My friend, after much repeating of what I mean by my verbiage, this seems to come down to repeating a dozen times your contingent definition of my word, and insisting that I must use IT, even though that definition makes no sense to me, and is not what I intended to assert. So it just feels like a standoff about my (apparently limited) vocabulary.
I think a better approach to another person’s stated view would begin by working with his words as he defines and intends them, and then offering a critique of his actual claim.
(FWIW my studies in UCLA’s philosophy department were most influenced by analytic philosophy and logical positivism, with our big name there being prof Rudolph Carnap). But the trend among most professors of philosophy was to find it a meaningless word game. The debates about how to construe terms became so endless that it became out of favor, and today there are no Carnap progeny at UCLA. While philosophy is inevitably much concerned with clarification of words, my bias is that the best way to unambiguous clarity is to speak as much as possible with the definitions of ordinary understood usage, and that if no regular folk can follow your words & reasoning, it’s smuggling something in.)
