This smells like a framing debate. More importantly, if an article is defining a common word in an unconventional way, my first assumption will be that it’s trying to argumentatively attack its own meaning while pretending it’s defeating the original meaning. I’m not sure it matters how clearly you’re defining your meaning; due to how human cognition works, this may be impossible to avoid without creating new terms.
In other words, I don’t think it’s that Scott missed the definitions as that he reflexively disregarded them as a rhetorical trick.
N of 1, but I realized the intended meaning of “impaired” and “disabled” before even reading the original articles and adopted them into my language. As you can see from this article, adopting new and more precise and differentiated definitions for these two terms hasn’t harmed my ability to understand that not all functional impediments are caused by socially imposed disability.
So impossible? No.
If Scott had accurately described the articles he quoted before dealing with the perceived rhetorical trickery, I’d have let it slide. But he didn’t, and he’s criticized inaccurately representing the contents of cited literature plenty of times in the past.
This smells like a framing debate. More importantly, if an article is defining a common word in an unconventional way, my first assumption will be that it’s trying to argumentatively attack its own meaning while pretending it’s defeating the original meaning. I’m not sure it matters how clearly you’re defining your meaning; due to how human cognition works, this may be impossible to avoid without creating new terms.
In other words, I don’t think it’s that Scott missed the definitions as that he reflexively disregarded them as a rhetorical trick.
N of 1, but I realized the intended meaning of “impaired” and “disabled” before even reading the original articles and adopted them into my language. As you can see from this article, adopting new and more precise and differentiated definitions for these two terms hasn’t harmed my ability to understand that not all functional impediments are caused by socially imposed disability.
So impossible? No.
If Scott had accurately described the articles he quoted before dealing with the perceived rhetorical trickery, I’d have let it slide. But he didn’t, and he’s criticized inaccurately representing the contents of cited literature plenty of times in the past.