dmb said to Marsha:
... describing static patterns as "ever-changing" is about as wrong as it gets.
John replied:
Absolutely every single particle of this cosmos in which we dwell, IS
ever-changing, shifting and becoming something different through time. And
even our ideas about it evolve and shift, so those aren't absolute neither. In
fact, I thought this was your big bugaboo against idealism's postulation of an
absolute? That there ain't no such animal. Isn't that a given?
dmb says:
Huh? Your comments make Absolutely no sense. What kind of reasoning does it
take to construe complaints about the improper use of the english language as
an assertion of some Absolute? Not only does the latter fail to follow from the
former, they're not even remotely related. I was quoting James, Pirsig and the
dictionary, not Hegel or Plato, to show how other speakers of english use the
terms in question.
And the larger point here, in case you missed it, is that we cannot have any
kind of successful communication without a certain stability of meaning. And in
this case we are talking about the MOQ first distinction. Who could possibly
deny that it is bad to be confused about these central terms? Who thinks it's
helpful or useful to use definitions that are opposite from the one commonly
used by Pirsig, James and english dictionaries?
Like I said, this doesn't even rise to the level of a philosophical discussion.
It's just about thinking and talking badly. It's about ruining the possibility
of any real communication. We trade in words and ideas here and so this is NOT
nit picking about typos or spelling errors. To misconstrue the basic meaning of
these terms is intellectually paralyzing. When confused concepts are being used
at that basic level, the conversation is going nowhere fast.
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