This entire thread just demonstrates how confused and useless it is to argue “by definition”, or argue about term definitions.
You keep inserting words into people’s mouths lmao. Nobody said “by definition” before you did. (Control-F for “by definition” if you don’t believe me).
I did not miss your “if.” I didn’t think it was necessary to go into the semantics dive because I thought the analogy would be relatively clear. Let me try again:
In general, when someone says X group is Y, a reasonable interpretation is that members of X group are more likely to be Y. If you are being Gricean, somebody saying A is a member of X implies that they think A is a fairly central member of X and thus are more likely to exhibit Y.
In colloquial English, “X is Y” almost never means “if X, then Y, for all values of X and Y”. Eg, if somebody said “men are taller than women” you should take this as a claim about statistical averages, not a claim that all men are taller than all women.
Similarly, if you see someone say something like “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” you should interpret this as a claim that Nazis are on average significantly less respectful to nonwhites than other people would be to nonwhites. If you assume someone’s being Gricean when they said that, you might further assume that they believe that the specific Nazi they’re referring to exhibits similar behaviors to other Nazis on at least this dimension.
You should not interpret it as “every single Nazi is disrespectful to every single nonwhite person, in every case and in full generality.” I don’t think this is difficult. I don’t think you’d genuinely object to a claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites,” despite cases like allying with Imperial Japan, or adopting a swastika from Indian culture, or John Rabe. Even if the Nazis writ large made an entire exception for an entire ethnicity of people (eg suppose they were never disrespectful to the Japanese), I’d still consider the basic claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” to be approximately correct, and would not go all out of my way to continuously correct every incidence of that remark with “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites who are not Japanese.”[1]
Analogies aside, let’s go back to Yarrow’s original claim:
I find it so maddeningly short-sighted to praise a white supremacist for being “respectful”. White supremacists are not respectful to non-white people!
I think your attempt at a gotcha fails. For the same reason that it’s reasonable for someone to say men are taller than women without being immediately disproven as soon as you find a woman who’s taller than a man, or that Nazis are disrespectful of nonwhites despite allying with Japan.
Before writing angry/inflammatory replies, I recommend reading the actual text.
You keep inserting words into people’s mouths lmao. Nobody said “by definition” before you did. (Control-F for “by definition” if you don’t believe me).
I did not miss your “if.” I didn’t think it was necessary to go into the semantics dive because I thought the analogy would be relatively clear. Let me try again:
In general, when someone says X group is Y, a reasonable interpretation is that members of X group are more likely to be Y. If you are being Gricean, somebody saying A is a member of X implies that they think A is a fairly central member of X and thus are more likely to exhibit Y.
In colloquial English, “X is Y” almost never means “if X, then Y, for all values of X and Y”. Eg, if somebody said “men are taller than women” you should take this as a claim about statistical averages, not a claim that all men are taller than all women.
Similarly, if you see someone say something like “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” you should interpret this as a claim that Nazis are on average significantly less respectful to nonwhites than other people would be to nonwhites. If you assume someone’s being Gricean when they said that, you might further assume that they believe that the specific Nazi they’re referring to exhibits similar behaviors to other Nazis on at least this dimension.
You should not interpret it as “every single Nazi is disrespectful to every single nonwhite person, in every case and in full generality.” I don’t think this is difficult. I don’t think you’d genuinely object to a claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites,” despite cases like allying with Imperial Japan, or adopting a swastika from Indian culture, or John Rabe. Even if the Nazis writ large made an entire exception for an entire ethnicity of people (eg suppose they were never disrespectful to the Japanese), I’d still consider the basic claim “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites” to be approximately correct, and would not go all out of my way to continuously correct every incidence of that remark with “Nazis are disrespectful to nonwhites who are not Japanese.”[1]
Analogies aside, let’s go back to Yarrow’s original claim:
I think your attempt at a gotcha fails. For the same reason that it’s reasonable for someone to say men are taller than women without being immediately disproven as soon as you find a woman who’s taller than a man, or that Nazis are disrespectful of nonwhites despite allying with Japan.
Before writing angry/inflammatory replies, I recommend reading the actual text.
And I certainly won’t say the claim overall is false just because of a class [2]of exceptions! This is very much not how English works.
It’d be even more absurd to rate the claim as false due to a single exception