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To: unspun
VadeRetro: You read the article and it's got all this "intentional states" (is "internal" meant here?), "flowing t-states," "signs," "operating with signs," "imaging a word" (not to be confused with "using a word"), "conditions, state, relations, or properties of y ..."

unspun: But let me ask you, why do you want to describe something as nebulous (and even that term is too concrete) as the intentional life of man in concrete terms?

An article such as this one written entirely in vague, undefined, unexampled terms tends to mean different things to anyone who hears it. That was what I noticed about my former colleague's gobbledygook double-talk presentations. He would chatter away--"You create a methodology, test working configurations and baseline them, soon you have a data base of working configurations, then you baseline the methodology itself ..."--and most people would hear whatever they wanted to hear in it.

They could do this because one guy could imagine "methodology" as some management discipline, another as some physical procedure, another as a set of computer command files, another as the actual software of the proposed system, etc. "Baseline" is a noun or a verb as needed and can be almost anything recordable: source files, command files, documents, procedures, etc. (It helped that the guy was good at looking sincere while he double-talked.)

When all the terms in a long paragraph have some very broad range of interpretation, the whole thing essentially doesn't mean anything at all. While many/most people failed to realize that they had been listening to 10 or 15 minutes of pure double-talk, not even the people who really liked the presentation could give me much of an executive summary of what they had heard. What they had actually heard was little more than, "Config management is good discipline and I try to use Softtool's CCC for everything imaginable--far more than what the developers ever intended or would seriously advise--because CCC command language is the only computer language I know."

155 posted on 05/24/2003 6:55:03 AM PDT by VadeRetro
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To: VadeRetro; unspun
VadeRetro:
You read the article and it's got all this "intentional states" (is "internal" meant here?), "flowing t-states," "signs," "operating with signs," "imaging a word" (not to be confused with "using a word"), "conditions, state, relations, or properties of y ..."


unspun:
But let me ask you, why do you want to describe something as nebulous (and even that term is too concrete) as the intentional life of man in concrete terms?
That is like trying to knock a hammer into the breeze.



VadeR, -- I think you've 'nailed' one of the breezers..

Your obsevation on the:
--- "article such as this one written entirely in vague, undefined, unexampled terms tends to mean different things to anyone who hears it." --
-- Is dead on, as we can see from the comments of those who pretend to find some type of message in it.

-- None are so confused as the self deluded.



187 posted on 05/24/2003 11:34:50 AM PDT by tpaine (Really, I'm trying to be a 'decent human being', but me flesh is weak.,)
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To: VadeRetro
When all the terms in a long paragraph have some very broad range of interpretation, the whole thing essentially doesn't mean anything at all.

I hate to be found agreeing with an empiricist, but amen to this. I couldn't read past the first paragraph.

1,259 posted on 01/19/2004 2:30:08 PM PST by Taliesan
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