There aren’t necessarily any common elements, besides utterly trivial ones.
Maybe, maybe not. You won’t know without looking. You have to start somewhere.
If you look at examples of misspelled words in various languages and examine their individual properties, you won’t find what unites them in a category.
But then, what about correctly spelled words? There will be many observable systematic relationships between those. I happen to think you have the analogy backwards. In the good/evil dichotomy, it is the evil acts, not the not-evil acts, which are narrowly defined and systematically related (I think). If you try to find what is in common between the not-evil acts, those are the acts which have nothing in particular in common. Meanwhile, in the well-spelled/misspelled dichotomy, it is the correctly-spelled words that are narrowly defined and systematically related. In short, I think morality is fundamentally a narrow set of prohibitions rather than a narrow set of requirements. In contrast, the rules of spelling form a narrow set of requirements.
But whether you are right or I am right is something that we won’t know without looking.
You have to understand their relationship to the spelling rules in the various languages—rules which themselves are likely to be incompatible and mutually incoherent—to understand what properties make them examples of ‘misspelled words’.
Nobody told Galileo and Newton what the rules generating the world’s behavior were, but they were able to go a long way toward figuring them out. And isn’t that what science is? If you claim that the science can’t start without knowing the rules first, then aren’t you asserting that science is hopeless?
There aren’t necessarily any common elements, besides utterly trivial ones.
Maybe, maybe not. You won’t know without looking. You have to start somewhere.
If you look at examples of misspelled words in various languages and examine their individual properties, you won’t find what unites them in a category.
But then, what about correctly spelled words? There will be many observable systematic relationships between those. I happen to think you have the analogy backwards. In the good/evil dichotomy, it is the evil acts, not the not-evil acts, which are narrowly defined and systematically related (I think). If you try to find what is in common between the not-evil acts, those are the acts which have nothing in particular in common. Meanwhile, in the well-spelled/misspelled dichotomy, it is the correctly-spelled words that are narrowly defined and systematically related. In short, I think morality is fundamentally a narrow set of prohibitions rather than a narrow set of requirements. In contrast, the rules of spelling form a narrow set of requirements.
But whether you are right or I am right is something that we won’t know without looking.
You have to understand their relationship to the spelling rules in the various languages—rules which themselves are likely to be incompatible and mutually incoherent—to understand what properties make them examples of ‘misspelled words’.
Nobody told Galileo and Newton what the rules generating the world’s behavior were, but they were able to go a long way toward figuring them out. And isn’t that what science is? If you claim that the science can’t start without knowing the rules first, then aren’t you asserting that science is hopeless?