Your first comment in this thread was responding to an exchange which was about object-level questions, and very clearly so. Like, if I say “I’m trying to figure out whether this animal in front me of is a wolf spider or a fishing spider”, and you respond by saying “‘is a wolf spider’ or ‘is a fishing spider’ is pure semantics, so what factual question are you trying to figure out”, that is a nonsensical thing to say. Do you agree? Or do you think that’s a perfectly sensible reply?
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.
You would probably not include actual hyperlinks if you were literally saying this in the real world, so that makes this example disanalogous to the usual cases.
(I do think the question would be meaningful in the usual cases, but adding hyperlinks seems like cheating as it binds the statement to a lot more information than there would otherwise be. It adds the same sort of information as you would be adding by tabooing the words.)
I added the hyperlinks for the benefit of any readers who have no idea what those terms mean. In a face-to-face conversation, if my interlocutor responded by asking “huh? ‘wolf spider’, ‘fishing spider’, what is that? I’ve never heard of these things”, then I could explain to them what the terms refer to; or we could use a smartphone or computer to access the very same Wikipedia pages which I linked to in my comment.
In any case you may feel free to mentally strip out the hyperlinks—that will not change my point, which is that any good-faith interlocutor will understand from the quoted comment (possibly after asking for an explanation, to rectify a total lack of domain knowledge) that the terms “wolf spider” and “fishing spider” refer to a pair of disjoint categories, and that my inquiry is into the question of which (if either!) of the two categories any given actual spider ought properly to be placed in.