I think that attempting to come up with a verbal formalization of our underlying logic and then doing what that formalization dictates is akin to “playing baseball with verbal probabilities”...
I wonder if the extent to which one thinks in words is anti-correlated with sharing that intuition.
I’m a mostly non-verbal thinker and strongly in favor of your arguments. On the other hand, I once dismissed the idea of emotional vocabulary, feeling that it was superfluous at best, and more likely caused problems via reductive, cookie-cutter introspection. Why use someone else’s fixed terminology for my emotional states, when I have perfectly good nonverbal handles on them? I figured out later that some people have trouble distinguishing between various versions of “feeling bad” (for example), and that linguistic handles can be really helpful for them in understanding and responding to those states. (That also moved me favorably towards supplementing my own introspection with verbal labels.)
I don’t think that kind of difference really bears on your arguments here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a typical-mind thing going on in the distribution of underlying intuitions.
I wonder if the extent to which one thinks in words is anti-correlated with sharing that intuition.
I’m a mostly non-verbal thinker and strongly in favor of your arguments. On the other hand, I once dismissed the idea of emotional vocabulary, feeling that it was superfluous at best, and more likely caused problems via reductive, cookie-cutter introspection. Why use someone else’s fixed terminology for my emotional states, when I have perfectly good nonverbal handles on them? I figured out later that some people have trouble distinguishing between various versions of “feeling bad” (for example), and that linguistic handles can be really helpful for them in understanding and responding to those states. (That also moved me favorably towards supplementing my own introspection with verbal labels.)
I don’t think that kind of difference really bears on your arguments here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a typical-mind thing going on in the distribution of underlying intuitions.