P006 • Epistemic Principles
Also known as: Taboo Your Words, Conceptual Analysis
Sometimes a word is doing all the work in an argument, and you do not notice until you take it away. Rationalist Taboo is the practice of temporarily banning a confusing or load-bearing word from a discussion -- and then seeing if you can still say what you meant without it. If you can, the conversation gets clearer. If you cannot, you have found the place where the thinking was thin.
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Words are our most powerful thinking tools, and most of the time they work beautifully. We compress enormous amounts of meaning into a single term and move on. The trouble comes when a word starts to feel like it means something precise when it actually means different things to different people -- or when it means nothing at all beyond a vague gesture at a feeling. Without a practice like this, we can argue for hours about whether something is 'fair' or 'natural' or 'real' without ever noticing that the word itself is the source of the confusion, not the thing being discussed. Rationalist Taboo is not about distrusting language. It is about testing whether a particular word is clarifying your thinking or hiding a gap in it.
| When a conversation has been going in circles and you suspect a shared word is hiding a difference in meaning |
| When you are writing or thinking and a particular word feels important but you cannot quite say why -- tabooing it will reveal whether it is doing real work or just providing a feeling of clarity |
| When a disagreement feels intractable and you wonder whether both sides might actually agree on the substance but disagree on the label |
| When you encounter a definition that uses the word being defined, and you want to get underneath the circularity to see what is actually being claimed |
| A conversation keeps circling back to the same word and no one seems to be getting anywhere -- the word might be the problem, not the topic |
| You notice that two people seem to be agreeing on everything except one term, and you suspect they might mean different things by it |
| You are building an argument and one word feels essential but you cannot quite explain what it adds -- that is a word worth tabooing |
| A definition feels circular: 'X is X because it has the quality of X-ness.' When explaining a thing requires using the thing, the word is hiding rather than revealing |
| Replacing one abstract word with another equally abstract word and thinking you have made progress -- the practice only works if you get more specific, not just different |
| Assuming every word can be broken down into simpler terms. Some concepts are genuinely fundamental. The point is not to eliminate all abstraction but to test whether a particular abstraction is earning its place in the argument. |
| Using it as a rhetorical weapon -- demanding that someone define their terms in order to trip them up rather than to genuinely understand what they mean |
| Rationalist Taboo |
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| When a word seems to be causing confusion or circular reasoning, taboo it: explain what you mean without using that word or its synonyms. This forces you to be specific about the actual phenomenon rather than hiding behind abstract labels. |
| Breaks circular definitions and forces genuine explanation. 'Opium causes sleep because of its dormitive virtue' becomes impossible when you can't use 'dormitive' - you must explain the actual mechanism. Reveals when disagreements are semantic vs. substantive. |
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