If a concept is meaningless, but you continue to use it because it makes your mental processes simpler or is similarly useful, that’s a state of affairs that should be distinguished from the concept being meaningful
Or is useful for communicating ideas to other people..but, hang on, how can a meaningless concept be useful for communication? That just breaks the ordinary meaning of “meaning”.
EY argues that a particular literary claim can be meaningless, and yet you can still have a test and get graded based on your knowledge of that statement. This is in the posts that I linked at the very top of my post. Do you disagree with that claims, i.e. you think those claims are actually meaningful?
That sort of thing is testable. You get a bunch of literary professors in a Septuagint scenario, where they have to independently classify books as pre or post colonial. Why would that be impossible? It’s evidently possible to perform an easier version of the test where books are classified as romance, horror or Western.
That would be evidence. EYs personal opinion is not evidence , nor is yours.
Certainly if you get a bunch of physicists in a room they will disagree about what entities are real. So according to your proposed test, physics isn’t real?
There’s a huge difference between saying that a particular literay claim can be meaningless and saying that all of those claims are meaningless.
You can take the Sokal episode as an argument that if someone who doesn’t have the expert knowledge can easily pass as an expert then those experts don’t seem to have a lot of meaningful knowledge.
Different claims in that tradition are going to have a different status.
I’m not saying that all literary claims are meaningless. I’m saying all ontological claims are meaningless. Regardless, I’m responding to a comment which implied meaningless concepts cannot be useful for communication.
Or is useful for communicating ideas to other people..but, hang on, how can a meaningless concept be useful for communication? That just breaks the ordinary meaning of “meaning”.
EY argues that a particular literary claim can be meaningless, and yet you can still have a test and get graded based on your knowledge of that statement. This is in the posts that I linked at the very top of my post. Do you disagree with that claims, i.e. you think those claims are actually meaningful?
That sort of thing is testable. You get a bunch of literary professors in a Septuagint scenario, where they have to independently classify books as pre or post colonial. Why would that be impossible? It’s evidently possible to perform an easier version of the test where books are classified as romance, horror or Western.
That would be evidence. EYs personal opinion is not evidence , nor is yours.
Certainly if you get a bunch of physicists in a room they will disagree about what entities are real. So according to your proposed test, physics isn’t real?
As I have explained, the argument for realism in general is not based on a particular theory being realistically true
You ignored my question.
There’s a huge difference between saying that a particular literay claim can be meaningless and saying that all of those claims are meaningless.
You can take the Sokal episode as an argument that if someone who doesn’t have the expert knowledge can easily pass as an expert then those experts don’t seem to have a lot of meaningful knowledge.
Different claims in that tradition are going to have a different status.
I’m not saying that all literary claims are meaningless. I’m saying all ontological claims are meaningless. Regardless, I’m responding to a comment which implied meaningless concepts cannot be useful for communication.