I know I'm being nit-picky, but words are associated with experiences, not objects. (E.g., "red" is not an object. "circle" is not an object.)
This is especially important when you consider the fact that most people treat their language to be operating on some intricate notion of _reference_, when in fact it is based upon correlations of states of experience that may be very noisy. This kind of misunderstanding often leads people into a position where they do not know why things are true or why their words have meaning.
You're partially correct. Words we learn are linked to experience of their usage but they're also linked to other words and to tangible things in our experiences such as things like books or teachers or places which are objects. Objects have use-cases ie. Expected purposes and these are linked to the type of experiences you've personally had, imagined, or which seem to you likely or possible to have with a given object. When you go to a restaurant you have expectations in mind based on the restaurant object being linked to other restaurants.
>Words we learn are linked to experience of their usage but they're also linked to other words and to tangible things in our experiences such as things like books or teachers or places which are objects.
You and I are on the same page, but you're using the word 'experience' in a more narrow sense than I am. You can experience words and things that are (roughly) objects and my point still stands. Things that are objects are still better thought of generally as experiences. It's just more consistent.
Another way of putting this is that language learning is mostly about encoding the appropriateness of linguistic constructs in varying contexts. So it is appropriate to act like you are in a restaurant when you are in what looks to be a restaurant. It is appropriate to run with the pack. It is appropriate to run from a lion and chase down a gazelle. This is basically the whole point of a nervous system, if you want to go wild with it. We just evolved a specialized adaptation for using our 'appropriateness-engines' on words and symbols rather than general feelings of what is going on around us.
At least, that's a rough draft of what I'm getting at.
Would you recommend any references on this topic (words as reference vs. experience correlation)? Are there benefits to people who use permalinks and other citation-like references in online conversation? These may differentiate a static reference (e.g. a paper) vs. a dynamic one (Wikipedia or web search).
This is especially important when you consider the fact that most people treat their language to be operating on some intricate notion of _reference_, when in fact it is based upon correlations of states of experience that may be very noisy. This kind of misunderstanding often leads people into a position where they do not know why things are true or why their words have meaning.