Tabooing is a risky operation. One can easily replace a word with a substance that is wrong, that doesn’t capture one’s intended meaning. Consider example 3, where it’s tempting to taboo “should” with some formal definition of rationality from decision theory. If you were to taboo “should” in that sentence with the mathematical definition of expected utility maximization from CDT, for example, you would get a definitive “false” for the truth value of the sentence, and we would no longer be able to have a discussion that eventually leads to TDT and related ideas.
So before we taboo a word, we need to make sure we fully understand what we mean by it. When you’re doing this with a word like “should” which seems to mean different things in different contexts, it seems worth asking whether there is some sort of common meaning in all of those contexts that’s not immediately obvious, or if there is some other explanation for why the same word seems to be used for different purposes. This is what I was trying to do in my post, but I’d say that my understanding of the meaning of “should” is still insufficient for me to safely taboo it in many circumstances and I’ll have to keep using the word for the foreseeable future.
before we taboo a word, we need to make sure we fully understand what we mean by it.
Well, yes. As you say, tabooing a word with some more detailed description of something I didn’t actually mean in the first place is an error… which is to say, I shouldn’t do it… which is to say, it has negative expected value. (At least, that’s what I think I meant. Perhaps I’m mistaken.)
But if I don’t know what I mean by a word, and therefore can’t correctly taboo it, continuing to use the word unreflectively doesn’t really help us communicate clearly either. (Is that to say I shouldn’t do it? Maybe.)
So, sure, maybe the various uses of “should” have some core commonality and sufficient analysis of that problem will make explicit some important insight about the nature of whatever that core commonality refers to which is currently implicit in our language use. In which case continued analysis of that core commonality might reveal useful insights and is therefore worth doing.
But that still doesn’t seem like a reason to use “should” in my conversations once I’ve convinced myself that I don’t know what I mean by it.
So, what happens if I do something else instead?
Well, for example, I was about to write “So, what should I do instead?” and, recognizing the irony, stopped and rethought what question I wanted to ask. Did I in the process taboo “should”? Perhaps not… it’s quite possible that the question I asked is importantly different from the one I initially meant to ask. (For example, the question I asked is explicitly consequentialist, and the one I initially meant to ask is not, which might be a change of meaning or it might not be.)
Am I worse off for having done this? Would I have been better off to retain the original wording?
Well, if it turns out that there is value to a deontological view of ethics, then my replacing my original vague statement with an explicitly consequentialist statement has negative expected value. If not, then it has positive value. Either I think that’s more likely than the alternative, or less likely. But it seems like I pretty much have to make a choice here based on incomplete information and my best guess.
To say “I don’t know enough to taboo ‘should’ so I’ll keep using it the way I’m accustomed to” seems unjustified.
But if I don’t know what I mean by a word, and therefore can’t correctly taboo it, continuing to use the word unreflectively doesn’t really help us communicate clearly either.
I don’t think that’s quite right: there’s enough of a gap between ‘knowing how to use a word’ and ‘knowing how to define a word or replace it with other language’ that I don’t think it’s reasonable to take the latter as decisive for whether or not we should feel comfortable carrying on with a discussion.
For example, if you asked me to taboo ‘should’ I would be flabbergasted. I would have no idea what to replace it with, and I would be tempted to say that its not a tabooable word. On the other hand, I think I can say with some confidence that I use the word dozens of times a day, thousands of times a year, and I almost never use it in a way that sounds strange to anyone. Evidence which seems to suggest I know exactly how to use the word, despite not knowing (at all) how to taboo it. And if I can use a word perfectly, I think it stands to reason I can carry on a discussion with it even if I can’t taboo it, so long as the discussion isn’t about the definition of that word.
If I can’t explain clearly or coherently what I mean when I say I should do something, I have no confidence that I mean anything coherent when I say it, and I have no confidence that what you understand by it is what I mean by it.
If I can’t explain clearly or coherently what I mean when I say I should do something, I have no confidence that I mean anything coherent when I say it, and I have no confidence that what you understand by it is what I mean by it.
