The ambiguous "use"
I keep seeing people make this error, especially in social media discourse. Somebody wants to âuseâ something. Except obviously, itâs not theirs, and so itâs absurd for them to make that demand, right?
Quick examples§
Iâm not trying to pick on this person at all: theyâre not a twitter main character, theyâre not expressing an unusual opinion here, they seem completely nice and cool. But I think this cartoon they drew does a good job of capturing this sort of argument-interaction, which Iâve seen a lot:
Sun Sep 22 22:20:02 +0000 2024???
Iâve also seen the exact inverse of this: people getting upset at artists because once the work is âout thereâ anyone should be able to âuseâ it. (But I donât have a cartoon of this.)
There is an extremely specific error being made in both cases here, and if you can learn to spot it, you can save yourself some grief. What misuse is being objected to? What are the rights to âcertain thingsâ being claimed?
The problem is that âuseâ is an extremely ambiguous word that can mean anything from âstudyâ to âpirateâ to âcopy and resellâ. It can also cover particularly sensitive cases, like creating pornography or editing it to make a political argument.
But everything people do is âusingâ something. By itself, âuseâ is not a meaningful category or designation. Say you buy a song â listening to it, sampling it, sharing it, performing it, discussing it, and using it in a video are all âusesâ, but the conversations about whether each is appropriate or not are extremely distinct. If you have an objection, it matters a lot what specific use youâre talking about.
But if youâre not specific, there are unlimited combinations of âusesâ you could be talking about, and you could mean any of them. And when people respond, they could be responding to any of those interpretations. Thereâs no coherent argument in any sweeping statement about âuseâ; the only things being communicated are frustration and a team-sports-style siding with either âartistsâ or âconsumersâ (which is a terrible distinction to make!).
Formal logic§
This is not a new problem. This is the Fallacy of Equivocation, which is a subcategory of Fallacies of Ambiguity. This is when a word (in this case, âuseâ) has more than one meaning, and an argument uses the word in such a way that the entire position and its validity hinge on which definition the reader assumes.
The example of this that always comes to my mind first is ârespectâ, because this one tumblr post from 2015 said it so well:
flyingpurplepizzaeater Sometimes people use ârespectâ to mean âtreating someone like a personâ and sometimes they use ârespectâ to mean âtreating someone like an authorityâ
and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say âif you wonât respect me I wonât respect youâ and they mean âif you wonât treat me like an authority I wonât treat you like a personâ
and they think theyâre being fair but they arenât, and itâs not okay.
See, here the âargumentâ relies on implying a false symmetry between two clauses that use the same word but with totally different meanings. And, in disambiguating the word, the problem becomes obvious.
Short-form social media really exacerbates the equivocation problem by encouraging people to be concise, which leads to accidental ambiguity. But social media also encourages people to take offense at someone else being wrong as the beginning of a âconversationâ, which encourages people to use whatever definition of other peopleâs words makes them the wrongest.
Copyright examples§
Since Iâm already aware that copyright is a special interest of mine, I try to avoid falling into the trap of modeling everything in terms of copyright by default, Boss Baby style. But this is literally the case of a debate over who has the ârightâ to various âusesâ of things that are usually intangible ideas, so I think itâs unavoidably copyright time again.
Is AI eating all the energy? Part 2/2
Monorail!
maybe the textgen content apocalypse is great
