User:Lee Daniel Crocker/Semantic disputes

On the Wikipedia semantic dispute page, it is pointed out that some people do not consider such disputes to be "genuine" disputes. I am one of those people, so I'll explain why.

I do not mean to suggest that semantic disputes are unimportant; quite to the contrary, they can be matters of life and death. Manufacturers of herbal medicines, for example, use phrases like "contains no drugs" to make the public believe that their products are safe. This of course depends upon the confusion between the consumer's general understanding of what a "drug" is, in contrast with a more narrow deifinition used by the seller that excludes natural drugs. Such deliberately deceptive use of language can be dangerous, and therefore arguing about the appropriate use of language can be important.

What I emphasize, rather, is that semantic disputes are all disputes about the use of words, which are arbitrary, and are not "real" disputes about the referents of those words. If you have a semantic argument about the use of the word "drug" or "standard of living", you are arguing about the use of those words, but you are not arguing about drugs or standards of living. Further, such disputes do not serve to improve one's knowledge of the real world at all, except one's knowledge of human language. Semantic disputes are used more often as a rhetorical tactic to avoid arguing about actual propositions, and to convince others of a proposition which one might believe for reasons other than rational argument.

First, to me, the purpose of rational argument is to bring out points in favor of and against a proposition in order to more accurately judge the truth of the proposition. Even if some person initiates an argument in order to convince others of a proposition rather than to investigate it himself, one presumes that argument is the means by which he has formerly arrived at the conclusion he wishes to support, and that once the argument is begun, participants may bring up ideas that will lead to re-evaluation.

Second, words are arbitrary. Names of things do not contain any information about the things themselves. Even though they may have connotations that contain information, their use in rational argument is restricted to their denotations. For example, if you and I are walking in the park and I point to a bird and say "That is a finch", what do you now know about finches? Absolutely nothing. You might later point to a similar creature and ask "Is that a finch as well?" and I might answer "No, that's a sparrow", or "Yes, that's a finch", but you still don't know anything about finches. You know something about speakers of the English language, namely that they call certain kinds of birds "finches", but nothing at all about finches themselves. Now if I told you that finches were small songbirds, that they had strong short beaks for crushing seeds, that there are many different species with different markings, and that they are commonly domesticated, then you know some actual facts about finches. You might use these facts in real life: if you see a small songbird with a short beak in a cage, you might offer it seeds, while if you saw one with a long skinny beak you might assume that it prefers soft worms or insects.

Words can have connotations with meaning, but they are still arbitrary. If you heard the term "zebra finch", you might assume from the word's connotations that it is a finch with black and white markings, and you'd be correct in this case. But you still don't know anything more about finches (if your assumption is verified you know that some of them have black and white markings, but still nothing else). And you don't know anything at all about zebra finches other than what you already know about finches. Do they have different eating or mating habits? Do they live in certain locations? You don't know--you only know the name. Connotations can also mislead you: if you heard the term "goldfinch" you might assume that it is a finch that's mostly yellow, and you'd be wrong. When you see an actual goldfinch, you'll see that it is brown with black, white, and bright yellow markings. If you happened to call goldfinches "bananafinches", nothing at all about them would change; everything you know about those birds you'd still know, and every argument you had about them would be exactly the same. If you and a friend argued about which word better described the bird, you would not be having an argument about the bird itself--the goldfinches (or bananafinches) won't change a bit during your argument, and you and your friend do not disagree about any fact you might know about them.

In the semantic dispute example given, Joshua and Tim argue about whether the United States has the highest standard of living, but they disagree about the use of that term. What is the proposition being argued? At first, it was "The US has the highest standard of living". During that argument, the parties accept as factual that the US has the highest per capita income, but dispute whether that reflects "standard of living". They now therefore have a semantic dispute about whether a particular measurement--per capita income--is an appropriate definition of "standard of living". This dispute is not about the original porposition; it is a dispute about the proper use of language. They are now arguing the entirely different proposition "per capita income is the best measure of standard of living". This is a legitimate thing to argue, and many reasonable arguments can be made on both sides, but no matter how much you argue about how the term should be used, nothing at all will change about the US or any other country, and you won't learn anything about them by arguing what words to use. In fact, you can use this semantic dispute to avoid arguing about the original proposition. You may ask what purpose the term "standard of living" serves, what the majority of people think when they hear it, and these are legitimate concerns. It might be that that's really what you want to know after all: what is a good measure for quality of life? This is a fine argument to have, but it is not related to the original proposition.

