[FRIAM] Motives - Was Abduction

[Steven A Smith]

> Nick writes:
>
> < Ok, Marcus, I am standing my ground as a realist here: ():-[)>
>
> There you go trying to claim semantics for terms in a public 
> dictionary again.   (That’s an example of taking ground, like in my Go 
> example.)    Doing so constrains what can even be *said*.   It puts 
> the skeptic in the position of having to deconstruct every single 
> term, and thus be a called terms like smartass 
> <https://www.foxnews.com/politics/kellyanne-conway-embarrasses-cnns-jim-acosta-during-heated-exchange> 
> when they force the terms to be used in other contexts where the 
> definition doesn’t work.   A culture itself is laden with thousands of 
> de-facto definitions that steer meaning back to conventional (e.g. 
> racist and sexist) expectations.   To even to begin to question these 
> expectations requires having some power base, or safe space, to work 
> from.
>
I think this is the "genius" of Trump's campaign and tenure... he 
operates from his own (and often ad-hoc) Lexicon and that reported 39% 
stable base of his seems happy to just rewrite their own dictionary to 
match his.   That seems to be roughly Kellyanne's and Sarah's only role 
(and skill?), helping those who want to keep their dictionaries up to 
date with his shifting use of terms and concepts up to date.

It has been noted that Trump's presidency has been most significant for 
helping us understand how much of our government operates on norms and a 
shared vocabulary.   He de(re?)constructs those with virtually every 
tweet.   While I find it quite disturbing on many levels, I also find it 
fascinating.   I've never been one to take the media or politicians very 
seriously, but he has demonstrated quite thoroughly why one not only 
shouldn't but ultimately *can't*.

> In this case, you assert that some discussants are software engineers 
> and that distinguishes them from your category.  A discussant of that 
> (accused / implied) type says he is not a member of that set and that 
> it is not even a credible set. Another discussant says the activity of 
> such a group is a skill and if someone lacks it, they could just as 
> well gain it while having other co-equal skills too.   So there is 
> already reason to doubt the categorization you are suggesting.
>
I took Nick's point to be that the Metaphors that those among us who 
spend a significant amount of time writing (or desiging) computer 
systems is alien to him, and that despite making an attempt when he 
first came here to develop the skills (and therefore the culture), he 
feels he has failed and the lingua franca of computer (types, geeks, 
???) is foreign to him.   Here on FriAM, I feel we speak a very rough 
Pidgen (not quite developed enough to be a proper Creole?) admixture of 
computer-geek, physics, sociology, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, 
mathematics, hard-science-other-than physics, etc.

I sense frustration in many of us when we try to talk about our various 
topics of specialty (as amatuers or professionals) with our 
significantly educated (but in other (sub)disciplines) lay-colleagues.   
It seems that in the attempt to be more precise or to make evident our 
own lexicons for a particular subject that we end up tangling our webs 
in this tower of Complexity Babel (Babble?) we roam, colliding 
occasionally here and there.

- Sieve

>
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