Well, there's another word we'll have to ban from our vocabulary: react, reaction, reacting. It's too ambiguous. It could mean a response of any kind, or it could mean an emotional reaction, which was the sense in which I intended it. I think most people understood that. A reaction usually connotes a quick response without much thought behind it, such as with a reflex. It's a bitch having to condense complex thoughts into the symbols we call words but I have yet to see anything better.
Of course, you won't understand meaning if you're intent on setting up straw men by interpreting things in a way that they plainly are not meant. So when I say that I could follow you around and observe your behavior, or I could go through everyone's posts, that doesn't mean that I intend to do it, much less that I have an obsession with it. I don't think you're doing yourself any favors here with remarks like those..
Don't be ridiculous. And stop reacting emotionally.
Nowhere have I suggested banning ambiguous words. But, apparently, it's perfectly OK for
you to use a word in a special sense ("react" = "react emotionally"), but you whinge and complain when I do the same thing ("belief" = "uncorroborated opinion"). And in any case, I'm using the word "react" in exactly the same sense you are - a quick response without much thought. I think you're being thoroughly emotional about it all. I'm not the one setting up straw men. If you don't intend to follow me around or go through my posts searching for ambiguous words, why did you even mention it? You wrote it, but you "plainly" didn't mean it?? C'mon.... Backpedalling now doesn't help your cause at all. It still shows a bit of an obsessive-compulsive mindset, I would say.
This discussion has been fascinating, but it's rapidly becoming tedious, so this will be my last post on the subject - unless, of course, you write something that seems to be even more ridiculous than usual.
So, here it is. I define a "belief" as an opinion, which may be more or less strongly held, and may or may not be shared with others, for which little or no unambiguous corroborating evidence exists. I mean at least the kind of evidence that would be acceptable in a magistrate's court, if not in a scientific laboratory. And the strength and tenacity with which such a "belief" is held tends to be inversely proportional to the amount and quality of evidence that supports it. (This, incidentally, is pretty much how I defined it in my first post to this thread, so there's absolutely no excuse for misunderstanding me.)
And, the reason I try to restrict my use of the words "belief"(n) and "believe"(v) is because, on the basis of a great deal of prior experience - some of it on this very forum - I judge that there exists a high probability, amounting almost to a certainty, that someone, somewhere, is going to misunderstand, misconstrue (often deliberately), misquote or otherwise screw my meaning up. Yes, you can call that reacting if you want, but there's nothing emotional about it; it's more like cool, mathematical calculation.
When I said I
suspect many things, but don't
believe any of them, according to my own definition I was being perfectly clear, but you immediately "reacted" - and have continued to "react" ever since (yes, emotionally, even though you claim otherwise) - to try to prove to me that you know my mind better than I know it myself - which is presumptuous at the very least. You could follow me around for a day - hell, for a week, if you want - but you'd be wasting your time, and, more importantly, mine. I'm not going to change my definition to suit you - or to suit the dictionary, for that matter. You could point out to me situations where you
think I'm "believing", over and over until your face turns purple, but I'm sure I could counter every single instance with a rational explanation.
Dictionaries are, by their very nature, descriptive rather than prescriptive. They describe how words are used, not what makes sense. Words change in common usage even when the new meaning makes no sense. "I could care less," is an example, when what is meant is "I
couldn't care less". Many people use the word "cohort" when they mean "colleague"; a "cohort" was originally the basic tactical unit of the Roman army and has been used subsequently to mean a definable group (usually of humans or other organisms), but because of confusion with a similar-sounding word has changed from a collective to a singular noun. It's common usage, but technically incorrect. So you can't rely too much on a dictionary for exact meanings.
Why is "proving" yourself right - about
my state of mind - so goshdarned important to you? If that's not an "emotional" response, then the word "emotional" has no meaning.
TFS