Okay, maybe I’m getting where you’re coming from now...??
In the hypothetical scenario you quoted from me, it’s you who are trying to prevent someone from using a useful concept in a context where it’s clear what concept is meant by the word. You seemed to endorse doing so, writing “[TM:]I’d want to know why you were doing that [ZD:] Because I think [reasons]”. It seems like in this hypothetical, you’re the one making the mistake that you sometimes rightly accuse others of making: trying to stop other people from using a useful concept (using ambiguous but contextually clear language).
Now it sounds like basically you’re saying: “If that’s what they were doing, then I was making a mistake. I don’t believe that that’s what those people are doing, I think they’re not trying to use words for clusters and instead trying to use words to make people feel a certain way, and I think they’re going to make a bunch of destructive mistakes because they’re using words not for clusters.”
(Which you roughly said in your first response above, but it didn’t land for me, maybe because you packaged it with a strawman of the hypothetical position that *is* using “women” for a cluster meaning something about social treatment.)
Since that might be right about what’s happening, I’m curious why we’re down this rabbit hole, and will go back again and look upthread.
Looking back, it seems like you’re using bad examples to argue your point, if I’ve got you right. This conversation came from a post where you argue that concepts based on niche-adaptedness are less cohesive:
In contrast, “finned swimmy animals” is an intrinsically less cohesive subject matter: there are similarities between them due to convergent evolution to the aquatic habitat, and it probably makes sense to want a short word or phrase (perhaps, “sea creatures”) to describe those similarities in contexts where only those similarities are relevant.
But that category “falls apart” very quickly as you consider more and more aspects of the creatures: the finned-swimmy-animals-with-gills are systematically different from the finned-swimmy-animals-with-a-blowhole, in more ways than just the “respiratory organ” feature that I’m using in this sentence to point to the two groups.
It seems to me now that
(1) you’re mostly mistaken about such concepts being “less” anything (well, probably in some useful sense there are “more features” explained by phylogeny than by niche-adaptedness, but that doesn’t make the latter “less cohesive”),
(2) that example is a red-herring for your point, which is that “concepts” that aren’t attached to a cluster *at all* are fake and bad (such as “women” used to “mean” “whatever makes people not sad if I use the word this way”).
...Though it’s worth noting that it’s almost impossible to *avoid* some cluster-related-ness. If you use a word in whatever way makes people not sad, you are going to pick up on some cluster-structure. I think this *is* a good way of *finding one’s way* to *new* words; I think we agree that this is a very bad way of *continuously correcting towards territory-reflection*.
Okay, maybe I’m getting where you’re coming from now...??
In the hypothetical scenario you quoted from me, it’s you who are trying to prevent someone from using a useful concept in a context where it’s clear what concept is meant by the word. You seemed to endorse doing so, writing “[TM:]I’d want to know why you were doing that [ZD:] Because I think [reasons]”. It seems like in this hypothetical, you’re the one making the mistake that you sometimes rightly accuse others of making: trying to stop other people from using a useful concept (using ambiguous but contextually clear language).
Now it sounds like basically you’re saying: “If that’s what they were doing, then I was making a mistake. I don’t believe that that’s what those people are doing, I think they’re not trying to use words for clusters and instead trying to use words to make people feel a certain way, and I think they’re going to make a bunch of destructive mistakes because they’re using words not for clusters.”
(Which you roughly said in your first response above, but it didn’t land for me, maybe because you packaged it with a strawman of the hypothetical position that *is* using “women” for a cluster meaning something about social treatment.)
Since that might be right about what’s happening, I’m curious why we’re down this rabbit hole, and will go back again and look upthread.
Looking back, it seems like you’re using bad examples to argue your point, if I’ve got you right. This conversation came from a post where you argue that concepts based on niche-adaptedness are less cohesive:
It seems to me now that
(1) you’re mostly mistaken about such concepts being “less” anything (well, probably in some useful sense there are “more features” explained by phylogeny than by niche-adaptedness, but that doesn’t make the latter “less cohesive”),
(2) that example is a red-herring for your point, which is that “concepts” that aren’t attached to a cluster *at all* are fake and bad (such as “women” used to “mean” “whatever makes people not sad if I use the word this way”).
...Though it’s worth noting that it’s almost impossible to *avoid* some cluster-related-ness. If you use a word in whatever way makes people not sad, you are going to pick up on some cluster-structure. I think this *is* a good way of *finding one’s way* to *new* words; I think we agree that this is a very bad way of *continuously correcting towards territory-reflection*.