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most discussions about the meaning of words can be derailed for a good while by bringing up prescriptivism vs descriptivism and aligning yourself with the latter, and forcing everyone to define words from first principles for the current context. All disagreements are purely due to misunderstandings based on poor word definitions, and through social sense making we can temporarily find agreement.
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Dec 8, 2023 05:23
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fart simpson posted:u dont think people can come to different conclusions based on the same facts? you’ll have to define what exactly you mean by facts here; are we talking observable phenomena, or their interpretation? because sure you could imagine vastly different reactions to the same phenomena but if your definition of fact includes interpretation, then you are starting off from a hard to validate sequence, but also it sounds much different to ask “can people come to different conclusions from interpreting facts the same” of course you can argue that context creates a distinction in interpretation so the idea of sameness here relies on some temporal factor or an arbitrary grouping of events into some categories or labels and well, is that also shared?
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Dec 8, 2023 05:37
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look, I took an outrageous stance to get the discussion going and I don't truly believe this, but let's see if we can argue our way out of a paper bag, because that's what this semantics and pedantry is for. distortion park posted:your understanding of a fact must include some interpretation, as the fact only becomes what it is in the context of everything else you know. Exactly, so since the interpretation is a fundamental part of the understanding of events, and that we have the ability to reinterpret past events based on new contextual cues that has been enriched by a conversation, we should in theory and to a large practical extent have the ability to properly re-define concepts and re-align people's contexts until they can match agreed-upon semantics. The deeper question is therefore not whether we can or can't have disagreement, but whether we're willing to take the time to reconstruct a shared context and compact that would let us in fact align on a common ground that in turn yields an agreeable solution. distortion park posted:anyway semantics is easy, you just look at how people are using the word in question. Doing a bunch of word games and thought experiments will normally just take you further from understanding Oh but this has some limits, generally known as the indeterminacy of translation, which states that ultimately, all translation ends up being behavioral because there is an inability to know, based on the utterances, what the initial meaning was; you mostly have only the ability to repeatedly observe it to draw a context that lets you approximate the meaning. So of course here you're being fast and loose, but "just look at how people are using that word in question" and "doing a bunch of word games and thoughts experiments" are also part of the proper experiment design that lets you figure out if your observations are grounded properly. fart simpson posted:well, i mean you said I'll refer here again to my prior point in this very post about the issue being one of encoding and decoding, and therefore of building the common ground for these to align better. The issue we're going to run into sooner or later are whether the context includes values and upbringing (it most likely does), and therefore whether part of accurate-enough encoding and decoding of words for meaning has the ability to include this construction of the self into its definition. If so, you will have a hard time drawing a clear-cut boundary between "the word choice was bad" and "the idea behind the word choice was a consequence of past experience" and bringing clarification may necessarily involve re-examining people's own stances. As such, one could argue that "paying you as little money as possible" will imply a re-examination of what we mean by "paying" (and the concepts behind the exchanges of goods and services), the idea of "little", of "possible", and also of "money." One may very well find that both sides of the argument, given the proper context both agree on what money and paying means, but that "as little as possible" is a point of contention that may be redefined and agreed upon with sufficient discussion to reinterpret the events properly.
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Dec 8, 2023 17:39
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thank god fishmech isn't around anymore, I feel like I'm cosplaying them
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Dec 8, 2023 17:41
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prisoner of waffles posted:more of a comment than a question, but it does seem as though semantics and pedantry are actually wonderful if you want to confine arguments into ever-smaller and less productive paper bags. Like, a great stance to take if your language game is to nominally agree to play some larger language game, but your actual aim is to frustrate all other players. It can be used like a fractal when measuring a country's coast. It's like the semantic version of the CC game where you add more and more people to an email chain until all productivity dies, but instead you break down the discussion into an ever-expanding set of sub-arguments until everyone is fed up and you "win". fart simpson posted:nope this is just word games. the point is that people have different, fundamental interests that sometimes conflict in irreconcilable ways. in those situations you can’t really “agree” because what’s good for you is not good for me I mean in good faith the argument I'd make is one of relativist point of views where each actor in a system has a different amount of information they have access to and bounded rationality that means you can't expect full alignment. In bad faith, there's the classic counter-argument that there are some behaviors that should be agreed to as unacceptable. In bad-faith pedantry, you just have to endlessly try to move the argument towards the type of behavior that benefits you the most. Whether this should be allowed or not is subject to this very argument.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:02
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Sagebrush posted:if you ever see a whole Curie you're probably going to die as would any white person faced with truly spicy indian curie
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Dec 11, 2023 03:03
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fart simpson posted:rationality doesnt have much to do with alignment and you cant agree on whats unacceptable if you dont agree in the first place. conflict is part of existence and it sounds like you gotta come back down to earth and open your eyes to see it I mean do you frame conflict as a fundamentally permanent irremediable thing, or as a transitory state until parties can find a way to either compromise, realign visions, or repair wrongs, and then move on?
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Dec 11, 2023 03:11
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fart simpson posted:i think everything is transitory in the sense that nothing is static and everything is in a process of change. but there are persistent conflicts with resolutions that can basically just be the destruction of one of both parties in the conflict yeah Wouldn't that bring us back to the question about whether some elements should be fundamentally possible to agree/disagree on if we are to define which conflicts ought to be persistent or not? I imagine it's sort of related to Scanlon's Contractualism and related thoughts.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:17
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fart simpson posted:what does "ought to be persistent" mean? im being descriptive not prescriptive we're gonna need more participants in order to increase the usage sample in here
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Dec 11, 2023 03:20
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echinopsis posted:what r u guys on about we're just progressively making more and more obtuse arguments on specific terms while also being very loose with other terms and analogies until the whole discussion is meaningless.
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Dec 11, 2023 03:21
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