I recently had a Facebook encounter with someone who objected to the use of the terms right to life and right to property because he felt these terms confused people into thinking that they had a right to life in the sense that if they couldn’t manage it, someone else
Tag: equivocation
Total 7 Posts
It often happens in arguments with the general public that people ask for an empirical example of whatever economic (or political) principle I’m attempting to explain. In truth, it’s sometimes worse. They ask for an empirical example, but really they are appealing to authority under the guise of wanting a
Yesterday I was musing about writing a new post. Specifically, I wanted to talk about the difficulty inherent in writing on political topics. This difficulty stems from a multitude of reasons, not the least of which is the reaction you will get from people who don’t agree with you. The
I just discovered this one a short time ago while working on an article about language. Here’s the definition based on the Wikipedia entry: Polysemy: the capacity for a sign, word, or phrase to have multiple related meanings. It is usually regarded as distinct from homonymy, in which the multiple
The words universe and atom originally had very specific abstract meanings. Universe referred to “everything that exists” while atom referred to the “smallest indivisible constituent of matter” (from the Greek philosophy of Atomism). Over time these abstractions became concrete in their meanings. As the science of physics progressed people came
On the path to enlightenment there are a lot of people who, for whatever reason, want to keep you from the truth and they have a few ingenious techniques for doing so. One of these goes like this: Present a little bit of truth along with a lot of falsehood
Doublespeak is a type of logical fallacy known as equivocation. Equivocation is the use in a logical argument of a word that has two or more distinct meanings. The purpose of using Doublespeak is to evade real debate by confusing or obfuscating. In any spoken language, words naturally change over
