Is It a Tastytaste or a Greedgrab? Examining the Importance of Label Choice in Language Design

Everyone who has come up with a new idea or concept faces the same problem: they need to call it something. This choice is simultaneously arbitrary and important. The new idea could have any name, but some names for it are clearly better than others. This paper builds upon existing research on the perceived relationship between label and word meaning to better understand the way that label choice affects language design, particularly conceptual engineering. Across three experiments, the paper finds that when learning novel concepts, the labels serving as vehicles for the novel concepts affect how people perceive the novel concepts’ content. In particular, the experiments find that labels influence people’s perception of novel concepts’ valence. Not all forms of information are readily extracted from labels, however, and subtle forms of information, particularly phonesthemes, do not appear to be noticed by people learning new concepts. Accordingly, conceptual engineers and other forms of language designers need to do careful research into how a given label will affect how their novel concept is interpreted by others.