People would often say, “I don’t believe in global warming.” And interviews with scientists tried to discern whether they did or did not believe in global warming.
I note the following:
1) You claim that there’s a common term that makes its surrounding question wrong
2) BUT it would be corrected by a trivial substitution,
3) and the people using the term seem to understand the issues you raise (i.e. you needn’t be certain global warming catastrophes will happen in order to justifiably take countermeasures)
Together, that suggests that you went wrong somewhere, and people were actually using the term differently than you thought. Remember, words are hidden inferences. They arise whenver people identify a usefully-clumped cluster of thingspace. In the above, “believe” grabs a set of things in thingspace, and one attribute that makes it fall into the above “believe” category is “we should act as if it will happen”.
So it’s true that people need to carefully distinguish the separate issues you raised, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a wrong question.
P.S. Oops, I guess I fell into the same trap I just accused you of. Using a word that doesn’t naturally make the distinctions critical for the problem you’re looking at, does make it a wrong question.
Any given word can’t make the distinction critical to all problems. The word “tiger” is useless for that problem as well. A word itself is wrong if it’s not useful enough or if it provokes abuse, that is wrong usage. The usage of a word is wrong if it confuses human thinking.
I note the following:
1) You claim that there’s a common term that makes its surrounding question wrong 2) BUT it would be corrected by a trivial substitution, 3) and the people using the term seem to understand the issues you raise (i.e. you needn’t be certain global warming catastrophes will happen in order to justifiably take countermeasures)
Together, that suggests that you went wrong somewhere, and people were actually using the term differently than you thought. Remember, words are hidden inferences. They arise whenver people identify a usefully-clumped cluster of thingspace. In the above, “believe” grabs a set of things in thingspace, and one attribute that makes it fall into the above “believe” category is “we should act as if it will happen”.
So it’s true that people need to carefully distinguish the separate issues you raised, but that’s not the same as saying it’s a wrong question.
P.S. Oops, I guess I fell into the same trap I just accused you of. Using a word that doesn’t naturally make the distinctions critical for the problem you’re looking at, does make it a wrong question.
Any given word can’t make the distinction critical to all problems. The word “tiger” is useless for that problem as well. A word itself is wrong if it’s not useful enough or if it provokes abuse, that is wrong usage. The usage of a word is wrong if it confuses human thinking.