Tag Archives: meaning

Ok, the title is clickbait. But, uncharacteristically of clickbait the article is about much more and it is important. The point is that gender is a complicated concept that does fit simple models like biological appearance. This is a point that Ludwig Wittgenstein sought to elucidate by applying logical analysis. The meaning of many words in ordinary language are more like family resemblances than essences. For example, many words have several entires differentiating the different...

Unfortunately, Shannon's entropy, often referred to as information entropy, and then shortened to just information, is often confused with the colloquial term "information". This brings connotations of data, of knowledge, of specific sets of symbols with specific meaning. But as Shannon and Weaver said in their book from a year later, we must not confuse information theory information with meaning. This collision of terminology is amplified when it encounters economics, where information...

The following proposition is asserted as true by Marxists (e.g., Foley 1986: 16): Proposition 1: Socially necessary labour time is the only source of value. Marx asserted this numerous times, though not necessarily in these words, and here are some examples: “A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it. How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured? Plainly, by the quantity of the...

It is illustrated perfectly by this news story here.So a Mexican restaurant at a British university hands out sombreros to students as a “celebration of Mexican culture” (according to none other than the restaurant’s general manager). In our truly bizarre politically-correct culture, this is condemned as “racist.”This is an utter abuse of the term “racist,” and an insult to people who have genuinely experienced real racism.What is racism, if it is to have any coherent, sensible and defensible...