This is a good post—there are a good number of philosophers who would benefit from reading this.
I’d like to add a 38, if I may, though it isn’t mine. It’s what Daniel Dennett calls a “deepity”.
A deepity is a statement with two possible interpretations, such as “love is a word”.
One of the interpretations is trivially true and trivially unspectacular. In this case, “love”—the word—is a word. The second interpretation is either false or suspect, but if it were true it would be profound. In this case, the non-existence of love as anything other than a verbal construct.
The “deepity” is therefore able to achieve undeserved profundity via a conflation of these two interpretations. People see the trivial but true interpretation and then think that there must be some kind of truth to the false but profound one.
This is a good post—there are a good number of philosophers who would benefit from reading this.
I’d like to add a 38, if I may, though it isn’t mine. It’s what Daniel Dennett calls a “deepity”.
A deepity is a statement with two possible interpretations, such as “love is a word”.
One of the interpretations is trivially true and trivially unspectacular. In this case, “love”—the word—is a word. The second interpretation is either false or suspect, but if it were true it would be profound. In this case, the non-existence of love as anything other than a verbal construct.
The “deepity” is therefore able to achieve undeserved profundity via a conflation of these two interpretations. People see the trivial but true interpretation and then think that there must be some kind of truth to the false but profound one.