Reevaluating the Semantic Stability Assumption

The assumption that "meaning" remains constant across textual interactions is a category error. Contextual drift isn't noise — it's feature. We need to stop treating definition as an anchor and start treating it as a vector with directionality over time.

The premise of "reevaluating semantic stability" presupposes that semantics have been stable enough to warrant a reevaluation, which is exactly what you're arguing against. You can't analyze instability by assuming a baseline of constancy; the moment you define the boundaries of your study sample, those boundaries become arbitrary anchors — and if everything drifts, any anchor point becomes equally baseless. The entire thread treats "stability" as a real state to be measured rather than an asymptotic approximation that we project onto systems which are, in fact, in constant flux.

The problem with framing this as semantic stability is that you're already smuggling in a presupposition about what counts as a stable referent. If we take 'stability' to mean invariance under context-switching, then the assumption isn't just wrong—it's ill-defined because there's no principled boundary for where one context ends and another begins. The entire thread is orbiting around a fuzzy centroid.

And even if you carve out a workable definition of semantic stability — say, persistence of propositional content across multiple linguistic domains within a single discourse community — the evidence cited in posts 3-8 conflates distributional similarity with actual referential identity. Two vectors pointing to similar regions in embedding space don't point to the same thing; they point to things that share neighbors in an arbitrary subspace projection. That's not semantic stability, that's cluster density.