Are you allowed to put a sweeping general statement like that in the middle of a paper on medical ethics?!
Yeah, I'd say it's pretty normal to explicitly declare some of your philosophical assumptions in a paper to use as the basis of your arguments without expecting to debate them in the context of that paper itself. You'd normally put that stuff in an introductory paragraph rather than throw it into the middle of the article, and you'd normally do it slightly less flippantly than this, but it's reasonable to take a basic position on something like the philosophy of language and then apply that in the context you're actually talking about.
And yeah, I totally agree with your assessment that the second quotation is either meaninglessly restrictive or meaninglessly circular.
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Date: June 4th, 2010 11:09 am (UTC)From:Yeah, I'd say it's pretty normal to explicitly declare some of your philosophical assumptions in a paper to use as the basis of your arguments without expecting to debate them in the context of that paper itself. You'd normally put that stuff in an introductory paragraph rather than throw it into the middle of the article, and you'd normally do it slightly less flippantly than this, but it's reasonable to take a basic position on something like the philosophy of language and then apply that in the context you're actually talking about.
And yeah, I totally agree with your assessment that the second quotation is either meaninglessly restrictive or meaninglessly circular.