@p @PakkonenCT @PussySlayer @adam @m0n5t3r @moth @rasterman @realDonaldTrump @seelenknochen you only think it's an apt comparison because you imagine a universe where calling a bat a rat is useful. if I had said android you would've said "but it uses the linux kernel ashkually" and you would've been right.
bats are in no way rats, flying or otherwise.
you are making some sort of descriptive/existentialist argument about a bat being whatever people call a bat so it's not false to say a bat is a flying rat because some people will think bat when you say flying rat. by the same conceit someone could say "that guy who invented the internet" and mean steve jobs and yeah they'd be wrong, even though that makes sense to some people.
bat isn't a common name with ambiguities in the way, say, "turtle" is. nor is it a folk name associated with a single species that contains concepts which could be associated with another, like "bluebird" could be to any blue avian, or "deadly nightshade" to any highly toxic plant in Solanaceae.
nor is bat a paraphyletic grouping, there is a 1:1 overlap between the scientific term chiropteran and the common term bat.
nor is flying rat even a common term for bat, most people will imagine pigeons given that description.
there's a contradiction to saying that it's false to call fish cetaceans (cause cetacean is scientific jargon) but not to call whales fish, and to proceed to to say "well what is truth really, language is socially constructed". we accept the existence of truth as the most foundational axiom upon which all first reasoning proceeds.
the appeal to machine learning is meaningless to me, i am not a believer in strong AI, I don't care what an algorithm says about bats and rats, though it would be reminiscent to the picture of a cat labelled dog by a neural net. actually, calling cats dogs has more truth to it than calling bats rats. both are domesticated companion animals with a relatively close cladistic relation.
if you had said "bats are like rats with wings, it was a metaphor" i'd disagree and explain why but not call it a false statement. but you didn't. you're now saying "well nouns are groupings of properties and bats have rat properties so i'm still right".
as for linguistics my knowledge is largely in philology and etymology, which is what's relevant to your "fish used to mean this" argument.