The empirical study of naming: the language of experience

I have proposed that words tag conceptualization processes, not things directly. But since the input to at least some conceptualization processes is the sensory perception of things, there is, of course, also a relationship between words and objects. This relationship may be studied empirically, under laboratory conditions. For this purpose, it is desirable to choose words that have simple referents, in the sense that they can be exhaustively described by objective measurement of all of their physical properties. This condition is fulfilled in only a small class of words, namely those that describe the sensation of certain physical properties themselves. Let us refer to these words collectively as the language of experience; examples are words for temperature, taste, hearing, or vision.