Taboo Your Words (2008)

I don't think anything intelligent can be said about a "completely unobserved and unrecorded tree." We do not know an object that has the qualities of being unobserved and we can never know, because then it wouldn't be unobserved any more. That's the idealist argument against materialism.

People will argue about whose definition is correct. By simply mechanically substituting the definition in place, you don't need to worry as much about whether it's correct.

Albert and Barry may have strong feelings about what the word "sound" means. They'll never agree to use the other's definition. Search and replace and you can advance the conversation past that point.

One of my personal rules for communication is that high-level language is a killer. Whenever conflict or confusion arises, high-level words need to be abandoned in favor of precision if the communication is to go anywhere. This is very similar to the article's examples of replacing a word with it's definition.

I believe that high-level language is the root of many philosophical/political disagreements because people simply use different definitions. When disagreeing parties avoid high-level labels (like "justice", "bad", "fair", and a plethora of others) and instead say exactly what they mean they can much more quickly realize exactly what they disagree and agree on. Arguments over high-level concepts rarely go anywhere useful because there's no substance to argue over.

> The illusion of unity across religions can be dispelled by making the term "God" taboo, and asking them to say what it is they believe in; or making the word "faith" taboo, and asking them why they believe it.

This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same. They happen to use the same words, like "God", "heaven", etc, but the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.

High-level language is very useful for quick communication. But it's horribly misleading and is a complete road-block to communication when people have different definitions or ideas in mind. This seems really obvious, but it's sad how much religious, philosophical, and political discussions only center around high-level language.

> This is very true, and I can't believe some religions that people think are the same. They happen to use the same words, like "God", "heaven", etc, but the concepts are completely different and incredibly incompatible.

What's more, the definitions of the religions themselves are so slippery, we can barely begin to compare religions. For example, suppose we take the author's advice and try to dereference the term "afterlife" in a comparison of Christianity and Islam.

Our first step would thus be to ask: What happens to an individual's consciousness after death, according to each of the two religions? But here our inquiry goes right to pieces, because we won't be able to agree on how to define the set of beliefs constituting each religion.

Is Christianity defined as the set of beliefs expressed in the Bible? And likewise for Islam and the Koran? But if so, then what about adherents of those religions who are not fundamentalists? Are we to ignore people who call themselves Christians and Muslims, yet believe that only some, or perhaps none, of the scripture is literally true?

But if we define Christianity and Islam so as not to exclude those people--which seems like the intellectually honest choice--how can we possibly agree on a set of beliefs that constitutes each religion?

Perhaps we could administer a scientific poll of self-identified Christians and Muslims, asking them to agree or disagree with various theological propositions. Those propositions which are supported by a majority of self-identified adherents become part of our definitions, and the rest do not.

That may allow us to continue with our project of comparing afterlife beliefs, but it still seems incorrect somehow. Now we've greatly oversimplified the actual beliefs of Christians and Muslims worldwide. By establishing an arbitrary threshold (>50% belief), we've painted over a lot of distinctions that matter to real-world adherents. Equally badly, the arbitrariness of the threshold makes our definitions suspect. Had we chosen a different threshold, we'd probably have arrived at radically different definitions, suggesting that our definition has little authority.

Thus the problem of comparing religions seems intractable.

Believe me, I have no skin in the game, but that's not exactly true. Creationism, as it is most often used, is the belief that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago according to Genesis. Intelligent Design most often refers to God being the one who guided/created evolution, gravity, etc. which had the purpose of leading to humanity.