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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Even omissions should cause sentences in the essay to be false though. Is there really not one sentence you believe is false?

(Also, would you mind being civil? I'm doing it; you can too.)

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Hmm, I know I'll get downvoted for this, but I don't think he's being uncivil, pg. He made an accusation against you, but he didn't do it in an uncivil manner. Asking him to be civil strikes me as weird, and possibly that you're being too defensive?

PakG1, you have a good point. Accusing someone of "selectively ignoring" evidence is suggesting the person is not seeking truth at all. In civil discourse, one owes a response. In uncivil discourse, then the opponent often isn't asking a real question and the answer doesn't need to take it seriously. I think PG was taking onan_barbarian's comment seriously and asking a sincere question.

I do not suppose it to be possible to accuse anyone of anything in a civil manner. Accusation belongs to prosecutors, mothers in law, schoolteachers and other beings that are clearly on a higher plane than one.

Civility is a difficult, but simple, art, necessitating primarily that one should wish to get along with another: onan does not seem to be going out of his to make himself agreeable to pg or anyone else in this exchange.

Forking the conversation, but going out of your way to make yourself agreeable is not efficient conversation. Now, the workplace and an Internet forum may differ in terms of environment, but if I applied "going out of my way to be civil" to the workplace, it would make for a lot of inefficient conversation and meetings. Being direct is much more preferable in the workplace, and as long as you leave out insults and profanity, it can be quite civil. That is what I'd expect in everyday life as well. My standards of comparing the workplace and other environments may not be shared.

Perhaps you would prefer people use more phrases like "I think", "I feel like", or pose sentences as questions. I suppose that works well enough for me without destroying conversation efficiency too much.

The word "accusation" has a broad spectrum of emotion, but perhaps a very narrow emotive connotation when heard by the accused.

The civil version (at least tolerably so) would be the first 17 words. The remaining 10 could be affixed to any criticism of any essay by anyone.

OK, I had to upvote this reply. Would figure. :)

I don't understand why you are so keen to draw me into a line by line nitpick. You saw my objection to the essay. Address it or don't. I don't think your points in the essay can stand without both a discussion of empiricism and an examination of the broader analytic philosophy project. You obviously do, so I'm happy to leave it there.

I want to focus the discussion. When people complain about things I've written, often as not they're complaining about things they believe I think, rather than things I actually said. It's hard to have a meaningful conversation with that level of disconnection between the participants. So I usually ask people who disagree with something I wrote to tell me what specific sentence or passage they feel is false.

If I've said something false, I'd honestly like to know what it is. I wrote that essay, like most essays I write, to figure out things for myself. So if I've made a mistake I want to know what it is.

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