the use and abuse of words
There is a thin line between genius and madness, and I definitely teeter, if not already, on the madness side, but bear with me a bit. I will say, linguistics is an interesting field. Too bad I will never formally study it, and so it might confuse me forever.
I think Wittgenstein was right in recognizing how most “problems” are because we suck at using language and not knowing when we fail it. A lot of social discourse fails because people disagree about definitions, and consequently, evidence, and consequently, the “Truth” of a claim.
using words
People use words. This post is a wall of words. Using words is a ubiquitous thing in both speech and reading. What about 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.”
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition
Take the definition of “blue”. With this definition, I can say “A clear daytime sky has the color property Blue”. The statement would be a true statement. The statement would still be a true statement if the person were color-blind and perceived a blue. There’s little to debate about the use of the term. A problem arises when you fix blue to say a specific empirical band of light. Now, a color-blind person can be said to not see the same blue.
the abuse of words1
Unlike a word like “blue” which has stable “referents”, more controversial words like “dangerous” or divisive categorizations like “riot/protest” are where abuse occurs. The same thing appears in design when a client says they want a system to be “fast”, well, what do they mean?
I find it worth understanding the mechanics of these words as they are consistently weaponized. The decision to label a group a riot or a protest, an action just or unjust, and a person dangerous has more implications than saying “the sky is blue”.
Starting with the word “dangerous”, words like it are 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 schema?” It can be answered, and it is pragmatic they are answered.
The problem is, most academic studies, personal attitudes, and arguments will 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 I despair about rhetoric because it allows a person to cite data and, in a sense, have their claim be “true”, but not “True”.
cognition and perception
The other point I despair of is how “cognition affects perception”. It’s not too crazy to say “perception affects cognition”. The things we can see, sense, ultimately affect how we can talk about things and theorize about them. The reverse is problematic because what do you mean by how we talk about the world affects how we can see it?
“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 any other way falsifying to ourselves what may be going on around us.”
Edgar Schein
The quote is talking about concepts probably familiar to everyone: “cognitive dissonance” or “mental gymnastics”. I have had the same discussion in this section of a blog about bias. The human capability to knowingly or unknowingly and ignorantly be married to our beliefs is a dangerous one. It happens to people who are “self-aware” or not.
The point here is: the decision to label “riot or protest” has been made before the actual event happens. It’s “soritical” for lack of a better word. Similar to the discussion of dangerous, if there was 1 person in the crowd doing violence, it might be in a sense true to say it is a “riot.”
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Do these words have a vague predicate or will they never have a “true” one? ↩