Linguistic Measurement and the Impoverishment of Meaning (V2)

Meaning is to language what measurement is to quantum mechanics—a necessary act that produces knowledge at the cost of reducing reality (p. 1). This paper draws substantially on the foundational work of the Brussels School (Aerts and colleagues) on Quantum Cognition, whose formal models of concept combination provided a structural foundation/inspiration for this essay's central analogy between linguistic measurement and quantum measurement. V2 reframes the argument as an epistemological essay rather than a neurobiological claim, engages the Sellars/Davidson "Myth of the Given" objection directly, grounds the ineffability claim in James (1902) and Wittgenstein (1922) rather than resting on Gödel alone, and adds empirical support from the tip-of-the-tongue literature (Brown & McNeill, 1966).