From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Nov 05 2002 - 18:17:10 MST
On Tuesday 05 November 2002 16:55, Dehede011@aol.com wrote:
> In a message dated 11/5/2002 6:41:43 PM Central Standard Time,
> charleshixsn@earthlink.net quotes: We are only saying look at the data.
> The facts explain themselves. Ron h.
> Then replies, "But as a definition it's a bit lacking."
>
> Charles,
> If you will read about Korzybski's General Semantics you will learn
> that definitions may either be extensional (you point to an apple) or
> intensional (you describe an apple) both have advantages.
> You keep wiggling around trying to use intensional definitions
> because they allow you to be so abstract that you neither have to admit
> your real world results nor devise ways to avoid repeating those same
> results in the future. You will get to continue enslaving people causing
> great human misery as well as costing millions of human lives.
> Of course those of us that do not wish to enslave people nor to be
> enslaved ourselves keep pulling your feet back to the fire of reality.
> Ron h.
If you define something by pointing at it, you have defined not appleness, but
one particular apple. To define what it means to be an apple you must
abstract the relevant features. Otherwise you can only point at all apples,
and say "that's an apple" to each of them. But you definitely haven't
pointed at all examples of socialism, and the ones' that you claim as
pre-eminent examples, seem to me to be more clearly examples of something
else. From my experience the primary characteristic of socilist groups is
that they fall apart, but I don't consider this to be a diagnostic feature,
either. After all, most businesses fail, and I haven't know that many
socialist groups. Most of them, by the way, called themselves "religious
communes" or some such, and could perhaps be considered communist if the
marxists hadn't so polluted the language. So perhaps they are only socialist
by me because I wanted to call them *something*. It wasn't their term.
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