RE: [huml-comment] What's "reapplicable rationale"?

["Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <clbullar@ingr.com>]

Ok.  Interesting to know that.  I made up the term 
on the spot to denote a rule for solving special pleadings.
  
Not surprisingly given our subject matter, we've had several cases of 
some term or another getting an emotional reaction from 
some individual or another.   It is unavoidable.  On 
the other hand, it is not infrequently that sort of emotional 
reaction that connotes a miscommunication in need of 
clarification.  Emotional signs are enormously useful.

Ummm... one I recall offhand was "stereotype".
It was intended to be used in much the same way as Sowa, et 
al use "prototype":  an exemplar for characterizing a 
set member.  Contrast that to using a rule (intensional 
assignment), or exhaustive enumeration (extensional 
assignment).   One way to use HumanML categories is to 
create such prototypical exemplars, which can be called 
"stereotypes" correctly, but calling them that tends to 
raise emotional actions.  In fact, it will be very easy to abuse HumanML 
in just such a fashion, just as early movies are loaded 
with stereotyped characters and continue to be to this day.
 
Our Western polyglot languages are loaded with such terms, 
BTW.  One almost has to use a dead or artificial language 
to avoid them, and even then, if the language is heavily 
used across different groups or cultures, emote-laden 
reactions will reemerge because this reaction, as I've 
said before, originates not in the term, but in a context 
of use.  Negro used to mean simply, "black", a color, as 
derived from romance languages.   So again, without the 
contexts (time, space, place, culture, speaker's history 
and so on), the terms are otherwise just vocalized air.

len

-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:dennis.hamilton@acm.org]

Thanks.

Sort of the categorical imperative for rationale.

That's only the second example I've encountered in IT!  (The first is
Richard Stallman's justification for Free Software and the General Public
License.)