As an example of semantic dispute used to avoid argument, creationists dispute the proposition that "various species of living things evolved from other species". When many speciation events were observed and documented by biologists, they found it difficult to support that proposition. They then contended that "species" was not an appropriate term for their contention. They admitted that "microevolution" and speciation could occur within "created kinds", but they contended that new created kinds could not evolve from other created kinds. They can now either decline to define "created kind", or change their definition as needed to dance around any further evidence discovered for the original proposition. This change of language didn't change any of the facts: the events called "speciation" still occur, and fossils still show what they show, but the creationists' use of language enables them to avoid the original proposition and its original intent while still appearing to be rigorous and scientific.

Alfred Korzybski (AK to his friends and students), the founder of General Semantics, had a favorite saying: "The map is not the territory." In other words, talk about a thing is not the thing, words are not the obejcts they represent, etc. While it is useful, especially in engineering-type applications to have a language, the behavior of which mimics the behavior of its referents, (mathematics does wonderfully in such a context), one should never fall into the trap of imagining that there is such a thing as a human language definintion which perfectly mirrors the thing defined.

Social scientitsts have the steepest hill to climb in this regard. There is no broad agreement on what the discrete objects and phenomena of human and social behavior are, much less what to call them. Consequently, in trying to solve human problems, and in trying to discuss the solving of human problems, there is a stumbling block which is never entirely out from under foot. The confereees may use the same words during the discussion, but the words seldom, if ever, embody precisely the same understanding within the individual minds on either side of the table.

It is of some benefit to us, therefore, to try to form some general agreement both beforehand and then repeatedly during the course of discussion as to what significant terms mean. Assumptions in this regard are uniformly fatal to constructive dialogue. (see my remarks under talk:Socialism.) So, to some degree, there tends to be some undercurrent of greater or lesser semantic dispute taking place in every discussion of human matters. Its effect may be negligible, or it may be determinative, depending on the subject matter and upon the degree of disparity between respective personal understandings of the definitions in use.

I note a particular state of affairs stemming from the paucity of verifiability (or falsifiability) of assumptions and propositions used in the social sciences. The field in general is positively littered with a jumbled surfeit of one-man theories and schools of thought. One sees a greater or lesser number of adherents to each of these schools, depending on the degree of publicity each has received, and the amount of scholarly agreement each has garnered, but you do not see three or four more or less unified schools of thought, each agreeing in the main but differing in certain particulars, and each supported by a staggeringly large body of experimental evidence. So, debates in the sciences and debates in the humanities have, of a necessity, totally different characters. And debates in the latter are much less frequently settled for the same reasons. The antagonists not only come into the discussions speaking in different languages - they refuse during the course of same to reach agreement on what is being said, much less what is being talked about. -- AyeSpy

Making the distinction that semantic arguments have nothing to do with the thing you are arguing about is kind of a semantic argument itself. It does nothing to help us solve the problem that the distinction would seem to address. If you can't get to the meat of the argument without a semantic argument, its irrelevant that it doesn't directly have to do with the topic. The real issue seems to be, restrict your arguments to those who are are capable of arguing in good faith. --User:Alan D

It is my experience that sometimes earnest, intelligent people put forth points of view and arguments that aren't at first obviously semantic; noticing that they are and pointing it out to them often does result in amore focused, more productive discussion. Once defintitions are agreed upon, arguments can proceed to substantive disputes: is there more X or Y in the world? What will be the likely result of action Z? Was X caused by Y, or by Z?  Who is actually affected by X?  There are plenty of arguments with real meat on them, and sifting out the mere semantic disputes can and does help reach them. --LDC


 * See also : User:Lee Daniel Crocker