The most interesting part of Plato's Phaedrus, to me, was on page 158, in this passage:
Socrates: When one says "iron" or "silver," we all understand the same thing, do we not?
Phaedrus: Surely
Socrates: What if he says "justice" or "goodness"? Do we not part company, and disagree with each other and with ourselves?
I've found the relationship between words and meaning quite interesting ever since the idea their relationship isn't a set-in-stone, one-to-one, black-and-white relationship. The more closely we look at their relationship, the fuzzier things seem to get.
For example, Socrates says (claims) that everyone will agree on the meaning of Iron or Silver, but that is easily disprovable. Imagine the difficulty in explaining to someone who had never seen or heard of either metal before what it was. If you handed them a silver cup and said "this is silver" they may take "silver" to mean "cup". If you showed them a bar of silver and said "this is silver" they may trade it for two bars of bronze to increase their supply of "silver". And if you gave them the cup, the bar, a few other things made from silver, and said "these are made from silver" they would almost certainly not recognize buried silver in rocks in the mountains.
I heard of a lawsuit a while ago where someone ordered 10,000 chickens from a distributor and received 10,000 dead animals. They had already had their heads removed, feathers plucked, legs cut off, and whatever else one does to a chicken to prepare it for cooking. The one that ordered the chickens was expecting live, whole animals, and sued. It turned out that within the meatpacking industry, no one would refer to a live animal as a "chicken"--to them, "chicken" meant the animal when it was ready to be cooked. The guy that placed the order was new to the industry and wasn't aware of the localized terminology, hence the confusion. It is not hard to imagine a similar case could arise in the mining industry, where they may refer to a pile of rocks containing trace amounts of silver, ready to be processed, simply as "silver".
I also had a friend some time ago that used metals and their perceived worth as a grading scale. If he liked a movie but didn't love it he may refer to it as "silver", a poor teacher/assignment was "tin", and so on.
These are just a few examples of how quickly and easily language can become convoluted and interesting, and ideas of "iron" and "silver" can be as messy as ideas of "justice" or "goodness".
It is interesting to think of words and their relationship to the world in terms of everyday metaphors we use. In Metaphors We Live By Lakoff refers to the daily terminology we use to explain situations in terms of our cultural values. For instance, "She broke down" or "He's come unscrewed" reveals the industrial nature of our society and how we view ourselves in terms of technology. Cultural values are placed upon words we comely use in everyday speech more than just explaining what ore, iron, and tin are. In other countries and cultures gold and silver might be different things that how we equate it with wealth. By establishing definitions for words we are going beyond taxonomy and going towards potentially defining cultural norms and priorities.
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