There are two things (at least) you could mean here, one of which I agree with. You could mean “If you say ‘You should vote your pocket book’ yet you can’t clearly explain what you mean by ‘you should vote your pocket book’, then you can have no confidence that you mean anything particularly coherent by ‘you should vote your pocket book’.” I agree with this, but it seems to be beside the point.
But the issue of tabooing is different. If you mean “If you say ‘you should vote your pocket book’, but cannot taboo or define the word ‘should’ then you can have no confidence that you mean anything particularly coherent by ‘you should vote your pocket book’.” If this is what you mean, then I disagree and I think this is strongly contra-indicated by the linguistic practices of everyone around us. How many people, after all, could come up with a taboo or definition for ‘should’? Yet I imagine this philosophical oversight would not prevent anyone (if they were so capable) from explaining what ‘you should vote your pocket book’ means.
I agree that if I am confident that I know what the sentence means (as you seem to be), that should increase my confidence that I also know what “should” means in that sentence (ditto “vote” and “pocketbook”).
But I’m not confident that I know what that sentence means, propositionally anyway, and your stated reasons for such confidence (that lots of people use the sentence without noticing a problem) don’t seem compelling to me, because lots of people regularly utter all kinds of sentences whose propositional content is deeply unclear. And, in particular, the ambiguity surrounding that sentence has not much to do with “vote your pocketbook” (which, while a highly metaphorical phrase, I’m pretty confident I understand) and quite a lot to do with “you should X”.
How many people, after all, could come up with a taboo or definition for ‘should’?
Very few. Very few could even come up with an explanation of what they mean by “should” in a particular sentence (such as “you should vote your pocket book”) which is a noticeably simpler task.
That isn’t somehow evidence that they know what it means. Quite the contrary.
because lots of people regularly utter all kinds of sentences whose propositional content is deeply unclear.
So, suppose a pair of construction workers, Bob and Jill.
Bob: Jill, pass me that hammer.
Jill: Which one?
Bob: The one I want has a black handle.
Jill: I see it, here you are.
Let’s posit that Bob could not taboo or define ‘has’. Jill could not taboo or define ‘are’. I think most people couldn’t, but we might disagree on that. I think they are likely to have trouble with ‘that’, ‘one’, ‘want’, ‘see’ and ‘it’.
Are you saying that the propositional contents of Bob and Jill’s utterances are deeply unclear, despite the fact that their conversation goes off without a hitch, and Bob gets the hammer he wants?
I am saying that my confidence in the clarity of the propositional contents of Bob and Jill’s utterances (to me, to Bob, to Jill, etc.) does not rest solely on the fact that Bob gets the hammer he wants. (Supposing that Bob in fact got the hammer he wanted.) Specifically, it also depends on a bunch of other things that I can roughly summarize as “imagining myself in Bob’s position and thinking about what I would mean by Bob’s utterances and what I would understand by Jill’s, and similarly imagining myself in Jill’s position”.
Still less does it depend on the fact that Bob and Jill feel content with the interaction (which they might even if Bob didn’t get the hammer he wanted, but instead got some other hammer that solves his problem… or if Bob didn’t really give a damn about the hammer, he just wanted to interact with Jill… or if various other contentment-producing pragmatic utterance-evaluation frames were in play).
So, to be clear, you’re not saying that being able to define or taboo the words you’re using (or hearing) in a given sentence is a necessary condition on having a perfectly clear understanding of the propositional content of that sentence. Is that right?
I’m saying that my inability to ‘define’ (for a particular understanding of defining, closer to the LW usage of “taboo” than, say, what a dictionary does) a word in a sentence is strong evidence that I lack a perfectly clear understanding of the propositional content of that sentence.
I might nevertheless be confident in my propositional (or other) understanding of that sentence, if I had significant enough alternative sources of evidence of that understanding.
So, agreed, the ability to define/taboo the words isn’t a necessary condition, it’s a source of significant evidence.
I see. I think we disagree on the contexts in which it is significant evidence against understanding the propositional content of that sentence. For example, I think being unable to taboo ‘utility function’ probably means one doesn’t understand it and that one’s use of it in sentences is confused. This is probably true of all philosophical or scientific terms of art. I don’t think this is true of ‘should’, or what you might call more everyday language. And I’m inclined to say that the tabooing or defining of such everyday language almost always does more harm than good. But thats a matter of details.
