Jack comments on How to understand people better - Less Wrong

76 Post author: pwno 14 October 2011 07:53PM

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Comment author: Jack 12 October 2011 02:42:02AM 0 points [-]

I don't see how that is supposed to matter.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning/#GriPro

meaning which can be thought of as the conjunction of two claims: (1) facts about what expressions mean are to be explained, or analyzed, in terms of facts about what speakers mean by utterances of them, and (2) facts about what speakers mean by their utterances can be explained in terms of their intentions.

Propositional theories of meaning fail precisely because they have a great deal of trouble accounting for situations where our words don't match our intentions.

Intention always matters.

Comment author: pedanterrific 12 October 2011 02:58:11AM 2 points [-]

Intention always matters.

What does it say about me that my first instinctive response was "I'm a consequentialist, not a virtue ethicist."

Comment author: lessdazed 12 October 2011 03:05:27AM 2 points [-]

It's not good enough to just be a consequentialist rather than a virtue ethicist. You have to be a conequentialist for the right reasons or it doesn't count.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 12 October 2011 03:40:45AM *  1 point [-]

Intentions are physical facts about brains. If you care about those particular physical facts, then you can be a consequentialist who cares about intentions.

Often, some of the physical facts that determine whether a certain word applies to a certain situation happen to be physical facts that fall under the heading of "intentions".

Comment author: pedanterrific 12 October 2011 03:56:33AM 1 point [-]

It's just... if "intention always matters" when choosing which word to use to describe someone else's actions, you spend an inordinate amount of time not knowing how to describe something while you gather data on the other agent's intentions, data which may not ever be definitive. That seems to rather miss the point of language.