🧵 View Thread
🧵 Thread (4 tweets)
Hazard@natural_hazard• about 4 years ago
Old post I forgot to tweet! When Arguing Definitions is secretly Arguing Decisions it's kind of a comic strip! https://t.co/ezuUT7841Z
Hazard@natural_hazard• about 4 years ago
Replying to @natural_hazard
tldr(1); some words are labels that act as decision rules ("if you see X then treat like Y") that encode choices you've made about how to behave. if a label exists in just you're head, it's easy to update decision rules. It gets harder when the label is embedded in shared lang
Hazard@natural_hazard• about 4 years ago
Replying to @natural_hazard
2: Some arguments that look definitional ala "X is a Y!" "Nuh-uh!" "Read a dictionary!" Are actually people arguing over how to make a decision, and who are trying to shortcut resolving their disagreement by appealing to existing decision rules encoded in labels