Semantic Restructuring is the pursuit of enlightenment, enlivenment, empowerment through the creative re-arranging of the building blocks of meaning. For a better description, Start Here.
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Bateson, books, cogling, context, CPB, embodiment, framing, I Ching, paradox, perception influence, prisdem, semantic punctuation, sensation, techniques, unconscious
Often you will hear people attempt to dismiss a disagreement by announcing, "We're only arguing semantics." Don't let them get away with it.
If there is a substantive disagreement which is confused by the use of a word being used in different senses then adopt new labels to sort out the various positions and continue on to resolve the conflict.
If there is substantive agreement which is confused by use of disparate labels for the same ostensible phenomena, then agree on a label and on the phenomena and continue on to either cement the agreement of diagnose any pertinent but not properly addressed disagreement.
In the latter case, substantive agreement with a mis-match of labels, the tendency to dismiss the matter is understandable. "We agree in substance but are using different labels," is to say conflict is resolved if we agree to the legitimate use of each others labels or find an agreed to alternative label.
But there are at least two dangers to summarily dismiss the matter on grounds of "semantics," first, labels are not passive things affixed to items; the choice of labels will greatly influence the choice and even the available choices related to that item, conceptually, cognitively. So it really is important to achieve agreement on substance and labels.
But the second danger of dismissing a case of mis-matching labels for substantive agreement is more pernicious: the act of dismissing matters on semantic grounds is itself sufficiently ambiguous, and where there is a matter of substantive disagreement under cover of the same label allowing your interlocutor to brush off the matter as one of semantics is to effectively allow that person to leave the field, to invalidate the disagreement, to continue with their acts unabated.
Assuming the issue is important, then allowing another to deflect efforts to pursue a persuasive line of thinking on the grounds that the disagreement is one of semantics is not an acceptable alternative.
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