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Tip of canine tail bashes dog's brains out by wagging same.
It is a war. There is no official state of war declared.
My father committed suicide on 3/13 of this year. Yet until I had the death certificates, banks and other institutions acted as though he were alive. It took a week for the coroner to issue his report; it took a month for the county office to issue the death certificate. So for over a month legally my father was walking around, even though I had already received his ashes in the mail.
In fact, as far as the IRS is concerned he is still alive.
Doing the speech act--"IRS, banks, investment firms, insurance company, county deed office, here is the death certificate: My father is dead"--has nothing to do with whether or not my father is alive. His continued living was or is a legal fiction.
We are not at war in Afghanistan or Iraq. Two more legal fictions. We make up words to keep the legal fictions clear. These words are jargon. Jargon can be accepted into language, but specialists who engineer their specialized language have no authority to engineer everybody else's language to suit their specialized purposes. We manage to cope, as long as the specialists don't assume that they're better, superior guardians of the language than the people.
Note that this confusion of words with acts and deeds is endemic. Yesterday the Obama administration released a plan for abolishing homelessness in the US. It is unfunded; it is unclear that is had been adopted; legislation is required to implement some of its provisions; moreover, whether or not the plan could actually work is unknown. Yet immediately it was declared a commitment to action; it was then called "doing something" about homelessness. Within 20 posts somebody said it was good that Obama--apparently taken to be the actual author of the plan--had finally actually done something about homelessness. To point out that it was just a plan, not even one that was adopted, was to be ridiculed as a pessimist. A factualist, I'd have said, but for many in word-land, things-and-acts, actual facts, are irrelevant.
In physical chemistry we spent a lot of time doing utterly boring experiments and cranking out reams of utterly boring data. Then we had to analyse it. One important point was to account for error, both calculated and experimental. However, sometimes the plausible error was small enough that the erroneous results we got were exposed as being wrong. "Unknown" error was a valid reason; but in more than a couple cases, "incorrect theory" was the right answer. The point of the labs in those cases was to show that our assumption that the carefully derived equations were meaningless speech acts: If they modeled reality accurately, good; if they didn't, we declared them to accurately model reality at our own peril.
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