Tabooing is a risky operation. One can easily replace a word with a substance that is wrong, that doesn’t capture one’s intended meaning. Consider example 3, where it’s tempting to taboo “should” with some formal definition of rationality from decision theory. If you were to taboo “should” in that sentence with the mathematical definition of expected utility maximization from CDT, for example, you would get a definitive “false” for the truth value of the sentence, and we would no longer be able to have a discussion that eventually leads to TDT and related ideas.
So before we taboo a word, we need to make sure we fully understand what we mean by it. When you’re doing this with a word like “should” which seems to mean different things in different contexts, it seems worth asking whether there is some sort of common meaning in all of those contexts that’s not immediately obvious, or if there is some other explanation for why the same word seems to be used for different purposes. This is what I was trying to do in my post, but I’d say that my understanding of the meaning of “should” is still insufficient for me to safely taboo it in many circumstances and I’ll have to keep using the word for the foreseeable future.
Well, yes. As you say, tabooing a word with some more detailed description of something I didn’t actually mean in the first place is an error… which is to say, I shouldn’t do it… which is to say, it has negative expected value. (At least, that’s what I think I meant. Perhaps I’m mistaken.)
But if I don’t know what I mean by a word, and therefore can’t correctly taboo it, continuing to use the word unreflectively doesn’t really help us communicate clearly either. (Is that to say I shouldn’t do it? Maybe.)
So, sure, maybe the various uses of “should” have some core commonality and sufficient analysis of that problem will make explicit some important insight about the nature of whatever that core commonality refers to which is currently implicit in our language use. In which case continued analysis of that core commonality might reveal useful insights and is therefore worth doing.
But that still doesn’t seem like a reason to use “should” in my conversations once I’ve convinced myself that I don’t know what I mean by it.
So, what happens if I do something else instead?
Well, for example, I was about to write “So, what should I do instead?” and, recognizing the irony, stopped and rethought what question I wanted to ask. Did I in the process taboo “should”? Perhaps not… it’s quite possible that the question I asked is importantly different from the one I initially meant to ask. (For example, the question I asked is explicitly consequentialist, and the one I initially meant to ask is not, which might be a change of meaning or it might not be.)
Am I worse off for having done this? Would I have been better off to retain the original wording?
Well, if it turns out that there is value to a deontological view of ethics, then my replacing my original vague statement with an explicitly consequentialist statement has negative expected value. If not, then it has positive value. Either I think that’s more likely than the alternative, or less likely. But it seems like I pretty much have to make a choice here based on incomplete information and my best guess.
To say “I don’t know enough to taboo ‘should’ so I’ll keep using it the way I’m accustomed to” seems unjustified.
I don’t think that’s quite right: there’s enough of a gap between ‘knowing how to use a word’ and ‘knowing how to define a word or replace it with other language’ that I don’t think it’s reasonable to take the latter as decisive for whether or not we should feel comfortable carrying on with a discussion.
For example, if you asked me to taboo ‘should’ I would be flabbergasted. I would have no idea what to replace it with, and I would be tempted to say that its not a tabooable word. On the other hand, I think I can say with some confidence that I use the word dozens of times a day, thousands of times a year, and I almost never use it in a way that sounds strange to anyone. Evidence which seems to suggest I know exactly how to use the word, despite not knowing (at all) how to taboo it. And if I can use a word perfectly, I think it stands to reason I can carry on a discussion with it even if I can’t taboo it, so long as the discussion isn’t about the definition of that word.
Yeah, this is exactly what I’m disputing.
If I can’t explain clearly or coherently what I mean when I say I should do something, I have no confidence that I mean anything coherent when I say it, and I have no confidence that what you understand by it is what I mean by it.
There are two things (at least) you could mean here, one of which I agree with. You could mean “If you say ‘You should vote your pocket book’ yet you can’t clearly explain what you mean by ‘you should vote your pocket book’, then you can have no confidence that you mean anything particularly coherent by ‘you should vote your pocket book’.” I agree with this, but it seems to be beside the point.
