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Logical Empiricism

Fun fact: an entire school of early 20th Century philosophy—logical empiricism—held that all disagreements are rooted in imprecise language, and that if we would just limit our arguments to well-formed, meaningful sentences with shared definitions of terms, disagreement would evaporate.

That turns out not to be true. Logical empiricism—like much else in philosophy—is wrong but in an interesting and important way. ("Interestingly wrong" and "ambitious failure" were comments left on some of the best undergraduate philosophy papers I graded.)

Logical empiricists may have been wrong, but their arguments have some merit. Not all disagreements are linguistic. But a lot are.

Referenced in

On the Ambiguity of "Content Type"

Conversations often run aground on problems of definitions. Indeed, What is a content type? has generated approximately 1743839754 Slack posts at Soapbox and prompted many a long Twitter conversation. (Have I mentioned how much I love my job?)