I actually think people who say “Life has no meaning and everything I do is pointless” are actually making a deeper mistake than confusing connotations with denotations… I think they’re actually making a denotational error in missing that e.g. “purpose” or “pointfulness” typically denotes ternary relationships of the form “The purpose of X to Y is Z.” In other words, one must ask or tacitly understand “purpose to whom?” and “meaning to whom” before the statement makes any sense.
My favorite connotationally-heavy follow-up to this is that “My life has as many purposes as there are agents it has a purpose to.”
I’ve been wanting to post on this under the name “Relation Projection Fallacy” for a while now, so I just did :)
I actually think people who say “Life has no meaning and everything I do is pointless” are actually making a deeper mistake than confusing connotations with denotations… I think they’re actually making a denotational error in missing that e.g. “purpose” or “pointfulness” typically denotes ternary relationships of the form “The purpose of X to Y is Z.” In other words, one must ask or tacitly understand “purpose to whom?” and “meaning to whom” before the statement makes any sense.
My favorite connotationally-heavy follow-up to this is that “My life has as many purposes as there are agents it has a purpose to.”
I’ve been wanting to post on this under the name “Relation Projection Fallacy” for a while now, so I just did :)