On 1/29/2011 8:37 AM, John Leslie wrote:
Alessandro Vesely<vesely(_at_)tana(_dot_)it> wrote:
Let me recall there's a proposed corollary to Godwin's law
http://www.irtf.org/mail-archive/web/asrg/current/msg15449.html
]
] I think that as soon as you start quoting the dictionary, you've lost
] the argument.
I thoroughly disagree. Perhaps quoting the dictionary "starts a
different" argument, but citing a scholar's opinion on derivation and
usage gives us something to focus on. IMHO, this aids the process of
convergence.
I'd ordinarily agree with Alessandro, which is why I don't recall ever
quoting dictionaries before in decades of discussions like this, but he
misses the point that I was directly responding to a comment that
"Reputation" has a single dictionary meaning that we should rely upon
for our work here, but as I attempted and you also pointed out
explicitly, there are _three_.
Indeed, before we can start using a word as technical jargon, we have to
understand what the jargon _means_. I'm not sure we do yet.
And secondly, more to the point I elaborated on somewhat more, the third
meaning is, I think, more in tune with what I think we want to do. The
point being that reputation isn't a single-dimensional
"good-neutral-bad" trinary or scalar thing and we should be considering
whether it's usefully multi-dimensional. That makes a huge difference
in what such a thing needs to be able to express.
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