For some reason I’m a critic this evening, forgive me, but I don’t think this one meets the standards of your previous articles; it feels to me that this doesn’t move us far beyond the widely appreciated fact that for every portion of direct implication an utterance has, there’s usually a generous side-salad of connotation. Am I missing a key novel move?
No. I almost put a footnote in saying something like “But you already knew all this, didn’t you?”
The reason I wrote it anyway is because of the last four paragraphs. The particular debate failure mode I outlined there—Person A makes a denotatively true but connotatively controversial statement, Person B is offended by this statement so tries to argue against it poorly or make some similarly offensive statement—is one of the most common problems with the arguments I hear. I want to be able to say “Hey, guys, adboc” and give a link to this article.
It also fills in something I thought was a bit of a hole in last night’s post. A statement like “Islam is a religion of peace” is a “dangling variable” underdetermined by the empirical facts it purports to relate to. So why does it matter which way we evaluate the proposition? It matters because of all the associated connotations. Since it has practically no denotation, saying “Islam is a religion of peace” is just saying “Please accept all these connotations here” without even the saving grace of a denotation to attach them to.
...tell me what you thought of that preceding paragraph. I can’t decide whether it’s obvious and a rehash, whether it’s uninteresting, or whether it deserves a post of its own.
I’m glad you wrote about the debate failure mode. The clear picture you gave of it will probably help me in future conversations; I’d kind of noticed the phenomenon, and I’d kind of noticed how to dodge it, but much less clearly.
Although I might appreciate reviews of the basics more than most people do. It seems to me there’s a great deal that I kind of roughly get on an abstract, “get the right answers on a multiple choice test” kind of level, but that I haven’t yet integrated into my root vision of the world. Meditating on the basics helps me, there.
For some reason I’m a critic this evening, forgive me, but I don’t think this one meets the standards of your previous articles; it feels to me that this doesn’t move us far beyond the widely appreciated fact that for every portion of direct implication an utterance has, there’s usually a generous side-salad of connotation. Am I missing a key novel move?
No. I almost put a footnote in saying something like “But you already knew all this, didn’t you?”
The reason I wrote it anyway is because of the last four paragraphs. The particular debate failure mode I outlined there—Person A makes a denotatively true but connotatively controversial statement, Person B is offended by this statement so tries to argue against it poorly or make some similarly offensive statement—is one of the most common problems with the arguments I hear. I want to be able to say “Hey, guys, adboc” and give a link to this article.
It also fills in something I thought was a bit of a hole in last night’s post. A statement like “Islam is a religion of peace” is a “dangling variable” underdetermined by the empirical facts it purports to relate to. So why does it matter which way we evaluate the proposition? It matters because of all the associated connotations. Since it has practically no denotation, saying “Islam is a religion of peace” is just saying “Please accept all these connotations here” without even the saving grace of a denotation to attach them to.
...tell me what you thought of that preceding paragraph. I can’t decide whether it’s obvious and a rehash, whether it’s uninteresting, or whether it deserves a post of its own.
I’m glad you wrote about the debate failure mode. The clear picture you gave of it will probably help me in future conversations; I’d kind of noticed the phenomenon, and I’d kind of noticed how to dodge it, but much less clearly.
Although I might appreciate reviews of the basics more than most people do. It seems to me there’s a great deal that I kind of roughly get on an abstract, “get the right answers on a multiple choice test” kind of level, but that I haven’t yet integrated into my root vision of the world. Meditating on the basics helps me, there.