the use and abuse of words
There is a thin line between genius and madness, and I definitely tether, if not, already on the madness side, but bear with me a bit.
I will first say, linguistics is a very interesting field, too bad I will never formally study it and so it might confuse me forever.
I think Wittgenstein was right in saying that most “problems” are because we suck at using language and not recognizing when we fail it (“not it failing us”).
That is a lot of social discourse fail because people disagree about definitions, and consequently evidence, and consequently the “Truth” of a claim. That is to say “rhetoric” is often applied for the sake of winning an argument and not actual capital T truth.
using words
People use words. This post is a wall of words. Using words is a pretty ubiquitous thing in both speech and reading. And the actually thing I want to talk about in the blog post is when we use language to say “True” things.
“blue: The hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between green and indigo, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 490 nanometers; any of a group of colors that may vary in lightness and saturation, whose hue is that of a clear daytime sky; one of the additive or light primaries; one of the psychological primary hues.”
Take the definition of blue. With this definition I can say “A clear daytime sky has the color property Blue” This would be a true statement. This would also still be a true statement if the person were color-blind and perceive a “different Blue”. There’s actually little to debate about the interpretation of the sentence unless you take the 420-490 nanometer part as important to the definition.
the abuse of words
Unlike a word like “Blue” that has relatively stable referents, more controversial words like “dangerous” or divisive categorizations like “riot/protest” is where rhetoric easily creeps in. The same thing appears in design i.e. when a client says they want a system to be “fast”, well what do they mean?
Personally, I find it worth to understand the mechanics of these words as they seem to be in the category of words that are everso fluous and yet consistently weaponized because so. The decision to call a gathering a riot or a protest, an action just or unjust, and a person dangerous has much more implications then saying “the sky is blue.”
Starting with the word “dangerous”, words like it are often abstract similar to words like “Justice”. The hard part comes when asking people to define the word and how they use it. “What is the prototypical dangerous or just thing?” It’s not impossible to answer and it is pragmatic that they are answered, especially if you want data’d claims right. This is precisely what “operationalization” does12.
The problem being, most academic studies, personal studies, and arguments will just say “X is dangerous” without saying how they “measured” the term and whether or not it is an acceptable measure. It is in this way that I despair about rhetoric because this allows a person to cite data all the way to Friday and in a sense have their claim be “true”, but not “True”.
cognition and perception
The other point I despair on is the notion that “cognition affects perception.” It’s not too crazy to say “perception affects cognition” right, the things we can see, sense, ultimately affects how we can talk about things and theorize about it. This is why the idea that enhancing these capabilities i.e. observing bacteria, telescopes for the universe, and the such has expanded “scientific understanding” of the world.
“the reexamination of basic assumptions temporarily destabilizes our cognitive and interpersonal world, releasing large quantities of basic anxiety… even if that means distorting, denying, projecting, or in other way falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us.”
The quote is talking about concepts probably familiar to everyone: “cognitive dissonance”, “mental gymnastics”, and so forth to the more perjorative framings.
I have made the same discussion in this section of a blog about bias3,but the human capability to knowingly or unknowingly and ignorantly be married to our beliefs is our most dangerous one. And it happens to people that are “self-aware” or not.
The point here being the decision to label a gathering “riot or protest” has been made long before the actual event happening. The background assumptions that are often then not implicit and unspoken have long made a decision. It’s very “soritical” for lack of a better words. Similar to the discussion of dangerous, if there was 1 person in the crowd doing violence it might be in a sense true that it is a “riot.”