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by philh
3842 days ago
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verisimilidude didn't get me, but nor did you or dragonwriter. I'm distinguishing between definition and meaning. You don't need to be able to define a word, to know roughly what it means. The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful. Attempted definitions of "science fiction" attempt to point at the meaning. They're maps pointing to a map. When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory". In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps. |
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"definition" and "meaning" are the same thing.
> You don't need to be able to define a word, to know roughly what it means.
The degree to which you know what a word means is precisely the specificity to which you can define it. Those are different phrasings of the same content.
> The words "science fiction" mean something. They're a map pointing to some territory. They don't mean the exact same thing to everyone, but close enough to be useful.
I kind of disagree with this. The words "science fiction" mean different enough things to different people (and even to the same people in different contexts) that those definitions are not close enough to be useful, except where social convention, mutual agreement, etc., act to align the definitions to, if not precise alignment, very close alignment within some very narrow subset of the space of all the definitions the term has when considering all possible contexts of use.
Often, a key aspect of making the term useful in a particular exchange is agreeing on a definition.
> When I say "there's no definition", what I really mean is "I've never seen a definition that points to a good map of the territory".
I think the problem is that you fail to recognize that the different uses aren't various fidelities of "maps" pointing to the same "territory", they are -- to borrow the map/territory metaphor -- maps pointing to different territories that are share a name, the way the same name might refer in different contexts to the juridical territory of a city, the territory of the county of the same name in which the city is located, the territory of a metropolitan area centered on the city that is not coextensive with it or the county, or a geographical feature associated with and overlapping the boundaries of the citiy. A map of any of those territories would differ critically from the other, not because it is a bad map of the territory, but because it is a map of a different but overlapping territory.
> In particular, a lot of definitions point at maps which don't point to Star Wars, and those are bad maps.
I think its a bad map in the way that a map of Los Angeles that doesn't include East L.A. [0] is a bad map.
[0] An unincorporated community in Los Angeles County, but not part of the City of Los Angeles.