[FRIAM] ordinary language

[glen]

After reading this yesterday:

https://theaggie.org/2025/04/09/the-corrupt-and-ridiculous-jurisprudence-of-the-john-roberts-supreme-court/

Then reading this today:

https://dailynous.com/2025/04/09/ordinary-language-philosophy-in-supreme-court-gun-case/

I'm steadily more convinced of what I took to be Eric's opinion of the Roberts court. I'm still on the fence re: ACB & Gorsuch. But the rest of the conservatives do seem to "work backward from preconceived political ties", as Caleb puts it.

And although I kindasorta agree with the outcome (that gun kits are properly called "weapons" and regulated as such), citing "ordinary language" is just convenient bullshit. Somewhere underneath my opinion lies my persistent hesitancy around ordinary language philosoph[y|ers]. Ordinary language is more likely to trick you into thinking you understand what's being said [⛧]. I know that's counterintuitive. But it's akin to code-switching. The meanings of words, phrases, and whole arguments/presentations depends fundamentally on the context in which they're being used. Ordinary language philosophy seems to either a) ignore the diversity of contexts or b) assert a kind of Grand Unified Context, the one model to rule them all.

It works for me to always remember things like "Oh, yeah, I forgot I was in a room full of [engineers|academics|furries|whatevers]." There is no such thing as ordinary language full stop, only language ordinary to a particular context.

[⛧] It also results in a bit of a verbosity explosion, where every polysemic word or phrase needs more phrases to disambiguate it, each of those phrases then needing more phrases, etc.

-- 
glen