I think the word “paradox” is ill-defined, because “seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory” is a “2-place word”—seems X to whom?
Thanks, it’ll take me some time to digest this link. Can you suggest a better definition and would this anecdote be included or excluded? If excluded, how would you define this odd exchange?
I am not a linguist—maybe there is a more appropriate label for this thing, but I don’t know it.
The idea of the link is: you shouldn’t say things like “the conclusion seems senseless” but rather “the conclusion doesn’t make any sense to person X (but it could make sense to some other person Y)”. Otherwise you get the implicit assumption that things make or don’t make sense equally to all listeners; that is that “not making sense” is an inherent property of the conclusion, instead of a relation between the conclusion and the listener.
I think the word “paradox” is ill-defined, because “seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory” is a “2-place word”—seems X to whom?
Thanks, it’ll take me some time to digest this link. Can you suggest a better definition and would this anecdote be included or excluded? If excluded, how would you define this odd exchange?
I am not a linguist—maybe there is a more appropriate label for this thing, but I don’t know it.
The idea of the link is: you shouldn’t say things like “the conclusion seems senseless” but rather “the conclusion doesn’t make any sense to person X (but it could make sense to some other person Y)”. Otherwise you get the implicit assumption that things make or don’t make sense equally to all listeners; that is that “not making sense” is an inherent property of the conclusion, instead of a relation between the conclusion and the listener.