What does it look like when someone starts to argue semantics?
Quote:
“Then you’re not a real Democrat.”
“Oh well if you’re not a Christian then you don’t really believe in the God.”
“A chicken sandwich cannot be called a chicken burger, that’s an oxymoron.”
A semantic argument begins when someone refuses to accept the way that another person defines, uses, or otherwise relates to a specific word or even symbol (like a flag). If you've ever found yourself in the middle of one, you probably realized at a certain point that the conversation felt like it was moving nowhere, or in circles. The advice “avoid talking about politics and religion” results from the tendency of political and religious discussions to turn friends into enemies over disagreements they weren't previously aware of, perhaps even to themselves. These disagreements typically have to do with the way that one interprets things: like baptism, or foreign aid.
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone had the same working definition for every word? Wouldn't progress happen so much more quickly? No. In a sense, if a language existed with perfect harmony between all of its semantic elements, progress would have already reached its completion. Dissonance between the what speakers experience and certain learned features of semantic elements is what causes them to change (and the arguments). For example, If you grow up learning that God says the Christians are going to Heaven, and then you meet a guy and he says, well, actually, the Muslims are going to Heaven, because your conception of God is wrong, it’s obsolete, let’s just you’re not likely to respond with an attitude of gratitude.
As painful as they can be, semantic arguments are necessary for language evolution. For example, someone might get the idea society as a whole is conflating two processes using one verb. This is common in scientific and religious practice; if a person is able to distinguish the properties of something that they consider to be distinct from whatever had been historically by denoted verb, they create a neologism, a new word, to signify that process. A modern-day example of this is the emergence of the Intelligent Design movement, which seeks to differentiate itself from all other Creationist perspectives by acknowledging the validity of macroevolutionary evidence that humans evolved from more primitive species. Or, conversely, that a distinction is being made where there is none. This is common in New-Age or spiritualist type books; for example the philosopher and theologian Alan Watts elaborates the view that the dichotomy between form and matter is false, and that we should simply think of and talk about everything as form. Both of these cases are worth considering.
“It’s just a political plot to get Creationism into our schools!” is the response you’ll get almost immediately from any non-believer if you bring up Intelligent Design (ID). Creationist conspiracy or not, the person making this objection almost always refuses to acknowledge that ID is, in fact, distinctly different from religion. ID is a metaphysical perspective in which Intelligence is ontologically prior to our experience and, apparently, to the evolutionary process that led up to it. “But most IDers dont even know what metaphysics and ontology are!” the nonbeliever may object. The truth is that it doesn’t matter. The semantic properties of ID fall out of the logical consequences of its definition when considered against various modes of questioning. For example, we could argue about whether or not ID is morally responsible, whether it legally counts as a religion, how much ID believers have in common with Young Earth Creationists, whether you’d be more likely to find ID believers in Christian or Muslim churches- we could argue all of those questions based on the semantics properties of the element “Intelligent Design” alone.
Is everything form? Well, in a way, the question makes no sense, because if everything is made of the same stuff, it’s like asking, “Is everything everything?”; or in different terms: “Is everything an X?” Is like asking “Is every X an X?” which is like asking “X = X?” The hard truth is this: Humans have made up words to describe what they experience. What we have is a collective set of experiences. None of them are matter, or form, or dogs, or cats, none of them ARE anything; or they ARE whatever we say they are, as long as we are consistent about what we’re saying. Watts’ assertion that everything is form can be taken as analogical, however: in ancient Greece, the universe was conceived by Plato as Ouroboros:
The ouroboros often symbolizes self-reflexivity or cyclicality, especially in the sense of something constantly re-creating itself, the eternal return, and other things such as the phoenix which operate in cycles that begin anew as soon as they end.
Not only is production and comprehension of speech a cyclical process, but so is the entire evolution of language:
Quote:
Understanding the sentences of a text involves applying a succession of cyclic operations to an ordered series of components… Hagege 212
The study of the historical evolution of language reveals a morphosemantatic cycle: a gradual progression from semantics to syntax… to morphology and phonology, at the end begins a slow movement back in the other direction, closing the cycle as it begins anew. Hagege 198
Perhaps the word that’s received the most semantic abuse is the word “god”, whether or not it’s capitalized. In ancient Hebrew, God was a verb, YHWH, meaning “I will be that which I will be,” because in the most ancient Hebrew everything was a verb (this is probably the case for all of the most primitive languages). Thus, one never asked questions like “Does God exist”? Because the verb for Will be is the same as the name for God so the question would be like asking “What will be will be?”As the feedback cycle between semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology progressed, God became nounified. At some point, the deities of the Greeks and the Hebrew God got conflated under the same name, so they had to be differentiated by capitalization. Later on, more people started using the same word to refer to the deity they worshipped.
So we are dealing with perhaps the most semantically ambiguous concept on the planet, other than perhaps “thing”. This is why I immediately abandon any discussion that starts off with “Do you believe in God?” if God is not immediately defined. Otherwise, what you end up with is a bunch of Atheists who hate Young Earth Creationism and focus on the God who smites 40 children with a bear for insulting a prophet, and a bunch of people who aren’t really even Theists just accusing the Atheists of only being in there arguing because they've got major resentment issues, and then you’ll have one guy who is either a young earth Creationist or a really good troll providing fuel for the flame.
I’ll settle the argument right now: We don’t know. Some scientists ignore the fact that science doesn’t the ability to answer ontological questions, or they simply scoff at them, and some theists ignore the enormous body of evidence from the fossil record that macroevolution has occurred and that humans almost certainly evolved from more primitive life forms.
Here’s the meat and potatoes: The truth is less important than the way you respond to the fact that you can’t know it. If there is a God and I have a soul that will be judged, I earnestly believe that my actions and intentions will weigh more heavily than a profession of belief or prescribed set of rituals. I doubt that any God who makes a world like this one wants its creation to just do the same boring things all the time. I think it would want us to do science, and explore the galaxy, and even hook up with multiple people. Because life is truly a blessing, whether given by God or blind chance.
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