(December 10, 2016 at 2:32 am)robvalue Wrote: If I talked in such precise terms all the time, I'd pretty quickly only be talking to myself. I assume, when talking informally, that most people will use common sense to add these implications.
I think there's a real problem here: shorthand, when used enough, gets conflated with absolute truth, and becomes foundational.
For example, when I talk about the material world, I'm using the kind of shorthand you are talking about. "I ate a juicy red apple" is actually the description of an experience. This is actually shorthand for a lot of experiences: redness, apple-shape, apple-taste etc., but at some point that "experience of X" bets subbed out with "X. Obviously and objectively X."
This doesn't matter when I'm trying to design a bridge that won't fall down. However, in discussions about the nature of mind and brain (to take one example), it instantly leads to the conflation of assumptions and conclusions. "I experienced brain-feeling (i.e. if poking it), subject-reports, sound-of-professor, sight-of-textbooks," which are all experiences, get "shorthanded" to "The professor said such-and-such, I did so-and-so to the brain, the subject's experienced changed in this-or-that way."
