue in the physical world. If I tell you a story such as "Mary was a rock, a wizard turned Mary into a frog", and I ask "Is Mary still a rock?" humans will normally agree that she still is, even though she is now soft and croaks.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but this part is wrong. There is no word in any human language (or, perhaps, in any modern human language at least) that corresponds 1:1 to an object of physical reality. They only correspond to mental constructs in the human mind (some of them shared with many or all humans, as far as we can tell). But neither basic words like "rock" nor advanced scientific terms like "electron" correspond directly to objects in the world.
This is true in two ways: for one, when digging into what we mean by these words, we often discover that the mental image doesn't correspond well with physical reality. For example, grains of sand are rocks in some sense, but few people would recognize them as such.
For another, we have mental constructs that we attach to objects that have no analogue in the physical world. If I tell you a story such as "Mary was a rock, a wizard turned Mary into a frog", and I ask "Is Mary still a rock?" humans will normally agree that she still is, even though she is now soft and croaks.