this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Language is an imperfect medium with inherent limitations, intended to convey thoughts from the mind of one person to another. Thus, context is critical. The tragedy of humans not being telepathic.
A large portion of this argument is between two factions trying to have a complex discussion regarding at least four different things using only two words; male and female. The discussion however expands to biology, stereotypes, gender norms, rights, etc.
To me, everyone arguing is a moron for trying to have a discussion without first agreeing on axioms and vocabulary. Male and female are not enough words for a discussion involving this many variables.
It's like, hey, please reconcile general relativity, quantum mechanics, and metaphysics using only X and Y. It just screams absurdity.
You might want to look at Wittgenstein.
In his early work he went hard on this approach, and insisted that "hey philosophy is dumb", just agree on the definitions and then chase through the implications.
In his later work he realised that this is impossible. Words have contextual meaning that is revealed by their usage and you can't nail down full and complete definitions in advance.
What you're talking about absolutely can and will never work. We have tried it and seen it fail.
The general point is that the "what is a woman" question is still word games rather than an honest attempt at finding truth and understanding
Yes exactly. "What is a chair?" These semantic boundaries may seem annoying and pedantic to explore at first, but can be pretty interesting once examined especially at a neurolinguistic level.
Yeah, let's spend the next 3 days hashing out all our vocabulary so we could have an argument...
I get the idea and I agree that people who won't come to the same understanding of words and concepts cannot have a discussion about a topic that uses those words and concepts. But if you think anyone is going to sit down and be "First we must get our axioms and vocabularies in sync" you're dreaming.
A practical approach is to assume people have roughly the same understanding of vocabulary so you could start the discussion. When discrepancies present themselves that's when you shift to finding a common understanding of axioms, concepts, words or whatever you want to call them. Morons are the people who refuse compromise on anything they believe in (including axioms and vocabulary).
It is safe to assume that many people would not agree on definitions at the start. So your strategy sounds good, but it's unrealistic in many circumstances.
Also, one faction is typically trying to avoid a complex discussion. They want to pretend life is simpler than it is.