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By redefining love to only mean sexual attraction or an emotion, you've changed the meaning of the word to something not originally intended. I don't think any linguists would agree, for example, the "love" and "sexual attraction" mean the same thing. You've substituted an observable proxy of sexual attraction for an unobservable meaning of love in the same way that economists substitute "income" for "well-being" -- it's something they can measure even if its not the same thing. This is what Wittgenstein refers to as "nonsense." You can have a sophisticated technical explanation of sexual attraction that conforms to observable evidence about it, but someone can just say, "Um, that's neat, but it's not really what I meant by the word, "love."
An honest approach to knowledge requires accepting that language imposes restrictions on meaning, so analytical symbols are often just proxies for the concepts we are really interested in, not the concepts themselves.
If the only way you can make sense of a word such as "love" is by assuming, a priori, a narrower definition than what others might ascribe to the word, then you haven't engaged in truth seeking. You've just engaged in avoiding a harder problem -- you've been lazy. That's a dishonest approach to knowledge at a very fundamental level, but it is also a very common one.
That's very Platonic of you, but it's at best misleading, and at worst, completely wrong.
Do you think 'love' exists outside of human experience?
As someone who is - presumably - human, how do you know this?
What exactly is an 'unobservable meaning', if no one can observe it?
Lazy thinking is much better at imposing restrictions on meaning than language is. Language is just as able to expand meaning and insight - as long as it's used correctly.
What expands insight is pattern recognition - understanding how experiences repeat, and relate.
Do you think 'love' is completely amorphous and freeform, and everyone's experience of it is completely original and unique?
Or are there certain stories, roles, scripts and outcomes that are common enough to be recognisable, and even predictable?
No. But I don't need to know this in order to think this, because it wouldn't change my thinking if it could be shown that love does exist outside of human experience, so your question seems irrelevant.
"Unobservable" refers to abstract concepts, and philosophers use that term to distinguish it from "unobserved" -- something that should be able to be observed if we only had the senses or tools to do it. A geometric proof is an example of an unobservable meaning in that might be impossible to observe in nature (such as true vacuum is), but it can nonetheless be shown to be true, so it belongs to the set of things in the world that can be shown to exist by using language. (Wittgenstein's truth-proposition framework.)
Other unobservable things, such as the meaning of love and death to an individual, do not belong to that set of things that can be proven to exist using language because whether or not they do exist are irrelevant to further thinking about them. Existence is not a relevant question for an abstraction such as love, but communicating what one means by love still may matter nonetheless, which means that it is still part of the world.
Do you believe there are no such things as abstractions in the world? If so, can you prove it?
Lazy thinking imposes restrictions usually by misusing language. Misusing language is akin to using language as a crutch, much like we complain about religious people using faith as a crutch. Lazy thinkers fail to imagine meaning beyond present definitions of symbols, and they fail to appreciate how the definitions of the symbols they been given by others must necessarily restrict their ability to think about the world. Non-lazy thinkers, which are rare, are those use their recognition of the limits of language to generalize beyond those limits and thereby make new discoveries about the world.
No, I don't. Uniqueness is not a relevant concept to my understanding of love. (I'm not sure why you keep bringing it up.) Whether love is the same or different for each individual has nothing to do with wanting to think about and communicate one's own personal experience of it. It is enough that I think that each individual being is unique. (Which can be proven using only simple characteristics such as time and space to show that at least in those two dimensions no two individual beings are the same.) That's why you can't universally define "love" as "sexual attraction." (Again, how many people can you find who really think those two words mean the very same thing? I know you won't find many philosophers or other people who have really thought deeply on this subject who do.)
There certainly are stories, concepts, roles, etc, that are common enough to be recognizable and predictable. But that's not important to our discussion here. What matters in many cases are not the odds of prediction, but individual, unique experiences at hand. Although there are billions of people in the world, the only experience of it that I can answer to is my own. I'm the only one who will die my own death, and the bio-chemical description of that death will be irrelevant to my experience of it, even if it is relevant to my experience of others' deaths.
As a banker once told me regarding his lack of trust in portfolio risk management techniques, "When you're the one who's diving head-first into a pond, it doesn't really matter what the average depth is, does it?"
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