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Showing posts from October, 2014

The Excluded Middle

Last night I was reminded of how often people look at a position and assume there are only two alternatives. Usually this happens when someone fails to adequately distinguish what they mean. When this occurs, an oversimplification occurs and an individual asserts a generalization. Generalizations are dangerous because they rarely carry the meaning a speaker or writer himself thinks of when writing or speaking the assertion.  Such statements fail to account for sense, time, and referent sufficiently. Since the communicator has a different meaning than the recipient, a closed communication loop is created where the original communicator has distanced himself from his audience.  At times, this distance is intentional. One example may be a speech writer who is intentionally ambiguous and uses a lot of platitudes.  Such a person may want to call to mind, for the speech recipients, various undefined and broad ideas of patriotism along with emotional experiences which are left open to int