Curious: Nagging Questions With Unimportant Answers

[Cin]

Originally Posted by imperfect_cupcake

How do I reconcile being a materialist if I also agree there are emergent properties??

I shouldn't think it would be too hard and I imagine if one can accept the premise of emergent materialism one could literally reconcile anything.

Your question got me thinking about semantics and that brought to mind a question I often have running around in my head. If semantics is, among other things, the branch of linguistics and logic concerned with meaning, why is it often disparaged? I think we all speak with the hope of being understood, but without clarity of meaning language is.....well....meaningless. Why then do people often say we shouldn't get bogged down in semantics or scoff and say “that's just semantics”? When the meaning of our words are all we have to understand each other, why is not semantics revered?