Vocab: word that means to acknowledge something, also giving life to it?

“Affirm” is close to what you’re looking for. Affirm and acknowledge are both synonymous with accept — to believe the realness of something. Affirm also suggests the truth of a thing.

conjure
conceive
conceptualize

I second conjure:

1) raise: summon into action or bring into existence, often as if by magic; “raise the specter of unemployment”; “he conjured wild birds in the air”; “call down the spirits from the mountain”
2) bid: ask for or request earnestly; “The prophet bid all people to become good persons”
3) conspire: engage in plotting or enter into a conspiracy, swear together; “They conspired to overthrow the government”

I’m going with @chielamangus and affirm.

invent
create

Invoke?

Your talking about inception, but is it possible?

validate

Roger. that airplane talk for okay.

Engender

OP: You can’t acknowledge something that doesn’t already exist, so you can’t bring something into existence by acknowledging it.

In the creation myths of some cultures, a divine figure will call something into existence just by saying its name. Is that what you have in mind?

Or are you thinking cases where someone coins a word for some phenomenon that people were not conscious of (such as “frenemy”, maybe?), and once there was a word for it, people starting noticing that phenomenon much more often? Or something along those lines?

Or something else entirely?

@submariner – that’s not necessarily true. Take autism, for example. It clearly exists its exact form is open to debate, but wasn’t recognised until Piaget gave it a name in the early 20th century.

@longtresses – my suggestion would be “recognise”.

@the100thmonkey That is not a counterexample to what I said.

Not strictly, but there’s an interesting ontological issue in “you can’t acknowledge something that doesn’t already exist”. Does autism exist in the same way that the cars driving outside your house do?

@submariner Doesn’t it go both ways?
You recognize something that already exists (e.g. suddenly there’s “middle” between “beginning point” and “ending point”),
and something comes into existence only after you give it a name (I like your example “frenemy”).

Sometimes you also name qualities in other people that were previously unnoticed, undistinguished, or were barely there, in effect strengthening them.

Or not…..

@longtresses You’ve tagged your question as language, etc., not philosophy, so I assume you’re asking about English usage, not looking for a debate about metaphysics.

“Recognize”, like “acknowledge”, presupposes that something is already there. You can’t recognize or acknowledge something into existence. So no, with those words it does not go both ways.

The “frenemy” example is a case where the new coinage affects other people’s perception of a phenomenon, but the phenomenon was there before it was named.

Another example: “metrosexual”. Somebody observed some similarities among a set of well-dressed but vaguely effeminate middle-class urban men and came up with a new category to place them in. Perhaps you could say that the category was created when somebody came up with that word, but the men and their similarities were already there (or perhaps it is simply the old category of “fop” with a new word for it). Now, there may be an interplay between the language/thought and the social reality. Men might change their behavior depending on whether they like being classified as metrosexuals. So in that sense it may go back and forth.

Speech-act theory also talks about “performatives”—utterances that create a social reality. E.g., the Queen says, “I dub thee Sir Elton John”, and presto, there is now one more English knight in the world. Or the priest says, “I now pronounce you man and wife”, and the couple is married.

Is there a word in another language that expresses what are trying to say? I still don’t know if any of these examples get at what you mean.

Another vote for engender.

adds a vote for Invoke.

Invent

@submariner unicorns. They’ve been acknowledged but don’t exist (well, not that we know of). That theory is a bastardization of the fact that we can’t conceptualize anything without taking things from something that already exists.

@Hobosnake I’m not sure what your point is. I have a hunch, but I don’t want to misread you. Could you state your point more clearly and be more explicit about what it is in my previous post(s) that you are responding to?

@submariner it was a counterexample to when you said

“You can’t acknowledge something that doesn’t already exist, so you can’t bring something into existence by acknowledging it.”

Since unicorns don’t exist, no one has never acknowledged one, much less brought one into existence.

The idea of unicorns exists. You can acknowledge or recognize that a work of art or a toy is intended to represent something that corresponds to that idea, but that’s not the same as acknowledging an actual unicorn, since, as you say, they don’t exist, i.e., there are no actual unicorns.

Notice also that even in the case of imaginary things, “acknowledge” or “recognize” are not the verbs we use in English to talk about the creative act of thinking them up in the first place.

As I said before, this is a language thread, not philosophy thread, so I’m not going to get into a debate about the ontological status of fictional objects here.