Peterdjones comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong

77 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 October 2012 06:16PM

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Comment author: Peterdjones 12 October 2012 06:30:48PM *  3 points [-]

I agree that literary critical terms are fuzzy in the same sense as "kind", but I don't think they're necessarily any more fuzzy.

That is an important point. It is not so easy to come up up with a criterion of "meaningfulness" that excludes the stuff rationalists don't like, but doens't exclude a lot of everyday terninology at the same time.

I could add that others have their own criteria of "meaningfulness". Humanities types aren't very bothered about questions like how many moons saturn has, because it doens't affect them or their society. The common factor seems to both kinds of "meaningfullness" is that they amount to "the stuff I personally consider to be worth bothering about". A concern with objective meaningfullness is still a subjective concern.