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ChristianKl comments on Open thread, December 7-13, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.)
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.
For Thomas Kuhn it's a an issue of different paradigms.
When we look at the questions of atoms then saying: "Atoms exist." likely means "Thinking of matter as being made up of atoms is a valuable paradigm."
Lavoiser came up with describing oxygen as a new element. In doing so he rejected the paradgim that chemistry should analyse principles like phlogiston but rather think of matter as being made up of atoms.
Calling oxygen dephlogisticated air is more than just an issue of calling it a different name. It's an issue at the heart of the conflict of two scientific paradigms.
Both the phlogiston theory and the oxygen theory successfully predict that if you put a glass over a candle the candle while go out. The oxygen theory says that it's because there no oxygen anymore in the air. The phlogiston theory says that it's because the air is full of phlogiston so that it can't take any more additional phlogiston.
Phlogiston chemistry was a huge improvement over the chemistry of the four elements which neither explained or predicted that the candle would go out.
Understanding different paradigms to look at an political issue is often an important part of having a political debate. It moves the issue beyond tribe A vs. tribe B. Of course you can have a tribe A vs. tribe B political discussion but often that's not the kind of political debate that I like to have.
In reality the kind of conclusions that parliaments draw from political debate are laws that fill hundreds of pages that specify all sorts of little details that happen to be important. If the GBS does policy documents specifying details and coming to a conclusion makes sense but I don't think that's a good goal for a discussion on a forum like Omnilibrium.