On Thu, Nov 9, 2017 at 9:22 AM, Ben Finney <ben+pyt...@benfinney.id.au> wrote: >> If you call an idea arrogant you are necessarily stating that the >> person espousing the idea is guilty of arrogance - that's what the >> word means. > > Yes: it describes the behaviour. It does not imply characterisation of > the person. > > To describe the idea as arrogant, or generous or clever or foolish, is > *not* to say that the person holding that idea is arrogant. > > That would be as unwarranted as calling Bill Gates generous merely > because he sometimes gives a small portion of his wealth to charity. Yet > we would not hesitate to say that the giving of funds to malaria > research is a generous idea. > > Similarly, to say that someone expressed an arrogant idea is indeed to > say their bewhaviour was arrogant, and that necessarily accuses the > person of arrogant behaviour. That does not characterise the person as > arrogant and it is not an attack on the person.
Yep. My way of looking at this is: actions are generous, or arrogant, or whatever, based on the moral decisions behind them. (So for example, it doesn't count as "generous" to accidentally drop a whole lot of money to the Mudders of Higgins' Moon, even though people benefited a lot from it.) To describe a *person* as any of those things is to say that you expect, on balance, that this person's decisions (and thus actions) are likely to fit that description. You would describe Superman as altruistic and a helper of those in trouble, because you can confidently expect that he will selflessly help anyone who needs it. Describing *him* as altruistic is a descriptor/predictor. To call a *person* arrogant is to say "Not only was this action of yours arrogant, I fully expect that your future actions will be arrogant too". But that isn't what happened here. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
