Word of the Week: The Gavagai Problem

The Gavagai problem describes the enormous task of word learning. To learn a word’s meaning, we begin by matching words to referents, or the thing to which a word refers.  The word “gavagai” originates from a thought experiment proposed by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in 1960. It goes along the lines of this:

Imagine you are in a foreign country where you do not speak the language, and no one around you speaks your language. You are standing in a field with a local. A rabbit hops by in front of you, and the person says, “Gavagai.” Quine asks, what does “gavagai” mean? It may mean rabbit, but it could also refer to an aspect or quality of the rabbit (ears, tail, fuzzy, white) or what the rabbit did (to hop, to appear, to cross). Alternatively,  “gavagai” could be something in the scene, such as grass or sky. Or it could mean something different entirely, like Look over there, I’m tired, or Where are you from again?.

This thought experiment illustrates how difficult word learning is for children since there are potentially infinite possibilities of what a word could refer to in any given scenario.

In the real world, this word learning problem becomes even less straightforward as surroundings can be messy or chaotic. To add to the complexity, adult speech is often vague or incomplete. Solving the gavagai problem requires children to use a combination of visual and tactile information, social cues, and eventually linguistic cues to narrow down the meaning of a new word.