I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
“There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.
I agree that people hearing Zack say “I think this is insane” will believe he has a lower P(this is insane) than people hearing him say “This is insane”, but I’m not sure that establishes the words mean that.
If Alice goes around saying “I’m kinda conservative” it would be wise to infer that she is probably conservative. If Bob goes around saying “That’s based” in the modern internet sense of the term, it would also be wise to infer that he is probably a conservative. But based doesn’t mean Bob is conservative, semantically it just means something like “cool”, and then it happens to be the case that this particular synonym for cool is used more often by conservatives than liberals.
If it turned out that Alice voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, one would have a reasonable case that she had used words wrong when she said she was kinda conservative, those words mean basically the opposite of her circumstances. If it turned out that Bob voted party line Democrat and loved Bernie Sanders, then one might advise him “your word choice is causing people to form a false impression, you should maybe stop saying based”, but it would be weird to suggest this was about what based means. There’s just an observable regularity of our society that people who say based tend to be conservative, like how people who say “edema” tend to be doctors.
If Zack is interested in accurately conveying his level of confidence, he would do well to reserve “That’s insane” for cases where he is very confident and say “That seems insane” when he is less confident. If he instead decided to use “That’s insane” in all cases, that would be misleading. But I think it is significant that this would be a different kind of misleading than if he were to use the words “I am very confident that is insane”, even if the statements cause observers to make the exact same updates.
(My point in the comment above is merely “this is not contentless filler; these distinctions are real in practice; if adding them feels onerous or tedious it’s more likely because one is blind to, or does not care about, a real distinction, than because there’s no real difference and people want you to waste time adding meaningless words.” A lot of people act along lines that go something like “well these words SHOULD be taken to mean X, even though they predictably and reliably get interpreted to mean Y, so I’m going to keep saying them and when other people hear ‘Y’ I’ll blame them, and when other people ask me to say something different I will act put-upon.” <—That’s a caricature/extremer version of the actual position the actual Gordon takes; I’m not claiming Gordon’s saying or doing anything anywhere near that dumb, but it’s clear that there really are differences in how these different phrases are perceived, at the level of hundreds-of-readers.)
Is it wrong for Bob the Democrat to say “based” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a conservative? Is it wrong for Bob the plumber to say “edema” because it might lead people to incorrectly infer he is a a doctor? If I told Bob to start saying “swelling” instead of “edema” then I feel like he would have some right to defend his word use: no one thinks edema literally means “swelling, and also I am a doctor” even if they update in a way that kind of looks like it does.
I don’t think we have a significant disagreement here, I was merely trying to highlight a distinction your comment didn’t dwell on, about different ways statements can be perceived differently. “There is swelling” vs “There is swelling and also I am a doctor” literally means something different while “There is swelling” vs “There is edema” merely implies something different to people familiar with who tends to use which words.
Yes, but I don’t think this is particularly analogous, specifically because the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “swelling” and “edema” seems to me like it’s likely at least an order of magnitude smaller than the difference in interpretation, in practice, between “this is crazy” and “this sounds crazy to me.”
As for whether either of these usages are wrong, it depends entirely on whether you want to successfully communicate or not. If you reliably cause your listener to receive concepts that are different than those you were trying to transmit, and this is down to utterly predictable boring simple truths about your language usage, it’s certainly your call if you want to keep doing a thing you know will cause wrong beliefs in the people around you.
Separately, 100% of the people I’ve encountered using the word “based” are radical leftist transfolk, and there are like twelve of them?
I understood “based” to be a 4chan-ism but I didn’t think very hard about the example, it is possible I chose a word that does not actually work in the way I had meant to illustrate. Hopefully the intended meaning was still clear.