That is an embarrassing last name for a man where I come from anyway.
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Debate!
How to disagree
(34 posts)-
Posted 11 years ago #
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Fit like 'i day Quine? Aye chavin' on yer semantics?
Posted 11 years ago # -
This is a stand-out topic in terms of CCE quirkiness, and that's saying something. I get the impression I'm supposed to have read something else before I'll really get the point of this.
However, I feel challenged to try and refute the central point: "If moving up the disagreement hierarchy makes people less mean, that will make most of them happier. Most people don't really enjoy being mean; they do it because they can't help it."
Really? Is there really a convincing argument that "being mean" makes people unhappy?
Go to look at the EEN comments and ask whether you see people getting less and less happy as they stick their racist / velophobic / whatever commentary into the public domain? I don't think so.
I think meanness might make *other people* unhappy, pretty much by definition, but it certainly isn't going to make the perpetrators unhappy.
Assuming classifying casual conversation according to a formal taxonomy doesn't make people happy, since it has no other benefit to them as individuals, according to my counter-argument we shouldn't expect to see that much of this hierarchy stuff (and indeed we don't).
Posted 11 years ago # -
I hope so much there is an American called Loon Quine.
You could read word and object or indeed Ontological relativity by WV Quine but instead I would recommend Sunset Song by Lewis Grassic Gibbon which is very funky.
Posted 11 years ago #
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