I was wondering the other day how words can be defined in multiple ways, so therefore, when we listen to others speak, they won’t necessarily mean what we interpret. When we communicate with others to “win” language-games, the goal is to get the output we want…
…but if the output we want doesn’t necessarily mean what we interpret, what’s the point of winning? Yes, we can induce the probability of someone saying what we expect, and maybe we even win our gambles…
…but without certain interpretation, receiving what we want to hear is merely a delusion.
Heck, it’s possible that people have the interpretation we want in entirely different language, possibly even what we believe to be offensive language…
…and people can be offended by what we say on accident too.
Communication seems so vain these days. I can only imagine that people communicate out of hopeful desperation, or anticipated real utility (as in persuading someone to do what we want).
People communicate because communicating is useful to them, and because it comes naturally to creatures as smart as us. True, communicating often produces disparities between the intended and interpreted meaning of any statement, but that in itself does nothing to destroy language, nor is it the fault of inductive reasoning. There is just an ambiguity built into the process - it can’t be eradicated, so we do our best to work around it, or with it, even sometimes manipulating it to our own advantage. You’re right an uncertainty is always there, but it doesn’t render vain all our attempts to communicate. Language works anyway, which is to say it works often enough and well enough to still be useful.
i think inductive reasoning creates language, at least as much as it destroys it
that sentence perhaps inductively destroyed the meaning of destroy
but the inductive ‘idea’ so to speak that you proposed (in my mind induction is a mere juxtaposition of two ideas) is…
inductive reasoning → destroying language
mine is
inductive reasoning → creating language
…
in a world with two objects… does adding a third destroy the meaning the others? perhaps. it’s a good thing though… hopefully people will begin to agree upon more specific wording for more specific ideas
Winning? I think this is where you’ve gotten yourself into trouble. I seek the challenge of my beliefs in Philosophy, not necessarily the imposition of my beliefs. It’s why I push others to think, come up with new ideas. I rarely say ‘this is what you should think’. Do I win if they come up with new ideas? Hard to materially trace that benefit back to me, perhaps in the long run.
It’s all good in the end. Language came from where it is going- confusion. I don’t see why a outlook of one kind of definition per term, with not parallels, is beneficial. Look at the military’s emphasis on correct nomenclature- half the time when I was in I didn’t know what people were talking about, and vice versa. It became a Acronym game, and they were misunderstood half the time in the lingo between various job specialties… I couldn’t understand basic stuff a guy in Communications was saying over say, what a repair specialist was saying to me. They however understood me given my job was well known by them, as they were support for us. Just left us out in a lurch, as that many more words had to exist so each job could be accomplished via the manuals that much more exactingly, term by term balanced out by the central trainers (TRADOC) who had to make sense of the whole mess.
Shit’s always going to be a blur, just try to describe it, and short hand it. What needs to survive will survive, and what doesn’t goes away. Easiest way to support democracy is to support a free evolution of language.
Sometimes, but not necessarily. Communicating is the foundation for cooperation. It’s how people work together to acheive common goals, or for mutual benefit - that’s not really objectifying one another, or at least, if it is, it’s not really in a negative or harmful way. Language can be used to exploit, yeah, but that’s far from it’s only use. Also, like i said, communication comes naturally to us, even when we aren’t trying to get others to do or say what we want them to do or say. i mean, we’re communicating right now, and i wouldn’t say that either of us is objectifying the other into a tool. We still do it because we benefit from it, but we’re not exploiting one another.
Greenleaf’s Servant Leadership, he put emphasis on locating intuitive thinkers who largely already identified and found solutions to problems within bureaucratic structures, however, they weren’t always people you would expect to of done this from a cultural perspective of who should have the clear lines of advancement up the corporate ladder.
Practice i suppose. Instinct. Trail and error. Some people are out to screw you, but i guess you just have to trust that not everyone is out to screw you, and try to be as discerning as possible.
I like the satire inherent in the above, but it seems like a satire aimed primarily at arguments. My wife and I have different native languages, so we are conscious of some of these issues all the time. (we would both be called fluent in the other’s language, but still, let me tell you, problems come up daily, whole fights, sometimes, based on nothing). When we talk there is a very conscious exploratory process, often. We know we need to triagulate, often. There is losing, but only for both of us. There is winning, but only for both of us. So there is no winning over a loser, much of the time - I mean, sure we can try to win on occasion, but my point is that it is only a subset of communicating where competition is the rule.