This chapter explores linguistic factors that cause misinforming. It presents the origin of misinforming as building in the polysemy of the natural languages. The evolution of natural languages reflects the needs of human life according to its specific properties such as surrounding nature, climate, food, etc. They are developed historically and correspond to the way of formation of a group of people as a society. The language is the key component of the group's culture, and the society is usually identified by the language. The language is a tool to facilitate informing within the members of the group and may serve as a barrier in communication between members of the group with members of other groups. In the computer information systems era, communication via technology added complexity and as well as the risk of misinformation.
TopPolysemy Of Natural Languages
Natural languages evolved during the history of civilization to serve as a tool for communication. A language is composed of words, used to code particular objects, facts, activities or their properties. Languages evolve to serve the growing needs of details to communicate. This long evolution led to polysemy, as a phenomenon creating misinforming hazards. Polysemy is a misinforming factor in communication between parties using the same language. Communication between parties originally using different languages, a typical case in our globalizing world, includes translation, or interpretation of words in one language to looking for corresponding word in another language.
Polysemy, multiple and often diverse meaning of words and phrases, of natural languages representing the richness of expression is natural nowadays. The language as a reflection of life is developing by constructing terms to mark human activities or observed phenomena in the surrounding nature. With the evolving complexity of life and learning more about nature the languages also evolve to allow representing the nuances in diverse environments. Originally, human life was simple, and people needed a few words to describe and communicate facts, events, actions. Within small groups – family, tribe, village – there was almost no polysemy. By growing complexity of life, and by growing connectivity between different groups, the complexity of language grows and understanding between groups with different experience is becoming more difficult. Uniting tribes includes creating a common language to allow communication, but different meaning of given word used by a separate groups or tribes remain in use and have been preserved. This enriched the language and diversified the meaning assigned to a single word.
Another aspect of using languages is that a word or phrase actually codes the real meaning. A human eye may distinguish about 4000 nuances of colors, but in a language, we are using just a handful different color names – white, yellow, red, blue, etc. By adding adjectives such as dark, light, or similar we may increase the number of codes used, but it is still far from those 4000 nuances. And even more, the actual number of colors – frequencies in the spectrum – is much larger and by using special equipment a human may distinguish them. Or, by using language we are not able to present completely the reality and even what a human, creator of the message, observes or knows. Choosing the level of granularity in describing details of entity’s properties is subject to a trade-off decision – choosing low level of granularity allows better view on the properties of a particular instance but provides low possibility for meaningful generalization and classification, as well as correct interpretation, translation, or sharing.