is helium a molecule?
That's a very special kind of question: one that's almost entirely about definitions of words. It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone here that different people or groups use words in different ways, and therefore that questions about definitions often don't have a definite answer.
Many many questions have some element of this (e.g., if some etymology enthusiast insists that an "atom" must be indivisible then the things most people call atoms aren't "atoms" for him, and for all we know there may actually be no "atoms") and that's important to know. But this doesn't look to me like a good model for political disagreement; word definitions aren't usually a big part of political disagreements.
(What is usually a big part of those disagreements is divergence between different people's or groups' values, which can also lead to situations where there's no such thing as The Right Answer.)
That's basically rejecting skepticism.
Unless you allow the "conclusion" to be something like "We don't yet have enough information to know whether A or B is the better course of action", or "A is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is X, and B is almost certainly better if what you mostly care about is Y", or "The dispute between A and B is mostly terminological". All of which I'm guessing Viliam would be fine with; it looks to me like what he's unsatisfied with is debates that basically consist of some arguments for A and some arguments for B, with no attempt to figure out what conclusion -- which might well be a conclusion with a lot of uncertainty to it -- should follow from looking at all those arguments together.
That's a very special kind of question: one that's almost entirely about definitions of words.
On one level, yes, this is just a definition issue.
On a deeper level no, because particular answers to such questions place the phenomena into a specific framework. Notice that two answers to "is helium a molecule" arose not because two people consulted two different dictionaries. They arose because these two people are used to thinking about molecules in very different ways -- both valid in their respective domains.
In that sense this "special ki...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
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