Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be invoking the concept of ‘status’. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don’t lower someone’s status, so that’s why I ended up using the term. But of course X’s (‘actual’) status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others’ ‘opinion of X’. So it’s only in that ‘weak’ sense that I meant my remark that X ‘doesn’t actually have a status’; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the various individuals judging X rather than a status simpliciter. X’s status, simpliciter, could then perhaps be defined as the weighted average of X’s status-in-the-eyes-of-all-the-others—weighted, perhaps, by their statuses. Or something, I dunno. Even that’s probably too simple. But of course I realise that one usually refers to status as though X simply has a status.
On the other hand, when you ask if I would say it’s wrong to talk about ‘my estimate of X’s popularity’ (which I wouldn’t), I realise that similarly I wouldn’t have a problem with talk of estimates of X’s status, if that were in fact what I wanted to refer to. So I misrepresented my own reasoning; I didn’t choose not to say ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’ because I don’t think X has an actual status, but because my estimate of the ‘actual’ status of X wasn’t what I was talking about. I did mean, as you suggest, ‘lower my opinion of X’.
Popularity, while being as vague a notion as status, does strike me as being a less complicated one; maybe that’s why I’ve developed these intuitions. But the usage of ‘popularity’ that seems most normal to me is as a function of the opinions of some whole population; although people do occasionally use the term in an individual-indexed way. That usage isn’t so popular with me, though. (And I’m not sure what to think about ‘privilege’.)
Yeah, but then I wouldn’t be invoking the concept of ‘status’. I was responding to the idea that spelling mistakes don’t lower someone’s status, so that’s why I ended up using the term. But of course X’s (‘actual’) status supervenes on the set of individual judgments that constitute various others’ ‘opinion of X’. So it’s only in that ‘weak’ sense that I meant my remark that X ‘doesn’t actually have a status’; viz. that (in my way of using the term) X has a status in the eyes of each of the various individuals judging X rather than a status simpliciter. X’s status, simpliciter, could then perhaps be defined as the weighted average of X’s status-in-the-eyes-of-all-the-others—weighted, perhaps, by their statuses. Or something, I dunno. Even that’s probably too simple. But of course I realise that one usually refers to status as though X simply has a status.
On the other hand, when you ask if I would say it’s wrong to talk about ‘my estimate of X’s popularity’ (which I wouldn’t), I realise that similarly I wouldn’t have a problem with talk of estimates of X’s status, if that were in fact what I wanted to refer to. So I misrepresented my own reasoning; I didn’t choose not to say ‘lower my estimate of the status of X’ because I don’t think X has an actual status, but because my estimate of the ‘actual’ status of X wasn’t what I was talking about. I did mean, as you suggest, ‘lower my opinion of X’.
Popularity, while being as vague a notion as status, does strike me as being a less complicated one; maybe that’s why I’ve developed these intuitions. But the usage of ‘popularity’ that seems most normal to me is as a function of the opinions of some whole population; although people do occasionally use the term in an individual-indexed way. That usage isn’t so popular with me, though. (And I’m not sure what to think about ‘privilege’.)