[lit-ideas] ouisia essentia
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 16 Jun 2014 21:35:02 -0700
Omar writes
I would once again invoke the analogy of doctors and the medical language.
While medical terms such 'arthritis' may be used by non-doctors, such uses
are derived by hear-say from medical uses. We don't tell doctors to
investigate how 'ordinary people' use the word arthritis to find out what
it means, but instead we refer the 'ordinary people' to professionals to
obtain a better understanding of what it means from them, when needed. (For
example, if they suspect that they have arthritis.) Some such might well be
the case with philosophical terms.
*Are you sure 'hearsay' is the word you want? It isn't clear whether you're
comparing two meanings of the word 'arthritis' or looking for the
difference between what a doctor says it means, *qua* doctor, and what
'ordinary people' mean by it. If I suspect, because of pain and swelling in
my joints, that I have arthritis, I think I'd ask the doctor if I did, not
what 'arthritis' means. I, an ordinary person, needn't have an 'ordinary
person's' understanding of that (as opposed to a doctor's expertise in the
field of muscles, joints, nerves and tendons) to know that arthritis is not
a small green beetle (although Arthritis is). I also know I have
osteoarthritis, not rheumatoid arthritis, which is lots worse.
*Here, though, I'm lost. I suspect that 'arthritis' is no more a medical
term than 'hives' is, but what if it were? Is the word copyright by the
AMA, so that ordinary people can't enter into the language game of medicine
unless they understand its *real* meaning, which apparently they cannot,
being but ordinary folk with ordinary understandings of what words mean—and
who gets to decide.
•I've been watching reruns of the TV series 'House M.D.' (House is an MD.)
So far, I've learned that doctors swear a lot and use a lot of jargon,
mostly Latin. When Dr Panek diagnoses someone as having supraventricular
tachycardia, I just close my dictionary and get out of the way.
Robert Paul
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