nightspore
Group: Members
Posts: 4761
Joined: Mar. 2008 |
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Posted: April 28 2009, 01:03 |
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| Quote (Sir Mustapha @ April 27 2009, 13:20) | I hate to go around pointing fingers and dissecting people's speech, but I don't wanna come across as vague and ambiguous either. I'm doing this only for clarification, not because I wanna "win" any argument:
| Quote | | That "lives up to my expectations", the more I read it the more I'm sure it's a polite put-down. I find myself asking: why didn't Clarke like it? |
See, you say there's no personal bias because Clarke's words are ambiguous. But in that statement, you're taking your personal, subjective interpretation of that "ambiguous" speech and making a judgment out of that. You're not asking "why Clarke wouldn't like it", but you're asking "why he DIDN'T like it", as if you had already confirmed that fact. Same thing here:
| Quote | | He wasn't being haughty; he was being polite. He didn't want to offend MO, but at the same time didn't want to say he liked something he didn't. |
As for circular, yes. Smillsoid contradicts your argument:
| Quote | | I think you've mistaken Clarke's respectful, measured style for hautiness. |
and then shrugs it off:
| Quote | | I think you both need to study discursive psychology. |
and then you go back to your original point:
| Quote | | If these people like something, why don't they just come out and say so? |
and Smillsoid defends his point again:
| Quote | | Clarke is attempting to remain 'objective' in his assessment of Mike's work, whilst endorsing it - a tricky operation. |
and so on and on. The debate wasn't converging towards a consensus -- people were just running around, biting each other's tail. Tension was rising. Not that I think people should not dump their opinions and shut up; it's just that tere was tension being raised here with no necessity. Worse: I think I'm just contributing to that now... |
Sir M, the words are ambiguous, but extra-linguistic considerations (how Smillsoid must be rolling his optics at that word) enable one to incline towards one view rather than another. As another example, consider the sentence "he was seen by the coffee machine". As it stands, the words are ambiguous, but one's view of the world (are coffee meachines intelligent?) enables one to interpret.
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