Dear Klaus and Keith,
This is a language footnote: The sense of the word "radical" that you
describe is in the dictionary and I am aware of it. It's not a bad
dictionary. Neither have I selected a single preferred meanings as
though there are no other meanings. I selected the definition that
illustrates the meaning I intended. It is a common and non-pejorative
meaning.
The use of definitions, etymology, etc., has purposes other than
"authority." They help us to break open words, their history, their
meanings and context. And, in this case, they exhibit one wide,
common understanding-in-use of a word. The other wide usages are that
of getting to roots and a political meaning.
The author is the authority on what he or she intends, but the
definition served to points. First it nicely summarizes one common
meaning in crisp language. Second, it shows that this is not a merely
private language. If intention alone were all that counted, I suppose
we could use any word with a metaphorical ring -- rather like a wine
critic -- describing an idea as "golden," "oaky," or "velvet" while
intending by these words meanings of other words.
Whatever my intended meaning, it would not be the same to write, "The
claim that 'the world we know is fiction' is velvet."
I could have added that I am aware you are making a radical argument,
attempting to reach the root of the problem to understand it. In that
sense, I also proposed what I saw as a radical argument, an argument
to evolutionary fitness. (The third answer was not critical realism.
The concept of critical realism appeared in my conclusion.) The
argument to evolutionary fitness offers one explanation for this
epistemology that I have not seen before, at least not in philosophy
of science arguments on whether we can know something "real" about
the world. That was my way of attempting to brush the leaves aside.
In this thread, we disagreed on what the root is.
As I wrote, I am not going to re-enter the main thread. The most
visible example of a reaction involving free radicals is combustion.
Yours,
Ken
--
On Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:35:38 -0500, Klaus Krippendorff
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
i too use "radical" in the sense of "going to the roots of an issue,"
avoiding being sidetracked by leaves -- not necessarily eradicating
the problem, as you suggest, but understanding it.
ken's post is a good example of how the supposed authority of a
dictionary fails -- whether he quotes from a bad dictionary or
selects the meanings he prefers, i do not know, in any case without
asking the user of the word what he or she meant by it. shouldn't
the author be the authority on what he or she has written? - but we
had this conversation before on this list without effecting its flow.
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