Re: Jarhead DVD

On Sun, 19 Mar 2006 23:46:24 -0500, moviePig wrote:

Jay G. wrote:
Things can "seem" like a lot of things if taken out of context. Which is
why, as you've said "context always has veto power." In this case, the
context made your observations "superfluous, inconsequential, and
redundant."

If you feel my analysis ignores essential context, feel free to reject
it. But note, meanwhile, that full possession of that context,
apparently, had not led the preceding discussion to consensus.

Neither has your "analysis." In fact, your interjection has taken the
discussion *further* away from consensus, since we're now arguing issues
completely tangential to what was at hand.

No... because 'some' leaves room for only *specific* exceptions.

Such as?

"Birds eat some kinds of grain" specifically connotes that "Birds
*don't* eat some kinds of grain"... at least in any colloquial semantic
dialect familiar to me.

Does it exclude other animals from eating some kinds of grain?

Does "some retailers put some DVDs on sale as loss leaders" really remove
peanut butter sandwiches as a possibility?

Colloquially ? Of course it does.

So you think that retailers could *never* put peanut butter sandwiches on
sale because of the above statement?

Yes, I think that the sandwich issue is, for all practical purposes,
dismissed from the statement's purview.

Dismissed, or eliminated?

In mapping onto a finite set of possibilities, what's "closer" is always
the question, afaik.

It wasn't in this thread, stop making blanket statements.

The finite set was indeed in this thread. I put it there.

No, "what's 'closer'?" wasn't the question in this thread. The question was
whether one statement is a blanket statement, while the other isn't. This
is the problem of you joining into the conversation sans context.


"All" means "all." "In general," by your own admission, at best means
"most." "Most" is "closer" in meaning to "some" than "all." If "in
general" doesn't fit your finite set of options very well, then the fault
lies in the finite set *you* set up.

'All', 'most', and 'some' are adjectives. 'In general' is an adverb.

The American Heritage Dictionary says it's an adjective, as does Wordnet:
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=In%20general

Of course, I can't know what you *meant*

I meant "in general," as taken from its generally accepted meaning, the one
in dictionaries and such. It's probably best to consult those before
constructing finite sets and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.

The finite sets were and are a potentially useful point of view ...but
no more than that, and if you don't like them, then don't eat them.

I'm not, in case you didn't notice. That's why I'm disagreeing with you.
Even worse than your finite set though is that you applied it incorrectly
to the sentence, making "in general" synonymous with "all," and absolute,
when it's 'closer' to "some."

What's useful is that both statements agree that such a practice exists, to
varying degrees. What's *useful* is determining the difference between the
two statements, and whether one is a blanket statement, and whether one
isn't. That's what's *useful* to the thread at hand. All of your comments
have been terribly *un-useful* since they make assertions like "in general"
is indistinguishable from "all."

The question I quoted and tried to answer was "What is the difference?",
which btw was the sole new content of its post, iirc.

WTF is "new" context? The context was the thread the question was asked
in.

If there was, in
fact, an additional question about blanket-ness, which question somehow
securely blanketed the entire discussion, I never directly addressed it.

Which is why your answer has been useless to the discussion at hand, never
mind not even correct in its *own* context.

I wasn't posing the question at you, and I assumed that anyone who did
respond would at least do so within the context of the thread. And I do
understand your answer, I just think that it's incredibly silly.

How often "silly" means "deciding differently from me"...

"Silly," in this context, means ridiculous and outside reason.

And, to requote your original post, you seemed to deduce that use of "in
general" implies one saying "all," not "most," which is just a varying
degree of "some."

Again, after discarding the 'in general'....


Which is my *point*. If you discard the phrase "in general," you're
creating a new statement with new meaning. It's like discarding "DVD" from
the sentences, and *then* interpreting what they mean. If you *have* to
discard "in general" to make your assertion true, that means that the
phrase has a meaning that is contrary to your assertion.

What makes matters worse is that you don't simply remove "in general" from
the statement, you're *adding* "all"s to the statement. Even without the
"in general," in "real world" applications most people wouldn't assume it
was talking about "all" possibilities.

I'm not adding anything. I'm removing what seems irrelevant, and making
the most of what's left.

"All" wasn't in the original statement, you added that to your
interpretation. Simply removing "in general" would've left the statement:

"Retailers use new release dvds as loss leaders and sell them below cost."

By your own reasoning of "real world" application, the exceptions to that
statement are a given, so the adjective "all" could not possibly apply to
any of the nouns, since "all" is an absolute.


"All" is an absolute. "Some" is not, and neither is "in general." So it's
closer to the "some-some" variant, which makes it virtually identical to
the second statement.

When taking its statement in isolation (e.g., *not* alongside dozens of
similar statements, of which only a select few sport a prefixed 'in
general'), the 'in general' tends to be mere filler, imo.

Even removing the "filler" though would not make the statement an absolute.
If it does, it means that "in general" is *not* filler, since it modifies
the statement to something less than absolute.

Don't remember the context. Won't re-check.

Wow, you won't even check an re-consult what *you* wrote. No wonder this
conversation is going so well. What happened to your assertion that
context was important above all else?

Suffice to say that raking up old rake-marks has long struck me as much
more tiresome than productive.

Ah yes, "don't worry about what I said *then*, a whole three posts ago,
worry about what I'm saying *now*." If you can't even be consistent with
your own reasoning from a few posts ago, why should I view your current
reasoning as credible?

To me, the original
statement "In general, retailers use new dvds as loss-leaders," means this:

Retailers use new dvds as loss-leaders.
The preceding sentence may not always be true.

Now, *I* consider the second sentence superfluous,

It wasn't [superfluous] in the context of the thread. Even eliminating the second
sentence, the first doesn't mean "all retailers use new all dvds as
loss-leaders," since you admit that something less than all is implied in
the original statement. That's by *your own* reasoning.

You asked for a difference between your two statements. Without bias, I
saw one that seemed reasonable.

It wasn't reasonable. By your own reasoning of "real world" applications
and such, transcribing "in general" to mean "all" is silly. Unless, you
think that "all" doesn't mean "all," but allows for exceptions as well,
which is equally silly.

You preferred that I not.

I'd have preferred that you had read the thread up to that point and
understood the context of the question at hand. However, even sans
context, I'd have preferred your argument of a limited set had even
followed the basic reasoning where "in general," an adjective implying
exceptions, could not be transmogrified into "all" an adjective that means
an absolute.

-Jay
.

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