Eliezer, your post appears to at least in part be animated by a frustration with people who are incapable/unwilling/don’t make a serious enough effort to both pursue interesting tangents that could later be developed into other full-length conversations and stay on topic overall. Granted, this probably describes a vast majority of people. Nevertheless, presuming the straying from topic though tangent acknowledgment to be an affliction of conversation with all people unfortunately leads you imply a necessary trade-off between the values of rigorous word definitions and untangling all those “really important” topics. While I come to this from a weakness for distinction-making, I don’t think that weakness really impairs my resolve to get through what you imply (and what I’m strongly inclined to agree) are the larger topics. In other words, I haven’t found interests in semantic and non-semantic questions to be mutually exclusive.
While I agree that “Redefining a word won’t change the facts of history one way or the other,” I find the “this is exactly the wrong way to look at the problem. What you really want to know—what the argument was originally about” part of the complaint to be both unpleasantly constraining and inaccurate. That there isn’t “exactly the wrong way to look at a problem”—what it is is defining a whole other area of interest. If in fact every time such a new area of interest is defined some other earlier problem risks getting abandoned altogether, then sure, I agree, that’s absolutely no good, but I just haven’t found that to be the necessary case with all conversations.
With this comment I’ll only express a tiny insight into the semantic part of the conversation (and I understand that addressing it doesn’t actually get at what you hope to discuss at full length, but whatever.) The whole question of whether “someone who has a definite opinion about the existence of at least one God, e.g., assigning a probability lower than 10% or higher than 90% to the existence of Zeus” should be called a “religious” person can be niftily neutralized by a slight but, I think, helpful rephrasing of same: Should that person be considered to hold religious opinions? If you agree that this new question doesn’t omit anything interesting from the original question (and you may not), then you may notice that the added benefit of such a rephrasing is that it blocks that whole silly digression about Stalin’s religion being Communism.
If you’re off-put by this kind of nitpickiness, perhaps you should reconsider: I think that getting your interlocutor to recognize that he or she is introducing an entirely new topic—semantics—rather than expanding on an original one may help you both remember that an answer to the semantic question doesn’t even begin to address the non-semantic question. (This isn’t true in all cases, but it is in this one.)
I find that kind of distinction-making valuable because it doesn’t limit the the topics “worthy” of consideration and ensures that interesting questions don’t get abandoned. Putting aside the opportunity cost of one discussion over the other, everyone should be happy about this, no?
Eliezer, your post appears to at least in part be animated by a frustration with people who are incapable/unwilling/don’t make a serious enough effort to both pursue interesting tangents that could later be developed into other full-length conversations and stay on topic overall. Granted, this probably describes a vast majority of people. Nevertheless, presuming the straying from topic though tangent acknowledgment to be an affliction of conversation with all people unfortunately leads you imply a necessary trade-off between the values of rigorous word definitions and untangling all those “really important” topics. While I come to this from a weakness for distinction-making, I don’t think that weakness really impairs my resolve to get through what you imply (and what I’m strongly inclined to agree) are the larger topics. In other words, I haven’t found interests in semantic and non-semantic questions to be mutually exclusive.
While I agree that “Redefining a word won’t change the facts of history one way or the other,” I find the “this is exactly the wrong way to look at the problem. What you really want to know—what the argument was originally about” part of the complaint to be both unpleasantly constraining and inaccurate. That there isn’t “exactly the wrong way to look at a problem”—what it is is defining a whole other area of interest. If in fact every time such a new area of interest is defined some other earlier problem risks getting abandoned altogether, then sure, I agree, that’s absolutely no good, but I just haven’t found that to be the necessary case with all conversations.
With this comment I’ll only express a tiny insight into the semantic part of the conversation (and I understand that addressing it doesn’t actually get at what you hope to discuss at full length, but whatever.) The whole question of whether “someone who has a definite opinion about the existence of at least one God, e.g., assigning a probability lower than 10% or higher than 90% to the existence of Zeus” should be called a “religious” person can be niftily neutralized by a slight but, I think, helpful rephrasing of same: Should that person be considered to hold religious opinions? If you agree that this new question doesn’t omit anything interesting from the original question (and you may not), then you may notice that the added benefit of such a rephrasing is that it blocks that whole silly digression about Stalin’s religion being Communism.
If you’re off-put by this kind of nitpickiness, perhaps you should reconsider: I think that getting your interlocutor to recognize that he or she is introducing an entirely new topic—semantics—rather than expanding on an original one may help you both remember that an answer to the semantic question doesn’t even begin to address the non-semantic question. (This isn’t true in all cases, but it is in this one.)
I find that kind of distinction-making valuable because it doesn’t limit the the topics “worthy” of consideration and ensures that interesting questions don’t get abandoned. Putting aside the opportunity cost of one discussion over the other, everyone should be happy about this, no?