From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sat May 04 2002 - 11:05:21 MDT
Samantha writes
> suffered by myself and my siblings. Are you implying my father
> had some kind of right to beat us mercilessly... ?
What can I say? I don't know what you mean "if he had a right".
Let me speak operationally. If you ask me about whether some
legal right exists, then I know perfectly well how to determine
that. I can examine the law books and the enacted statutes. I
can also consult the district attorney's office, the police,
or experienced judges and lawyers. Crucially, there is a fact
of the matter.
Likewise, I can determine operationally if X approves of
proposition P. The most obvious recourse is to ask X if
he or she approves of P. Over time, especially if I'm
being thorough, I can converge to an answer of whether
X approves of P. Also, I can observe X carefully and
maybe find out if there's a difference between X's verbal
support of P and X's actions.
For decades I've been guessing that when people say "X
has a right to do A", they really mean "I approve of
X doing A", and have simply seized upon a tendentious
and (they hope) persuasive way of phrasing it. But what
do I know? By having misspent my youth thinking about
the meanings of words and reading Korzybski, perhaps I've
just rendered myself clueless and can't understand any
longer the ordinary non-academic meanings of some simple
phrases. On the other hand, it could turn out that I'm
right, and that people talk past each other with phrases
like that, and that they might as well have said "It is
God's will that...."
I even hesitate to use the word "should": but it's somewhat
easy for people, I think, to see that I only mean "I approve"
or "I think it best".
As for your father beating you mercilessly, are you really
surprised to hear that I strongly disapprove? Exactly what
information were you after? Maybe you thought that I was
one of those people who want there to be a law against
everything I detest?
Lee
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