Taure comments on 37 Ways That Words Can Be Wrong - All

72 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 06 March 2008 05:09AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (70)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Taure 13 July 2010 08:17:02AM *  9 points [-]

This is a good post - there are a good number of philosophers who would benefit from reading this.

I'd like to add a 38, if I may, though it isn't mine. It's what Daniel Dennett calls a "deepity".

A deepity is a statement with two possible interpretations, such as "love is a word".

One of the interpretations is trivially true and trivially unspectacular. In this case, "love" - the word - is a word. The second interpretation is either false or suspect, but if it were true it would be profound. In this case, the non-existence of love as anything other than a verbal construct.

The "deepity" is therefore able to achieve undeserved profundity via a conflation of these two interpretations. People see the trivial but true interpretation and then think that there must be some kind of truth to the false but profound one.