Two people can be using the same word, meaning different things, yet continue the conversation, which is fine for coffee, but not when making decisions, particularly policy decisions affecting others. But it is easy to trip them, as Socrates did, simply by asking them what they mean by what they said –hence philosophy was born as rigor in discourse and disentanglement of mixed up notions, in precise opposition to the sophist’s promotion of rhetoric. Since Socrates we have had a long tradition of mathematical science and contract law driven by precision in mapping terms. But we also have had many pronouncements by idiots using labels.
We Don’t Know What We Are Talking About When We talk about Religion
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
581
In the face of this, how can you not appreciate Wittgenstein and 20th century philosophy’s concern with meaning at the core of the problems of philosophy? You seem to, in the past, have passed off this obsession with semantics as an impractical theoretical line of pointless inquiry, but here you have traced its roots back to those of philosophy itself. Do we not become confused when the conflation of terms and use lead us to believe the confusion to be manifest as material in the world caught up in our debates? Semantics seems only trifling until we forget in discourse that it exists as a third party mediating understanding.