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You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick? What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms an
by dsacco 9y ago
You find the introduction of definitional precision to be an annoying, cheap trick?
What exactly are you achieving if you don’t rigorously define your terms and agree upon them? You make it sound like insisting on that is just a method of sophistry, but it’s the foundation of human communication. We cannot possibly talk about anything in a productive way if we’re not being precise in our terminology. Nuance and context have a meaningful impact on our conclusions, and legal definitions aren’t pointless. You can debate the merits of those definitions, but to hand wave them away because the conversation is “informal” is silly.
It is objectively false and unproductive to conflate tax avoidance and tax evasion. If you have a disagreement about the ethics of tax avoidance and believe it is meaningfully similar to tax evasion, that argument can certainly be made. But it is a legitimate point that tax avoidance is a separate thing from tax evasion. If you want to challenge that, you need to essentially debate the axiomatic legal foundations - i.e. do you find the relevant legislation unethical? Do you think tax avoidance is a net negative even if it’s illegal? Etc. The legal context isn’t pedantry, it’s intrinsically relevant to the topic.
On the other hand, what you’re doing is dismissing an attempt at precision, which actually bypasses attempts to have these very legitimate debates. No conversation has been hijacked here. Moreover, even if you call this an “informal conversation”, it will persuade people to change their opinions or reinforce them in a meaningful way. You cannot avoid that reality by temporarily surrendering rigor and selectively choosing what’s relevant to the topic.
If you disagree with the legal distinction between tax avoidance and tax evasion, make a compelling argument for it. But don’t dismiss a well established legal distinction without a commensurately compelling reason to do so.
- _jal 9y agoI see a ton of imprecision in technical discussions here daily, and that's a topic on which one would expect some expertise here. And yet the pedantry that receives is far less annoying than the inevitable tax avoidance cliche-rants. Why? Because there the pedantry is at least topical. Here, it is arguing language in order to grind an axe on a side issue almost completely unrelated to the Ikea founder.
- dsacco 9y agoNatural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. In the latter you argue against the meaning of a word instead of the intended meaning of the argument. In point of fact, it’s pedantic to dismiss an argument from legality on the grounds that it’s “legal” and not “ethical”, because legalislation (and more importantly the reasoning behind it) is a subset of ethics. A carefully considered discussion will include the existing literature that has come out of previously considered discussion; therefore it is fully reasonable to consider legal arguments in a discussion of ethics. To reiterate, you need not agree with legal arguments, but to call them pedantic or irrelevant is simply incorrect. They’re exceptionally topical.
- _jal 9y agoThis is not a philosophy seminar, you're not engaging in normal conversational norm setting at this point, and this game was boring in high school. Have fun, but you'll have to have it with someone else.
- laughingman2 9y ago>Natural language philosophy constitutes legitimate dialectics, not pedantry. In the former you add precision by first synthesizing an agreement of terminology and introducing relevant definitions. What you describe is not the only view of language. If you are not being pedantic, you might consider the Wittgenstien's view on how language is like a game. So there are different classes of language games, and one can argue that legal one is not the one being played out in a internet forumn. Legalism is language of courts, derives its meaning from its use to resolve disputes. So deriving the meaning of ethics as used in normal conversation language game from legal grounds is being pedantic.
- laughingman2 9y agoYour view of rigorous language is debatable. In wittgenstienian sense Language is its use. So one might argue you are playing different language game (aka legal language) in a informal conversation game in a internet forum.