[MikeSchurman]

I sometimes see a similar thing when people are arguing. They sometimes use a different current definition of the same word, and don't even realize. Sometimes I would guess it's intentional.

I can't think of a good example, but I'm reminded of when climate science emails were and leaked and one of the emails had someone applying a 'hack' to the data. One side decided they were doing something underhanded. But hack I believe the use of the term was 'clever method'.

Anyway, I see this often. People are arguing over the definition of words, but they think they're arguing about something else more profound.

[brimble]

A huge part of "culture war", uh, discourse, seems to be driven by inability to agree on common terms and a complete ignorance of how labels relate to reality (so most participants don't even act like they know it's a problem). A better understanding of how slippery identity and "is" are, even for everyday things that seem very certain, would really improve communication there, I think. I'm thinking not just of the extremely obvious topic related to this (trans issues) but also things like abortion, where arguing over essentially arbitrary definitions by treating those definitions as per se important almost entirely crowds out substantial discussion.

[kelseyfrog]

What a great point. I've been struggling with the epistemological implications of the copula for the last few months. The existence of the copula and its use seems to imply a shared objective reality, when it's perhaps more explainatory to label the copula as a reality constructing mechanism.

Either way it's use as a universal quantifier eschews nuance. Patterns like "A is B" necessarily lead to differences in reality that are easily resolved when phrased like "I percieve that A is B". Copula-induced fights are ubiquitous.