On Mon, May 2, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Nicholas Leippe <[email protected]> wrote:
> I should hope so. But it is also helpful to learn the vocabulary and
> definitions that a field dedicated to studying this phenomenon has
> chosen to use when discussing it. You can disagree with their results
> if you like, but IMO it's pointless to simply disregard their chosen
> vernacular outright. You can't just redefine what the words mean
> because you don't agree with the meaning.
Alas, people redefine what words mean all the time, especially in
technical areas where general words are repurposed for specific
technical uses within the field. Witness all the political discussion
here, a great deal of which revolves around varying definitions of
words like "right" or "democracy" or "freedom", which different people
understand to mean rather different things. For that matter, look at
any dictionary and see the all the different meanings any particular
word might take on depending on the context. Someone just redefined
what the words meant, for whatever reason, and it stuck. And now we
are stuck with endless arguments over semantics. :)
--Levi
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