meta-tracking

posted on 2021-10-11

some social constructs don't originally track anything in the real world, but people who erroneously believe in them start assigning them attributes and meaning, and then those concepts bootstrap themselves into being real at least in that they track people's beliefs.

so, for example, refusing to follow astrology because it doesn't track the real world, fails to track all the people that start acting in astrologically predictable ways from believing (originally erroneously) in astrology.

another way in which one must take care to meta-track because people are involved, is the meaning of the meaning of words. the meaning of a word is defined by its usage; but, "the meaning of a word" is understood by many to instead track some essence of the word. while the idea of that essence is wrong, saying "the meaning of a word is defined by its usage" is kind of wrong; not because that's not what the meaning of a word is, but because in that sentence one is using a fairly non-usage meaning of "the meaning of a word".

and, you have to rember that phrases mean what they are understood to mean; so, in a weird way, the only statements that are understandable to someone are the ones that are agreeable with what they think, because those statements are those that match the general worldview-ideas-definitions that the person has; and fundamental disagreement entails using definitions of words and ideas that the person doesn't have, and therefore are kind of failures to communicate with them.

posted on 2021-10-11