pnrjulius comments on Semantic Stopsigns - Less Wrong

53 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 August 2007 07:29PM

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Comment author: pnrjulius 19 May 2012 04:59:44AM 0 points [-]

Well, hopefully not ALL our statements amount to tribal membership... then we couldn't even assert that our statements amount to tribal membership, now could we?

And clearly some of the things you might ask along the chain are normal, unproblematic questions, like "Why is there a dog in the yard?" and "Will it rain tomorrow?"; so I don't think it's a big stretch to presume that our discourse is properly semantic until we're given reason to think otherwise.

(Truth be told, I'm dubious of non-cognitivism in general; obviously it does work in your ATM example, and maybe even in the "God did it" example... but lots of people try to apply it to things where there really is an obvious propositional interpretation.)