[bigboote]

James cites the law as a good example of drawing fine lines around difficult issues, citing the definition for amounts of LSD. If you don't know about this, 500 micrograms of LSD is a dose, but you can't see anything that small so it's normally distributed on a chunk of blotter paper weighing 1000x as much. So when the law says that possessing X amount of LSD is a felony, does that include the blotter paper? The courts have said it does. Is this a triumph of the law drawing fine lines around difficult issues, or were lawmakers just ignorant of basic measurement techniques, prosecutors greedy, and judges easily fooled?

An example consequence of this interpretation: having 0.5 oz of pot is a minor crime. But if you mix it with 10 lb of lawn trimmings, you now have 10+ lbs of material with a detectable amount of a controlled substance, and you're theoretically guilty of a major crime. This is not a law written by science majors.

Giving credit to the legal system for sorting out such a broken law is like giving credit to Vista for having a stylishly designed BSOD.

[straiberman]

I think you're creating a straw-man here and end up proving jsomers's point.

You jump on the delicacy of the language and that's the point. jsomers doesn't argue _about_ this particular law, he was only giving an example on how pushing and pulling language can have direct pragmatic purposes and real political ramifications.

The point is that since law is mired in language, exploring language becomes an incredibly relevant task and pg's criticism seems to ignore this important function.

[qqq]

You say jsomers is defending analytic philosophy in this section.

Later jsomers says philosophy was bad but has reformed.

So on the one hand he defends old philosophy. And on the other he claims philosophy was bad, but is OK now because it has reformed. These defenses are incompatible.

[agentcoops]

I think the reformation to which he refers would be the advent of modern, analytic philosophy at the turn of the century through the works of Russell, Moore, Frege, and Wittgenstein. If so, the two claims are equivalent.

[qqq]

You're saying Wittgenstein is part of reformed philosophy, not bad philosophy?

I don't know about that:

http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~luke_manning/tractatus/tractatus-j...

1 The world is everything that is the case. * 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

[agentcoops]

I'm saying that Wittgenstein /contributed/ to the advent of modern analytic or formal philosophy; an indisputable claim. While I have a spot in my heart for the Tractatus (if nothing else the method of truth tables in logic was co-invented within its pages, not to mention "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"), I'm not defending it and its solipsistic position/obfuscated style per se.

[qqq]

How did his nonsense contribute to other people writing sense? Who was influenced by Wittgenstein then wrote sense?