Ah well, you’re wrong.
Strong S/W/K states that language, and only languge informs thought.
Weak S/W/K states that language can in some circumstances inform thought, and that thought in turn can inform language. So even under weak S/W/K, you can still have the construction of reality via language.
Bullshit.
Academia simply is an organized and systemic attempt at gaining knowledge. Why on earth should we not integrate this into ‘real life’?
In any case where you are not attempting to be deceptive, yes, the purpose is to be as accurate as possible because the purpose is to convey information.
Capitulate, necessarily? No.
But if someone had training in cog sci they could at least discuss the issues I raise rather than attempting to say they don’t exist. Someone with similar or greater training in the field would quite possibly have a greater understanding of the data and research. My point is not that I am an authority, but that I have knowledge of the subject matter. It isn’t an ‘appeal to authority’, it’s an appeal to facts.
No, I can not!
If I was to give you a link, it would require that you be logged into the University of Texas server as a student. Unless you are, you can’t open the link. That’s because UT pays a fee in order to offer its students access to all the peer reviewed journals out there, so every time I log on through my student account I am utilizing the service that UT has paid for. You, not being a student, do not get this service. So, no, I can’t link you to it. And emailing it, as I’ve already stated, is against copywrite law, so I’m not about to do that either.
And, yes, as I’ve said several times, I’m looking for more cites on the 'net. It should be rather unsurprising that journals which require you to pay to subscribe/read them would not make their material available on the web for free.
Um… no.
I’m saying that’s the paradigm the statement supports, even if you are using it to mean something else. If you mean you find some-but-not-all Chinese girls hot, you should say so. Saying ‘Chinese girls are hot’ includes the tacit word ‘all’. Otherwise, speaking of "chinese girls’ as an entity is fallacious.
~sigh~
First, that’s a strawman. Fucking cut it out!
Of course someone could indeed mean that they liked all Chinese girls, and I’ve never said otherwise.
Nor have I said these ambiguities wouldn’t exist, simply that our language should code reality in such a way that these ambiguities are made clear in individual instances.
If you can’t debate against my actual argument please drop out of the thread, I’m sick to death of people ascribing strawmen to me because the strawmen are easier to argue against.
Nope, fully correct. You are taking one factor and making it a ‘group’. The only valid group is humanity (And even that is debatable), and everything else from there is cherrypicking. There are people-who-happen-to-be-male. ‘Maleness’, however, means nothing.
It should be obvious that even in your example, the sensation of pain, there is a continium and some women can feel pain in a similar if not identical manner to some men. Are they then out of the ‘group’ of women?
To the degree that we can categorize individuals based on similarities we can create ‘groups’, but they do not exist in reality. You can never, ever, ever, point me to a group. You can point me to individuals who you wish to place in the group, but not a group. (Unless a bunch of people are standing together and you point to 'em)
Moreoever, by focusing on similarities and ignoring the wealth of differences, all we’re doing is stating that individuals have similar characteristics. “Group” thinking allows us to ascribe more than just these characteristics to groups, faccaciously. Groups are not fungible.
To elaborte, if “women” is truly a valid group, then we can talk about universal characteristics. Groups have identity. But you will find that there is difference and divergence between individual women.
Specifically in regards to the perception of pain in women, we see that it is primarily estrogen levels which affect this.
Now, let’s say we have a woman who, for whatever reason, is lacking in estrogen. By a definition that “Being in the ‘group’, women, you will have a lesser reaction to pain.”… well, by that definition, she’s not a woman.
There are certain individuals who can be shown to have similar traits via sound science. But beyond that we can’t really say anything.
My language is as precise as language allows. It is a well known phenomona that the deeper you get into linguistics, the less clear it becomes. There is a threshold past which “speaking about speaking” becomes too complicated.
Nope, I’m entirely correct.
There are individuals who we group together based on common features, but there is no objective existance for any group. Groups are aggregates of individuals, they do not exist without those individuals. You can never point to a group without mentioning the people in it, and once you do that, you must take into account that they are different and divergant, and thus, you can’t speak to the fundamental nature of any group.