78 Quotes About Semantics

All our work, our whole life is a matter of semantics, because words are the tools with which we work, the material out of which laws are made, out of which the Constitution was written. Everything depends on our understanding of them.

The way they talked about what happened, Mary said, was almost more important than what had happened.

[Metaphors] replace genuine uncertainty about the world with semantic ambiguity. A metaphor is a cover-up.

In order to understand what happened, we'll use words in the way that they exist: as drawers of distinction between ideas.

But if we decide contextually specific questions of synonymy on the basis of the total semantic range of each word, any synonymy in any context is virtually impossible.

Some people say they don’t believe in God, but they believe in an energy that moves through all living things. Others say they do believe in God, and they claim God is an energy moving through all living things. Some people believe in a holy book, and their faith gives them the same feeling of certainty that sustains people of other faiths as well as non-believers. Over this, we start wars.

That statues are motionless would be true only if the earth were the universe.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.