Hey man, I'm just speaking what I think is the truth--you come off to me as a super duper mega troll. But in my defense, I PMed you about the troll stuff and didn't blast you on the forum for it. But since you decided to bring it out of PM, fair game, right? Here is why I think you are a troll:
- You cycle from "thanks, that helps!" to "man everyone here is so cliquey" to "here are MY philosophical insights" and back again.
- You act like you understand academia ("So far I've done alright, and so far I've noticed academia in "real life" values these things - integrity, truth-seeking, standing up for oneself, standing up for facts, standing up for doing things the best way possible. It's only a bunch of online grad students that think they know better.") but in another thread you admit that you seem incapable of handling academia/research.
- You brag about your grades, you rag on TAs, blame the forum for... god knows what ("It seems a lot of people on here dislike whenever anyone mentions something above some generic average. Above average on the GRE? Best not mention it. Good grade? Keep it to yourself. Good school? Be careful what you say. Good house? A lot of money? Little debt? Happy family? Don't have to study for the GRE? Spend less than average time on something (like, say, an SOP)? All these things are off limits.") yet again, you appear to be inept/helpless when it comes to research (which is what really matters).
It is infuriating, and, as a result, you've managed to rile up a good number of the forum members. Good job.
I simply don't buy that a graduate student at Stanford could honestly be as consistently rude, floundering, or self-contradictory as you have been. Maybe this is just how you are and I am a terrible person, but either way, I refuse to engage you any further after this message. I think you should stop posting and reflect on how silly you have been.
Speaking as a rhetorician: listen to your audience (fuzzylogician et al.). They're telling you exactly how your writing/communication is being received by others.
Either the rhetorics of your messages are intentional and need to be toned down, or they're unintentional and you've been presented with a fantastic opportunity to better tailor your message to your audience.
I don't know if this is a genuine post or a sarcastic one. But regardless, let me say something more productive and that may be of more interest to other readers as well.
I am a linguist. In fact, my research centers around the area of sentence meaning (or semantics). Word choices (or lexical semantics) is an interesting field onto itself but it's outside my area of expertise so I won't comment on it any further. Logical entailments from sentences are also truly(!) fascinating. But beyond them there are other aspects of meaning that deserve attention as well -- and that is studied in the fields of pragmatics and discourse.
Sentences can have presuppositions and (defeasible) implicatures.
For example, if I tell you that I solved most of the problems on the quiz you are licensed to draw the conclusion that I didn't solve all of the problems correctly, even though my statement is entirely consistent with that state of affairs. Likewise, if I tell you that I have two brothers, you are licensed to infer that I have *exactly* two brothers, even though my statement is consistent with my having three or more brothers.
Singular definite descriptions like "the president" presuppose the existence of a unique referent that they can pick out in the discourse. That's why "the king of France is bald" is a weird sentence - not true but not quite false, it's infelicitous (there is no king of France) and likewise "you have to read the other thread on this board!" is strange (there is more than one other thread on the board). But if I told you sorry it took me so long to reply, I had to go pick up my brother at the airport, listeners and readers seem happy to accommodate the fact that I have a brother (possibly more than one, in fact) without protest even if they didn't know this fact before.
I can utter a generic statement like all owls hunt mice and you'll accept it as true even though what it entails is clearly false - there can be baby owls and very old owls that don't hunt at all, and sick owls or wounded owls - in fact, it can turn out that only half of all the owls hunt mice and you'll still think what I said was true. Similarly you'll agree that chicken lay eggs, even though it is at most true of half of all chickens even in the unlikely scenario that there are no exceptions among the hens, just because roosters don't lay any kind of egg at all.
Speakers report that they perceive differences between the following pairs of sentences: a triangle has at least three sides and a triangle has more than two sides, and also a triangle has at most three sides and a triangle has less than four sides -- even though these pairs are truth-conditionally equivalent (=they are true in exactly the same cases), and true (=every triangle meets the description in all four sentences, according to the mathematical definition of a triangle). These differences, then, have something interesting to do with the form of the number-words that are used in these sentences.
If I ask you can you pass the salt? or do you know what time it is?, you are being uncooperative if you just answer yes!. You understand very well that I want you to perform a certain action, even though my literal question was just yes/no.
The point of this tangent, beside my fascination with my own research field, is this: your request that we address only the literal meaning of your words and their logical entailments, but not anything beyond (in your words, distrusting what you explicitly say in favor of assumptions that are based on our own personal experiences), amounts to nothing more than insisting that can you pass the salt must be answered with yes!, else we are over-interpreting and putting words in your mouth that you did not utter. Competent speakers of any natural language use it to convey much more than just literal meaning, and whats more--they expect cooperative conversation partners to understand more than just the literal meaning as well; it's simply an integral part of language use. But you insist that a triangle has at least three sides! -- it's mathematically true, your integrity forces you to defend this position and you expect others to ignore the form of your argument, even though they tell you that there is something wrong with this formulation and you'll get your point across much easier and clearer if you instead said that a triangle has more than two sides. Alas, we are not machines, and form does matter (happily for us, linguists!).
Edit: this is my 1,500th post on this board...and I am very happy that it turned out this way, with a post that's mostly about interesting observations in my field and not about other petty things.
I just feel like humanities students are the most pathetic forms of people. Humanities are easy and pointless and that's why the field is so flooded. Sciences (such as physics) are what really impacts the world and changes things and helps people. What do humanities really do?
The students are pathetic too. They are miserable because they tried to do what they loved but society hated it. Society hates them because they are just writers and 99.9% of writers are pathetic too. Even the Simpsons hates grad students. Those poor grad students, they can't even watch the simpsons to escape their woe!
Idk, I loved humanities and thought they were great but now I realized that I was wrong to enjoy them and that writing, and humanities are bad, their practitioners are pathetic and that sciences are the only way, even if you don't enjoy them, because they are the only way to actually do things.
