Are you familiar with this face?
You might be — if you are of a particular generation, if you have somewhat of an artistic bent, if you pay attention to popular media, and so on. [1]
This is an image of a musician performing on stage as part of a duo that created a bunch of “Songs for Drella” … which was dedicated to another artist. All three artists are now dead, so all of their faces are now gone. Their names remain, I guess as tokens of discourse in art generally.
Token is a difficult concept. [2] It seems to be something like a unit of measurement, yet it also seems to equate strings like “and” and “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” in terms of their significance. Zipf was a researcher who developed a concept now referred to as Zipf’s Law which has many significant implications in the field of information science. One of these is that short strings tend to be more common and also to be more “general” in terms of their meaning. [3]
Beyond the shadow of a doubt: Humans have evolved to be able to recognize faces — in other words: those token humans who were not as good as others in face recognition had a significantly increased risk of not surviving (or at least of not surviving as well as the others who were better at face recognition). This was probably hugely important hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Today, being able to use language is perhaps more important. Bruh, if you can vibe with others, then, bruh, you can make things happen more and better.
Language recognition is complex. To identify a written text as belonging to a global corpus globally recognized as English … is a little bit bogus, bruh. Do you get my drift? Your vocabulary and my vocabulary are not the same. We do not actually speak the same language. According to Wittgenstein, you use particular words in the contexts you show up in, and I use particular words in the contexts I show up in. These aren’t the same contexts — we are different people. Yet some of the words you use in your contexts appear to be quite similar to (or even the “same” as) words I use in my contexts … as in: the “same” tokens.
We use language to simplify communication in negotiating meaning. Being on the same page is “good enough”. Unlike computers, we won’t be blocked by wishy-washy fuzzy sets. We can live with uncertainty [4] and move on. We want to move forward.
We find the idea of agreement with billions of people unfathomable. Sometimes agreement with just one or a few partners is all we can manage, bruh.
Socio Business blog 