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Old 09-16-2012, 01:48 PM   #44
Anthony Loeppert
Dojo: Aikido of Del Mar
Location: San Diego, CA
Join Date: Aug 2010
Posts: 155
United_States
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Re: Even at Boot Camp...no one can reach inside you and make you feel. Your feelings

Normally, I abstain from posting to threads on which I have received my aikiweb moderation spanking... however not today.

Quote:
Tom Verhoeven wrote: View Post
But this cannot be applied to philosophy. Words can and do have different meanings. This is also true in a dialogue or any kind of conversation. If you decide that a word can only have one meaning; "to manipulate means to nurture", "control is a legal requirement" then you create for yourself a doctrine or as you say rigid ideology.
I thought clarified myself with control and manipulation as a means to an end (nurture). Not that controlling and manipulation are the definition of nurturing. I also gave you a hint at the intention of such control, by saying the child doesn't need to be aware it is happening. Does that context indicate to you aggression? Simply the fact of talking about control in the children context vs. the martial context should have conveyed the intent. While there are parents out there that don't abide an instinctual connection of love and bonding with their own children, maybe I could have been given the benefit of the doubt as to my (normal) intentions towards my own children.

But you choose to parse language much like a computer, needing things spelled out explicitly. One of the pleasures of conversing with humans vs. instructing computers is you DON'T have to spell things out, or shouldn't have to. One can marvel at all the multiple definitions of various words and how we understand one another (and indeed it is amazing - as any computer scientist researching natural language parsing might tell you), however it is in our nature to use the context of a word to pair down the possible meanings into an understanding, again, within the context.

Quote:
Tom Verhoeven wrote: View Post
It is in the dialogue itself that you figure out what the other person really means, whether you really understand what the other person is saying, whether you can follow his definitions, argumentation, conclusions.
And when that dialog devolves into quibbling about the definition of "my" and what it means in different context, that speaks volumes in and of itself.

Quote:
Tom Verhoeven wrote: View Post
To add to this there is also a "build up" or structure if you like in each dialogue. Not following that structure leads also to a lot of confusion. To give an example from my posts in this thread; if I state something like; "control and manipulation are a form of aggression" then that is a statement that you can agree with or not. But is also a definition. If you then respond with "I control and manipulate my children and the environment" then from that follows only one logical conclusion.

In such a case it would be wiser to come up with a question, like "what is the basis of your definition?" That is challenging the poster to come up with an explanation. That explanation will either clarify things or show a mistake in reasoning.
Which gets back to my assertion above, you seem to need things explicitly spelled out, and here you offer your schema how a conversation works. What an unnecessarily tedious method of communication, especially in an informal setting such as this.

Last edited by Anthony Loeppert : 09-16-2012 at 01:56 PM. Reason: typo
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