🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3488dedd.5590573@news.thezone.net>,
Prove.Black.is.White.With@Our.Stats wrote:

> The only person who doesn't understand what you wrote is Barbara
> Amero. 
> 
> Take it to anyone who, unlike yourself, can read and understand
> English, and ask for an interpretation. They'll tell you what you
> meant. Try to keep your mouth shut while the interpreter is reading
> your words. No doubt you'll brand them as misogynist/andrist when
> you receive their verdict.


   I want to stay out of the specific squabble of which the above exerpt is
part, but I do want to remark on the form of this argument, because it
appears to me to be wrong.

   Several years ago, as a T.A. in medical ethics, I had a student who
wrote a paper in which she made some remarks which amounted to saying that
2000 years of philosophers were idiots for not seeing the simple truth she
had just discovered for herself. In my comments, I wrote that while it's
not invalid for her to say that the greatest minds of history were stupid,
they probably weren't all THAT much stupider than she.
   Naturally, she took offense, and tried to argue that I meant to call her
stupid, and called upon all sorts of grammar experts to prove what I meant.
Well, perhaps I overestimated her ability to recognize and appreciate
irony, and maybe I should have said that she wasn't much smarter than the
philosophers (though to my reading, that would have been MORE of an insult
in context, since the way I wrote it originally had an implicit challenge
to the premise that the philosophers were stupid at all, which the rewrite
would have lacked...)

   Anyway, the point is that when it comes to what a person actually MEANS
to say, the audience is not and CANNOT be the authority. What someone
actually DOES say is another matter, but if the author disavows a
particular interpretation, we are in no position to say, "No, you meant
what we say you meant." I KNOW what I meant to say to that student,
regardless of how ineptly I might have actually said it, and if she takes
offense at an unintended interpretation when other interpretations are
available, it becomes her responsibility and not mine.
   Likewise, we aren't going to get anywhere if we don't allow each other
to clarify what we actually meant to say. Language is not error-free, even
for the most fluent speaker, and part of making it error-tolerant means
allowing corrections to be made.

-- 
Thomas M. Cantine, Philosopher for hire
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