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Annoyance comments on Taboo "rationality," please. - Less Wrong
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Normally, people manage to communicate using our informal, muddly, complicated, natural language abilities. Sometimes this breaks down when we're discussing value-laden or highly abstract concepts.
Breaking words down into definitions doesn't solve the problem - the components that you define with need to be communicated, too. This lowest-level communication needs to be informal, non-defined primitives.
Tabooing words reboots the informal process of achieving communication, without the fuss of arguing about whether a definition is correct, or queries about which definition you are using.
"Normally, people manage to communicate using our informal, muddly, complicated, natural language abilities."
I think that, in actuality, they don't. Or rather, they communicate very little: mostly by indicating positions that the listener is already familiar with.
Ever try explaining a truly new idea to someone? With most people, I find that if they don't already have a referent, they simply can't understand, because they're not used to extracting complex information from natural language.
We're in agreement. The position that I was arguing against is something like: "People can't communicate unless they first define their terms." That would be an infinite regress; the only possibility would be that people never manage to communicate.
Okay, I'll accept that.
I offer a restatement: people can't communicate at a complex and abstract level unless their words are first defined in terms of words with already-accepted and -understood meanings.
If I begin to talk about gilxorfibbin without explaining what that is, it's unlikely the context will make it possible for you to know what I'm discussing.