Daniel Dennett has written convincingly about a phenomenon that he calls the "deepity", the use of a phrase that is trivial when read one way and meaningless or false when read another, to create an illusion of profundity. Example deepity: "Love is just a word."
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(Read one way, it's trivial, as "Love" is indeed a word. Read another way, it seems to indicate that love isn't a real phenomenon, which is clearly false, but the fact that it is true when read in the other way can lead to accidental belief that the other reading is meaningful.)
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Replying to @perrymetzger
hm. If someone said "Love is just a word" I would assume he meant "love is, in some way, shallow or not truly real". That's a legitimate opinion someone might have, and you'd have to let them talk more to know why they hold it.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
Then perhaps they should say "love isn't truly a real thing; here's my reasoning about why", and not "love is just a word", which is a linguistic trap.
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Replying to @perrymetzger
This just doesn't seem true to the way people use language! Usually they don't know why exactly they think a thing, or even what exactly they think. But they have an experience (like, maybe love sucked for them) and they got an impression (like, maybe love is overrated), and
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Replying to @s_r_constantin @perrymetzger
they want to convey that impression of life to you and make you have *roughly* that sense of things as well. "Love is just a word" seems like a perfectly good way to gesture in a direction like that. It's not an argument. But it's only very rarely that arguments are possible.
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
It's a terrible form of communication even if it's common, because people often *think* they share some sort of common information after exchanging such phrases even though they've conveyed almost nothing at all.
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Replying to @perrymetzger
Don't you ever think associationally? This reminds me of that? Cluster thinking? That's how metaphor & rhetoric works. Doesn't follow syllogistic logic, does convey *some* info, and (importantly) is actually possible for the majority of situations where you do not have
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Replying to @s_r_constantin
I use metaphor all the time. Ambiguous phrasings aren't metaphor or association. Again, if you try asking several parties what they mean by a deepity, you'll often find they have entirely conflicting views, and refuse to agree to an unpacking even if they agree on the original.
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Replying to @perrymetzger @s_r_constantin
There is a difference between avoiding meaningless statements, internally contradictory statements, linguistic traps, etc., and reasoning by analogy or metaphor.
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Reasoning by analogy: "X is like Y in this sense, we predict X is like Y in another sense." A functional relationship. Which one can dispute. Not the same thing as cluster thinking which has no part-whole relationships.
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