Abstract
We investigate the hypothesis that within a combination of a ‘number concept’ plus a ‘substantive concept’, such as ‘eleven animals’, the identity and indistinguishability present on the level of the concepts, i.e., all eleven animals are identical and indistinguishable, gives rise to a statistical structure of the Bose–Einstein type similar to how Bose–Einstein statistics is present for identical and indistinguishable quantum particles. We proceed by identifying evidence for this hypothesis by extracting the statistical data from the World-Wide-Web utilizing the Google Search tool. By using the Kullback–Leibler divergence method, we then compare the obtained distribution with the Maxwell–Boltzmann as well as with the Bose–Einstein distributions and show that the Bose–Einstein’s provides a better fit as compared to the Maxwell–Boltzmann’s.
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Acknowledgements
I thank Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi, Tomas Veloz and Diederik Aerts to read over the text of this article and give me their comments and suggestions. This work is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No:721321.
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Beltran, L. Quantum Bose–Einstein Statistics for Indistinguishable Concepts in Human Language. Found Sci 28, 43–55 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09794-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-021-09794-1