![]() For what is going on now I would propose the new word "Paretoism", after Vilfredo Pareto, the originator of the "80/20" "Pareto Principle": the empirical observation that 80% of the effect is the typically the result of just 20% of the causes. If you want a word that has no historical or cultural baggage so that you can use it to represent your own meaning, then, like Shakespeare himself, you should invent a new word. ![]() One could use the word "tribalism" in different contexts, and everyone would be happy with their different meanings…. If everybody simply understood that all meaning is only in the context, then things would be a lot simpler. "Basically, if you have any human language in your input or output, you are stuck with needing context to disambiguate.” (The same thing is done with letters to make words.) That is basically what Wittgenstein came to understand, but the new point being that that is not just some inherent defect of language, but a hallmark of an efficient and powerful language. The summary is that the most efficient and powerful language possible is one in which all of the words are ambiguous, and the meaning is only in the context.īriefly, instead of having a separate word for every possible present and future meaning, you use combinations of words to define any given meaning. A few years ago a team at MIT looked at the matter from a technical measurable sense. Immediately after claiming to prove that, however, he realized that they don't. Wittgenstein, of course, tried to prove that individual words had atomic absolute meanings. But science points to the fact that that is usually not possible. It would be nice if one could find a perfectly unambiguous word for which ever meaning one wanted. ![]() I also know the other perfectly legitimate meaning of the word that has a negative meaning to it, along with a distinct whiff of cultural superiority. I know that to those with an American Indian heritage, the word "tribal" has a very specific, technical and positive meaning. ![]()
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