Re: Pronouns & sexuali

Agreed, but I think the debates about what should be legal are also
often framing differences. For example - and here I'm admittedly
simplifying an extreme position - consider a belief that all bad
things should be illegal. When paired with a belief that all things
are either good or bad, this implies that all legal things are good.
Therefore any attempt to legalize activity X constitutes a belief in
the goodness of that activity.  And so people holding these beliefs
argue against legalization of X by pointing out how bad X is.
Meanwhile, the opposition sees the goodness or badness of X as
irrelevant to the question of legality. Each side is completely
missing the point from the other side's perspective.

A loglang might have a mechanism for making certain types of framing
assumptions explicit, but I suspect the general problem is not
linguistically soluble.

On 2/25/09, Sai Emrys <saizai@...> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 25, 2009 at 6:21 PM, Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...> wrote:
>> Slight neutrality fail.  I think even the staunchest
>> pro-abortion-rights activist would take umbrage at an insinuation that
>> they believe abortion to be no more serious than a root canal.  IME,
>> that sort of casual attitude exists mostly in pro-life depictions of
>> their opposition.
>
> As I said, I intentionally gave the most disjoint views that people do
> have. Someone who *completely* buys the 'fetus is just part of your
> body' view would not consider it any different than any other part
> except in pragmatic considerations; as such, I think a root canal
> (which is a bona fide operation) is inappropriate.
>
> Your description is of someone who does at least partially value the
> fetus more than generic other parts of their own body. Certainly this
> view exists, and I did not mean to imply that people don't actually
> mostly lie on the gray areas of a spectrum of opinions.
>
> In any case, this wanders off topic (by going into what people
> specifically believe and why). My examples were meant purely for
> illustrative purposes to explain what I meant about framing, which is
> meta to this.
>
>>   More generally, it is an error to equate a belief that something
>> should be legal rather than illegal with an endorsement of that
>> something.  The law is a blunt instrument, and it's at least as much
>> about who gets to choose as about whether any particular choice is
>> right or wrong.
>
> Let's not talk about what things should or shouldn't be legal here.
>
> Linguistically meta is on-topic; law and politics isn't.
>
> - Sai
>
--
Sent from my mobile device

Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>

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