I guess that I meant as simple as possible for the situation. I didn’t mean that you should try to expand every word into some sort of huge paragraph worth of explanation. I think that most people tend to take their jargon way too far, but it still has its place. I just meant that it would be useless to use a complex grammatical form in the place of a simple one meaning the same thing, or a big word in the position of a small one referring to the same thing. Useless if you’re trying to share ideas, I mean.
I suggested Human Action because we sort of expect everybody to be fluent in Misesian language here. If you’re not fluent in it, we’re prepared to quote him and stuff, but we just sort of act as if you already know it anyway. I mean, not everybody here does that, but it works if you do. Some of the people here focus more on Rothbard or something, and that’s fine. It’s just like, if you’re speaking something foreign to us, we expect you to break it down into ordinary language, or translate it into one of our languages (Misesian, Rothbardian, or whatever).
But remember that I didn’t even agree that we should both use the same language. I could speak Misesian while you speak Vichian. That would be fine. So with that in mind, I don’t think that my actual position is susceptible to that criticism (that a book doesn’t provide easy access to its definitions). It’s just that most of the people here read Mises, Rothbard, and so on, and are fluent in that kind of language. If you want to speak to us, you must teach us your language (by translating it into one of ours or using ordinary language to define it), or keep your ideas to yourself until we learn yours on our own. We don’t need to source the definitions unless it would be the best way to explain what we’re saying.
That might be something to work on. Maybe the Wiki will serve that purpose at some point.
That’s the unfortunate reality of our situation though. Just take a look at all of the assertions on this forum. They’re all mostly just a bunch of definitions. At least if you understand where I’m coming from, you would know what you’re doing. Check out this part of this post. Is that a definition or an assertion? It’s a definition masquerading as an assertion. You’ll find that all day long around here and a ton of other places. Our language isn’t very good at distinguishing definitions from assertions. And it leads to a lot of endless semantic arguments. It’s a big problem.
In a lot of cases, we really do have to spend the vast majority of our time defining terms rather than actually communicating about topics. Most of the discussions on this forum (and a lot of other places!) are an epic communicaton failure. If they were to step back and accept that they actually do need to spend the great majority of their effort on getting the language straight, then at least there would be a lot less nonsense. Most of the arguments on this forum are just word slinging. One guy’s words against the other’s.
It would be nice if we were all using the same words the same way, but I just don’t know how that would be practical with English (or any other natural language). Every word has like 7,000 meanings, there are like 1,000 synonyms for everything, the grammatical structure is a wreck, and so on. With what we have to work with right now, I prefer to just accept everybody’s definitions straight up. If I talk to your past self from a few days ago, I would refer to myself as a moral nihilist. But if I talk to LS, I probably wouldn’t. That’s it.
But I try to make my language as useful as possible. I avoid a lot of different grammatical forms because they’re messier than these. I avoid a lot of different words because they’re more confusing than these. And so on. If I lead by example enough, and I ask for clarification at the right times enough, I think that would be the best way to communicate right now. Suggesting other people to do it my way instead of theirs just doesn’t seem like it would work, but of course I haven’t ruled anything out.
But why would you need the words to contemplate the topic?
I try to translate their word language (whatever variant of English) into my thought process (pictures, sounds, and so on), and then that is what I contemplate. If I want to share my contemplations with them, I translate my thought process into my word language (some other variant of English). That’s all. I try not to contemplate the words unless I’m trying to figure out how to make one of the translations. Knowing their word language and my own at the same time isn’t categorically different than knowing both Spanish and French. It’s just a matter of degree, and it doesn’t pose any problems for my thought process.
If you spoke both German and Japanese, you would need to remember to “retrain” yourself every time you move from Germany to Japan or vice versa, right? That doesn’t seem too bad. It would be better if we all spoke the same universal language, but that doesn’t seem like it would be practical yet.