Here are a few thoughts which I think I’ve come up with independently and which are in agreement with your (the article’s) general thrust:
Sometimes when people advocate for a redefinition of a particular term—”racism” as redefined by pomo SJW feminists, for example—I often suspect that an explicit motivation for some of them (not all X are like that) is to transfer the evaluation and attitudinal/affective associations from the old denotation to the new one.
This is bad evil epistemic dark arts as it tries to implant a particular answer to a particular question in the audience’s mind(s) while skipping the critical thinking step. The answer they push is “yes” and the question is “should we evaluate <new concept> the same (or approximately the same) way we evaluate <old concept>”.
In the terminology (concept...ology?) of the article, this corresponds to erasing some of the lines connecting concept-circles and/or drawing new lines.
For example, if “racism” is redefined “prejudice plus power”, in many minds this adds a racism/power connection and possible removes a connection between racism and disparate impact, assuming “prejudice” refers to a state of mind.
I apologize for using a mind-killing radioactive hot potato example, but no sufficiently clear and less radioactive example came to mind.
Here are a few thoughts which I think I’ve come up with independently and which are in agreement with your (the article’s) general thrust:
Sometimes when people advocate for a redefinition of a particular term—”racism” as redefined by pomo SJW feminists, for example—I often suspect that an explicit motivation for some of them (not all X are like that) is to transfer the evaluation and attitudinal/affective associations from the old denotation to the new one.
This is bad evil epistemic dark arts as it tries to implant a particular answer to a particular question in the audience’s mind(s) while skipping the critical thinking step. The answer they push is “yes” and the question is “should we evaluate <new concept> the same (or approximately the same) way we evaluate <old concept>”.
In the terminology (concept...ology?) of the article, this corresponds to erasing some of the lines connecting concept-circles and/or drawing new lines.
For example, if “racism” is redefined “prejudice plus power”, in many minds this adds a racism/power connection and possible removes a connection between racism and disparate impact, assuming “prejudice” refers to a state of mind.
I apologize for using a mind-killing radioactive hot potato example, but no sufficiently clear and less radioactive example came to mind.