josh blog
Ordinary language is all right.
One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.
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Learning how to quote, learning how to make yourself suitable to be quoted, aiming at being unquotable or endlessly quotable.
I think these are probably the same people who usually say, '…it comes from the Greek word for "duty"'.
Education as cultivation of various shibboleths.
My friends tell me that according to their colleagues, the important thing is to give students exams about the definitions of terms like 'deontological'.
Specialists respond mainly to one another; this can make them, in general, unresponsive.
'That's not my area.'
Compare how a philosopher, a judge, a chemist, a journalist, a lover, a friend, a parent, may react to having…
1. made a bad argument.
2. accepted a bad argument.
3. said something that wasn't true.
4. accepted something that wasn't true.
5. ignored what others were saying.
6. listened to what others were saying.
Yet if you're concerned with something like, 'what it means to do something', and SIGNIFICANCE has entered the scene, you might barely be able to get a word out while transfixed by the thought of someone… somehow… doing… something.
'A theory of what to keep in mind'. Can't you just keep it in mind without the theory?