Dear Mauricio, Alessandro, and all,
Mauricio, thank you for your posts, I found the approach of connecting the set of terms and the notion of evidence useful.
Alessandro, I don't have a direct answer for your initial post, rather, in this post I want to suggest another way to think about what your your problem. Is it informative? Perhaps it is more matter of language and meaning.
Do the terms 'guideline' and 'recommendation', for example, identify the same kind of thing? To put the question another way, do the two terms have the same meaning? By putting the question in this way, my intention is to highlight a commonly held view of how meaning works. In this view, the meaning of a term consists in whatever object it picks out. So, if the terms 'guideline' and 'recommendation' pick out to the same object, then they have the same meaning.
Now, if the terms 'guideline' and 'recommendation' have the same meaning, then any sentence involving one of these terms will have the same meaning as any sentence that differs only by containing the other term instead. So, as Alessandro wrote, the terms would be interchangeable and would convey the same information to anyone who understands then.
This view of meaning generates an interesting puzzle. How come the sentence 'a guideline is a guideline' is trivial and yet the sentence 'a guideline is a recommendation' is potentially informative? Put simply, 'a = a' is obvious and trivial, yet 'a = b' might tell us something we that we do not already know.
Daly (2013, p. 15-17) describes this puzzle with the following example. Radovan Karadzic was president of Serbia following the break up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. As a public figure, is was widely known that
(1) Radovan Karadzic is Radovan Karadzic
From the late the late-1990s, Dragan Dabic was a practitioner in alternative medicine in Belgrade. Many of the same people that knew (1) also knew that:
(2) Dragan Dabic is Dragan Dabic
In fact, as a fugitive from international law, Karadzic had been living under an alias, and 2008 it was revealed that
(3) Radovan Karadzic is Dragan Dabic
Many people who had known both that (1) and (2) had not know that (3). Those people found both (1) and (2) uninformative whereas (3) is highly informative.
The terms 'Radovan Karadzic' and 'Dragan Dabic' pick out the same person, but according to the view that the meaning of a term consists in whatever object it picks out, then sentences (1-3) convey the same information: each of sentences is saying merely that a certain person is identical with himself. But this doesn't seem to be the case.
Similarly,
(4) 6 / 3 = 6 / 3
(5) 6 / 3 = sqrt(4)
Sentence (4) is trivial, yet what (5) says is more informative.
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To bring this post back to Alessandro's question, we could ask whether it is informative to assert that "the terms design guidelines, recommendations, principles, strategies and heuristics are often used interchangeably when they describe the outcome of a research." Maybe it is issue of language and meaning.
Best regards,
Luke
Luke Feast, Ph.D.
Daly, C. (2013). Philosophy of Language: An Introduction. Bloomsbury: NY
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