Unfortunately, words of natural language have the annoying property that it’s often very hard to tell if people are disagreeing about the extension or the meaning. It’s also hard to tell what disagreement about the meaning of a word actually is.
Our two worlds would then not actually disagree about ethics the concept, they instead disagree about “ethics” the word, much like ‘tier’ means one thing in English and another thing in german.
The analogy is flawed. German and English speakers don’t disagree about the word (conceived as a string of phonemes; otherwise “tier” and “Tier” are not identical), and it’s not at all clear that disagreement about the meaning of words is the same thing as speaking two different languages. It’s certainly phenomenologically pretty different.
I do agree that reducing it to speaking different languages is one way to dissolve disagreement about meaning. But I’m not convinced that this is the right approach. Some words are in acute danger of being dissolved with the question in that it will turn out that almost everyone has their own meaning for the word, and everybody is talking past each other. It also leaves you with a need to explain where this persistent illusion that people are disagreeing when they’re in fact just talking past each other (which persists even when you explain to them that they’re just speaking two different languages; they’ll often say no, they’re not, they’re speaking the same language but the other person is using the word wrongly) comes from.
Of course, all of this is connected to the problem that nobody seems to know what kind of thing a meaning is.
Unfortunately, words of natural language have the annoying property that it’s often very hard to tell if people are disagreeing about the extension or the meaning. It’s also hard to tell what disagreement about the meaning of a word actually is.
The analogy is flawed. German and English speakers don’t disagree about the word (conceived as a string of phonemes; otherwise “tier” and “Tier” are not identical), and it’s not at all clear that disagreement about the meaning of words is the same thing as speaking two different languages. It’s certainly phenomenologically pretty different.
I do agree that reducing it to speaking different languages is one way to dissolve disagreement about meaning. But I’m not convinced that this is the right approach. Some words are in acute danger of being dissolved with the question in that it will turn out that almost everyone has their own meaning for the word, and everybody is talking past each other. It also leaves you with a need to explain where this persistent illusion that people are disagreeing when they’re in fact just talking past each other (which persists even when you explain to them that they’re just speaking two different languages; they’ll often say no, they’re not, they’re speaking the same language but the other person is using the word wrongly) comes from.
Of course, all of this is connected to the problem that nobody seems to know what kind of thing a meaning is.