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Originally Posted by LeftWingPenguin
Honestly, when did it become taboo in cour culture to regard the meaning of statements as important? Isn't that essentially what's at issue nine times out of ten? How can you possibly have an argument/debate if you're not allowed to address the question of what you or your opponent means by what they're saying?
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The thing is that most of the time, people do actually know what the other guy is trying to say. You've obviously got the theory, "before we can discuss X, we must define our terms in talking about X."
The problem is that if a person's got somewhat weak arguments about X, they can avoid having to actually justify what they think by diverting the whole discussion into a semantic argument. Semantics become then not the basis for a discussion, but the avoidance of a discussion.
It's also very difficult to define all your terms at the beginning of the discussion, because during the discussion new terms will come up.
"About X, when considering Y..."
"Oh we never thought about Y. What do you mean by Y?"
"I mean so-and-so."
"Well that is a very poor definition, because..."
And then again we're avoiding the actual intended topic of discussion.
For example, over in Tangency lately it was recently blandly asserted that blacks in America could not be racist. The poster just left the statement like that, without explanation. Now, plainly blacks can have negative attitudes about other races, or their own; this is what we usually call "racist." But the poster wasn't using the everyday definition of "racist," they were using the definition that a subset of the sociology field uses - "racism is a system of oppression of a group based on their race." "Racism" becomes like socialism or fascism - not an attitude, but a system of government.
Of course, this definition of "racism" is one which isn't used by people normally, and so the thread got derailed by a long discussion of whether or not blacks could be racist - "no, they cannot be racist, but they can have negative attitudes about other races," and so on.
So in a semantic discussion, you end up defending your definition of the word over others - because you can't move on until you've agreed on the terms, right? And the discussion dies or flames out.
The "racism" definition is far from the only thing that's been quibbled over in these and other rpg forums. Over in sjgames, someone carelessly said "narrativist" and had a Forgeite step in and say, "but that's not Narratavism..." It was small-n versus big N! And of course entirely pointless; the Frogeite knew exactly what was
meant, they were simply trying to impose their minority definition on the majority, and avoid the actual discussion.
Semantic discussion can tell us a lot, because it can help us understand one another; my understanding of what some word means will help you understand how I think, and thus help you either view me as a reasonable person instead of a lunatic (since people often think you must be mad to disagree with them), or help you think of better ways to persuade me to your point of view, by using my own reasoning against me. So semantics can often be useful.
But more often, they're just a dodge.
It's better if we just use words in their common, everyday meaning; where words have no common everyday meaning because they're not well-known, susbstitute for well-known ones. This assumes, of course, that you actually want to communicate with someone. If not, you can just argue semantics
Incidentally, this applies a lot to rpgs. For example in GURPS, they have a few game terms which are everyday words, but have game-definitions; the differences between the two cause lots of confusion for readers, not so much once they play.
"IQ" is their word for intelligence and education. But there it is, "IQ", so people try to relate it to IQ score and then get confused.
"Dodge" is their word for "moving evasively making it harder for you to be hit." But people see "dodge" and think of someone ducking, then say, "but you can't dodge bullets." And then they start telling their players they can't roll Dodge vs firearms, and all their characters go down in a hail of gunfire. Woops.
"Honesty" is a trait your character can take, but it doesn't mean "truthfulness," instead it means being law-abiding. This has also caused new GURPSers lots of confusion.
Of course the GURPS authours insist on their own definitions of words over the common everyday ones. Judging by all the threads started in their forums over Dodge, IQ and Honesty, I think it was probably silly of them to insist in this way. If you insist on your own obscure and strange definitions of words, you have to explain it again and again and again, and this gets tedious. If you just use words the way everyone else does, then you can forget all that nonsense and get onto the more important job of actually roleplaying
