[tacticalogic]

Sophistry is all the rage in contemporary America, even though it prefers longer, more intellectual sounding names to dupe the gullible. Thus for example, it calls itself postmodernism, empiricism, naturalism, epistemological relativism, anti-foundationalism, pragmatism, situational ethics, pluralism, multiculturalism, interfaith, evolutionary humanism, trans-humanism, positivism, rationalism, and progressivism.

Who just tried to take control of that list of terms and re-define them all as "sophistry"?

[Alamo-Girl]

That the one who controls the dictionary, controls the debate, applies to every side in a dispute.

For example, we have often wrestled for control of the term "Creationist" because some of our correspondents would like to paint everyone who believes in God the Creator as a Young Earth Creationist by attaching the meaning, YEC to the term "Creationist."

I also wrestle for control of certain terms which have strict meaning in mathematics but would be misappropriated applied to physical nature.

For instance, a person cannot say something is random in a system when he doesn't know what the system "is." A series of numbers extracted from the extension of pi may appear random but are in fact, highly determined. Using the term to describe a physical phenomena without the qualifier, i.e. "physical randomnness" - suggests that all that physically exists is both known and knowable to science. That is of course impossible since science cannot say that fields, particles and dimensions which have no measurable direct or indirect effect must therefore not exist.

Of course the stakes are very high indeed when the debate is political and the consequences, bloody. "Untermenschen" or 'under men' was the term the Nazis used to describe Jews, Gypsies, etc. and as a result the people who put them to death in great numbers could believe they were not actually killing humans. Ditto for mainstream media, liberals and Democrats relentlessly referring to the unborn human as a fetus.

I defer on the "isms" to betty boop and spirited irish. Just one battle on a crevo thread over the terms "realism" "idealism" and "nominalism" convinced me to take the back seat. LOLOL!