Please consider supporting my videos on patreon.com/CaptainDisillusionCaptain Disillusion attempts to get to the bottom of a visual anomaly inside a sketch c...
“This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise.”
Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies
so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn’t about the community it was.
“This was a conversation in a public forum. The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning.”
There are lots of “generally understood” groups that go by existing words that aren’t understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these “generally understood” meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.
In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.
Precisely. Which is why you can make the case why the distinction is important to you, and why other people should care about and respect the more specific definition.
But you didn’t make that case until after my prodding. You initially took the position that there’s exactly one valid definition and the other person was factually, self-evidently wrong, and needed not to be convinced but to be corrected. That is not conducive to your goal of conveying your position, it doesn’t represent the community position (which I agree with on the facts!) well to outsiders, and it rubs me the wrong way simply because it’s inconsiderate and self-centered. Hence my sarcastic initial reply.
If you care about constructive discussion that others can meaningfully engage with, you need to be able to center other people’s perspective to a degree. This is about rhetoric and interpersonal communication as much as it is about dictionary definitions.
“This isn’t about a community no matter how much you’d prefer otherwise.”
Except that it was/is about the community/movement/group collectively known as skeptics. Go back the the beginning of the conversation. I mentioned materials and the reply came back about how it was all transphobic misogynist stuff. Well there is nothing inherently transphobic or misogynist about the application of epistemology, logic and spotting logical fallacies so the complaint must have been about the people. Then the conversation explicitly mentioned people by name as representatives of the community. So no matter how much you try to say it wasn’t about the community it was.
“This was a conversation in a public forum. The word “sceptic” has a generally understood meaning.”
There are lots of “generally understood” groups that go by existing words that aren’t understood at all by the general population. To many people atheists are Satan worshipers, trans people are bathroom predators, and geologists are part of a massive cover-up about the truth of young earth creationism. But we know that these “generally understood” meanings are completely false. In a dictionary a word can have more than one meaning and context matters.
Precisely. Which is why you can make the case why the distinction is important to you, and why other people should care about and respect the more specific definition.
But you didn’t make that case until after my prodding. You initially took the position that there’s exactly one valid definition and the other person was factually, self-evidently wrong, and needed not to be convinced but to be corrected. That is not conducive to your goal of conveying your position, it doesn’t represent the community position (which I agree with on the facts!) well to outsiders, and it rubs me the wrong way simply because it’s inconsiderate and self-centered. Hence my sarcastic initial reply.
If you care about constructive discussion that others can meaningfully engage with, you need to be able to center other people’s perspective to a degree. This is about rhetoric and interpersonal communication as much as it is about dictionary definitions.