But the issue of tabooing is different. If you mean “If you say ‘you should vote your pocket book’, but cannot taboo or define the word ‘should’ then you can have no confidence that you mean anything particularly coherent by ‘you should vote your pocket book’.” If this is what you mean, then I disagree and I think this is strongly contra-indicated by the linguistic practices of everyone around us. How many people, after all, could come up with a taboo or definition for ‘should’? Yet I imagine this philosophical oversight would not prevent anyone (if they were so capable) from explaining what ‘you should vote your pocket book’ means.
I agree that if I am confident that I know what the sentence means (as you seem to be), that should increase my confidence that I also know what “should” means in that sentence (ditto “vote” and “pocketbook”).
But I’m not confident that I know what that sentence means, propositionally anyway, and your stated reasons for such confidence (that lots of people use the sentence without noticing a problem) don’t seem compelling to me, because lots of people regularly utter all kinds of sentences whose propositional content is deeply unclear. And, in particular, the ambiguity surrounding that sentence has not much to do with “vote your pocketbook” (which, while a highly metaphorical phrase, I’m pretty confident I understand) and quite a lot to do with “you should X”.
Very few. Very few could even come up with an explanation of what they mean by “should” in a particular sentence (such as “you should vote your pocket book”) which is a noticeably simpler task.
That isn’t somehow evidence that they know what it means. Quite the contrary.
So, suppose a pair of construction workers, Bob and Jill.
Bob: Jill, pass me that hammer. Jill: Which one? Bob: The one I want has a black handle. Jill: I see it, here you are.
Let’s posit that Bob could not taboo or define ‘has’. Jill could not taboo or define ‘are’. I think most people couldn’t, but we might disagree on that. I think they are likely to have trouble with ‘that’, ‘one’, ‘want’, ‘see’ and ‘it’.
Are you saying that the propositional contents of Bob and Jill’s utterances are deeply unclear, despite the fact that their conversation goes off without a hitch, and Bob gets the hammer he wants?
No, I’m not saying that.
I am saying that my confidence in the clarity of the propositional contents of Bob and Jill’s utterances (to me, to Bob, to Jill, etc.) does not rest solely on the fact that Bob gets the hammer he wants. (Supposing that Bob in fact got the hammer he wanted.) Specifically, it also depends on a bunch of other things that I can roughly summarize as “imagining myself in Bob’s position and thinking about what I would mean by Bob’s utterances and what I would understand by Jill’s, and similarly imagining myself in Jill’s position”.
Still less does it depend on the fact that Bob and Jill feel content with the interaction (which they might even if Bob didn’t get the hammer he wanted, but instead got some other hammer that solves his problem… or if Bob didn’t really give a damn about the hammer, he just wanted to interact with Jill… or if various other contentment-producing pragmatic utterance-evaluation frames were in play).
So, to be clear, you’re not saying that being able to define or taboo the words you’re using (or hearing) in a given sentence is a necessary condition on having a perfectly clear understanding of the propositional content of that sentence. Is that right?
I’m saying that my inability to ‘define’ (for a particular understanding of defining, closer to the LW usage of “taboo” than, say, what a dictionary does) a word in a sentence is strong evidence that I lack a perfectly clear understanding of the propositional content of that sentence.
I might nevertheless be confident in my propositional (or other) understanding of that sentence, if I had significant enough alternative sources of evidence of that understanding.
So, agreed, the ability to define/taboo the words isn’t a necessary condition, it’s a source of significant evidence.
I see. I think we disagree on the contexts in which it is significant evidence against understanding the propositional content of that sentence. For example, I think being unable to taboo ‘utility function’ probably means one doesn’t understand it and that one’s use of it in sentences is confused. This is probably true of all philosophical or scientific terms of art. I don’t think this is true of ‘should’, or what you might call more everyday language. And I’m inclined to say that the tabooing or defining of such everyday language almost always does more harm than good. But thats a matter of details.
I share your understanding of our disagreement.