Where Are The Joints?

2025/11/26

Dictionaries are descriptive projects.

The purpose of a dictionary is not to demand of the world that this word has this definition. The purpose of a dictionary is to collate a description of what people tend to mean when they use a word.

Meaningful communication requires people to have a shared understanding of at least what a word approximately means—thus the value of dictionaries. But humans do not generally stop and recall the dictionary definition of every word they speak before they say it. In fact, I suspect most people would need to take a moment to come up with a suitable dictionary definition for any given word, and I’d be surprised if it were a perfect match for any dictionary’s definition. Give it a try:

And that’s because you aren’t recalling the definition of the word, you’re generating it, from information that is necessarily stored in some other way. The information you’re recalling is a Hebbian engram.

An engram is a unit of information stored via emergent configuration in a physical substance, in this case an array of interconnected neurons. It is the means by which brains are capable of storing and recalling information, distributed across brain, through Hebbian associative connections.

Over the (presumably) many years you have interacted with the English language, the concepts of that word and all the stimuli experienced alongside it have activated in close succession. Thus, the synaptic connections between the visual processing of that particular arrangement of lines and to other sensory input and motor output have strengthened considerably, such that seeing that word is all you need in order to recall a great many other concepts in conjunction. One of those related concepts may well be the dictionary definition.

But a piano bench is not a table.

Definitions are a descriptive project that people have, foolishly, come to believe is prescriptive.

Definitions attempt to cut reality at the joints, but they fail, again and again—the overwhelming majority of words do not describe something that has joints to be cut. Instead, they recall engrams. The sight of an apple, or the word ‘apple,’ is associated with fruit-ness, with red-ness, with sweet-ness. Worms and teachers and god-in-the-garden and seeds you shouldn’t eat. They recall engrams by stimulating all the neurons they’re connected to. But the relative strength of these connections aren’t, generally, 1 or 0. There’s an enormous continuum of synaptic strengths, and most neurons have thousands of synaptic connections. And there is, to the best knowledge of neuroscience, no single ‘apple’ neuron—perhaps there’s a neuron that encodes that series of letters, as the signal passes from your visual processing system, and a neuron that encodes the look of one likewise, and a neuron that encodes part of its smell, and a neuron or three that sends a prospective action (coring) off to the premotor area, and so on—it’s a clump. A cloud of meaning.

So there are no joints to cut. ‘Apple’ means all of those things, to varying degrees. Apples ‘are red,’ but they can be any color. They ‘are sweet,’ but they can be sour. These are all true, because memory does not follow the rules of language.

This is a bit terrifying, though. Science, as well as most people’s conceptualization of existence, relies on there being joints at which logic or truth can cut.

Are there any joints? And if so, what would it mean for some things to have firm, real divisions, but everything else to be blurry clouds of associative meaning?