I still a not sure if you are asserting that the phrase “women prefer jerks” has a single, commonly understood meaning among everyone, or among men, or what.
Normal people having conversations don’t use precise technical terms but they get along fine—and often wouldn’t even understand the formal and precise terminology very well anyway.
Their understanding of formal terminology is barely relevant. If a someone says that their printer “is shit”, I want to know if they mean that it burns through ink cartridges, jams frequently, prints with low quality, or what. I am unsure as to what an informal phrasing means, specifically I am unsure about the extent to which it means the same thing to different people. I’m not blaming people for being informal, I’m questioning how much agreement there can be among the people around hundreds of thousands of water coolers in the world when such an imprecise phrase is used. That around any individual water cooler people communicate well enough is not in doubt.
It just isn’t reasonable to dismiss “‘women prefer jerks’ is something which is commonly believed” as undefined.
It’s not being dismissed, it’s being partitioned according to my best estimation of what its speakers and listeners actually mean. There are probably different meanings because the phrase is not very specific.
Meta-statements about something like “the belief shared by people who believe this statement is true” are being dismissed.
I still a not sure if you are asserting that the phrase “women prefer jerks” has a single, commonly understood meaning among everyone, or among men, or what.
Their understanding of formal terminology is barely relevant. If a someone says that their printer “is shit”, I want to know if they mean that it burns through ink cartridges, jams frequently, prints with low quality, or what. I am unsure as to what an informal phrasing means, specifically I am unsure about the extent to which it means the same thing to different people. I’m not blaming people for being informal, I’m questioning how much agreement there can be among the people around hundreds of thousands of water coolers in the world when such an imprecise phrase is used. That around any individual water cooler people communicate well enough is not in doubt.
It’s not being dismissed, it’s being partitioned according to my best estimation of what its speakers and listeners actually mean. There are probably different meanings because the phrase is not very specific.
Meta-statements about something like “the belief shared by people who believe this statement is true” are being dismissed.