This text smells like pretty much emotional rationalization (in the psychological sense) of a certain biased point of view.
Actually, I’m not an enemy of narrow questions, and in the same way, I’m not an enemy of the plurality of meanings. The focused, narrow, formal approach is of great power indeed, but it is also restricted and new theories are being constructed again and again—outside of a narrow framework and back to some new one.
Consider a man who just learned to drink from a certain brown glass. Then, he sees a steel mug. They are quite different objects, with different properties, different names, and meanings attached in different linguistic contexts. If he can not grasp that what is common, he won’t be able to generalize the knowledge at all.
But somehow this trivial observation (consequences of which play a role on every layer of abstraction in thinking) tends to be forgotten when dozens of layers of abstraction are being created, the definition starts to battle the actual meaning until the latter is completely lost and one starts to rationalize upon those layers of abstractions while common sense whispers: “It’s damn meaningless, it doesn’t help to understand anything”. What happens then? Then comes the time to go back to the connected uncertain world.
There is more. A natural language contains a vast plurality of word meanings which actually help to look at things from different angles and to learn such commonalities by reading words in different contexts. If you will defy such a reality of natural language and human thinking you would risk becoming isolated in bubbles of extremely precise meanings that not understood by anyone other except Chosen Ones. It is already hard to extract meaning (you can read “ideas”) from books with narrative formalized too much. So to make full use of people’s knowledge It might be not useful to be biased towards narrowness which can disconnect people’s knowledge and prevent understanding.
So to me personally it’s not a virtue to put a narrow approach on a pedestal. Whatever thought trick humanity came up with and while it’s working well—it’s rational to me to use in the right situation. But you still can go deeper and be precise as much as you want if it proves to be worthy in (how ironically) a precise way.
This text smells like pretty much emotional rationalization (in the psychological sense) of a certain biased point of view.
Actually, I’m not an enemy of narrow questions, and in the same way, I’m not an enemy of the plurality of meanings. The focused, narrow, formal approach is of great power indeed, but it is also restricted and new theories are being constructed again and again—outside of a narrow framework and back to some new one.
Consider a man who just learned to drink from a certain brown glass. Then, he sees a steel mug. They are quite different objects, with different properties, different names, and meanings attached in different linguistic contexts. If he can not grasp that what is common, he won’t be able to generalize the knowledge at all.
But somehow this trivial observation (consequences of which play a role on every layer of abstraction in thinking) tends to be forgotten when dozens of layers of abstraction are being created, the definition starts to battle the actual meaning until the latter is completely lost and one starts to rationalize upon those layers of abstractions while common sense whispers: “It’s damn meaningless, it doesn’t help to understand anything”. What happens then? Then comes the time to go back to the connected uncertain world.
There is more. A natural language contains a vast plurality of word meanings which actually help to look at things from different angles and to learn such commonalities by reading words in different contexts. If you will defy such a reality of natural language and human thinking you would risk becoming isolated in bubbles of extremely precise meanings that not understood by anyone other except Chosen Ones. It is already hard to extract meaning (you can read “ideas”) from books with narrative formalized too much. So to make full use of people’s knowledge It might be not useful to be biased towards narrowness which can disconnect people’s knowledge and prevent understanding.
So to me personally it’s not a virtue to put a narrow approach on a pedestal. Whatever thought trick humanity came up with and while it’s working well—it’s rational to me to use in the right situation. But you still can go deeper and be precise as much as you want if it proves to be worthy in (how ironically) a precise way.