… I THINK? CHANGING IT FROM PREFERENCE FOR MEANING TO NECESSITY FOR TESTIMONY?
I‘ve been reading more on General Semantics and their meme E-Prime, and it’s pretty interesting how they advocate GS/E’ for the purpose of clarity and meaning.
Now, I advocate E’ and Operationalism because one cannot testify to the truth of a statement if one cannot state it in operational language. Because you can’t possibly state that you know what you’re talking about.
So, I think my argument in favor of E’ as a moral and ethical constraint, (and in the case of negative externalities, a criminal constraint) is stronger than the argument for ‘clarity and meaning’.
ON A MY CONTINUED FRUSTRATION WITH A PRIORISM AS A VERBALISM
I‘ve still got to address the strange a priorist argument that there is something particularly interesting about decreasing precision (making general statements). Yes we can drop properties of many similar instances in order to construct sets of commons properties, and give them names. But this is an inverse of the problem of making general observations and investigating which properties we observe are necessary and which are not.
Some descriptions, if made more precisely have no meaning: “wind” and “wave” are pretty good examples. At human scale they are meaningful statements. below human scale they are not. All statements of precision have maximum and minimum points of demarcation.
I mean, i guess if you start with instrumentalism, you implicitly start with human scale and the problem of precision and arbitrary precision as necessary properties of any description (theory).
I just guess this is one of those things that’s so obvious to me that I can’t imagine a literary alternative because I did not learn philosophy by literary (allegorical) means.
Curt