Is there any usefulness in ambiguous terms?

[Tex@s]

No! Do not let people that u love or care about go into a situation blind. There ignorance can hurt them and they need to know. People learn differently. If u read I say take a look at "The art of thinking." Its a good book and describes how people learn and solve problems. It names types and etc. 200 PAGE book not big, but invaluable.

 

[Vader]

Alive: Something which exhibits all the characteristics of life: locomotion, reproduction, respiration, metabolism, etc

What is "something"? What is a "characteristic"? When I say "I feel so alive", I am clearly using it in a different sense.

Intelligent: someone with a sufficiently high IQ

That is obviously self-referential (IQ stands for intelligence quotient); intelligence is the property that intelligent things have. Well, yeah.

True: something that is established by consensus and/or logic

It was never true that the Earth was the centre of the Universe.

Love: Compassionate attachment to someone who's presence you enjoy being around

I love pizza.

Have to go to work. More later.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

It's not circular to say someone has intelligence if they have a high IQ. IQ is a measure of lots of different/specific forms of logical reasoning, by saying intelligence=a high IQ you are implicitly stating that intelligence is the measure of all those forms of reasoning that show up on an IQ test, and can be quantified in an IQ score. I'm saying the sum total of all the reasoning abilities reflected in a sufficiently high IQ score(say anything more than 1 standard deviation from the mean score)=Intelligence, not simply IQ=intelligence. It's a pretty precise definition, not just some vague, circular statement. And I never said that was the only definition at all.

And the Earth is absolutely the center of the universe: what are you smoking?!?!

What's wrong with loving pizza?

I'm not sure what you're point is at all in relation to mine. What are you saying? It seems as though you misunderstood me completely, given you're response.

 

[Vader]

To be honest, I was in a rush and only read the first part of your post, so yeah, my response was wide of the mark. My point, though, is that a definition of any ambiguous term is going to rest on other terms, which must be further defined, again in relation to ambiguous terms. So, there's an infinite regress.

I rarely use any of those words, because they don't have concrete definitions. It is far from obvious to me why anyone should bother using them when a particular phenomenon could be more precisely described.

Are you really saying that you never talk in an ambiguous way? I cannot begin to imagine how difficult that must be.

If this is so, then I implore you to explain the existence / (perceived) necessity of "legalese".

Sometimes, natural language as it is commonly spoken is inadequate, and we need things like formal logic or legalese. However, much of the time, it's just fine. If I said "We're getting in the car, pass me the keys please", I wouled be exasperated if the person I was talking to said "Who's we? Which car are we getting in? Which keys are you talking about?". If I were to say this to someone, it is highly likely that they would understand what I mean. They would pass me the keys to the car that we were about to enter, and ambiguous terms would have been useful.

 

[CoffeeDrinker]

As for that infinite regress that you talk about, all our words come from somewhere in our experience and should be able to be referred back to that experience if necessary. Hume argues if a word's foundation can't be established by an impression gained during an experience, or a copy of an impression gained from someone else's experience, then the word or idea has no validity. So there wouldn't be an infinite regression because while words require more words in order to be explained, all of the words in use should be from a foundation of possible experiences. He's mainly talking about things like "innate ideas" which Descartes used to try and prove the existence of God, but I can see how things like "natural" vs "unnatural" can be subject to this kind of criticism. Where in your experience have you seen an "unnatural object"? Isn't a scientist in a lab tinkering with his tools of chemistry acting no more naturally than an otter breaking up whatever they eat with a rock on their belly?

I am all for defining as many words as necessary to get everyone on the same page, if such a rigorous debate was for some reason necessary, it'd be the only way to make sure people are talking with purpose and meaning, and not establishing statements that have no solid basis.

Again, I'm not talking about just talking just for the sake of talking, or other forms of communication. Obviously if a method of communication has survived to this day, it must have served some purpose over the eons, so it's all useful to some degree, and in some circumstances.