Dragaera

OT: Subjectivity vs. Objectivity (was: bois...)

David Silberstein davids at kithrup.com
Fri Aug 16 01:15:20 PDT 2002

On Fri, 16 Aug 2002, Steven Brust wrote:

>No one is suggesting you do so.  I like butter knives as they are, that's 
>why I have them.  And I have as many as I want; there is no need to turn my 
>Chef's knife into another one.

You may want to consider the following notion (which I am not sure is
correct, so if you see a flaw in my reasoning, feel free to point it
out): Language is used for more than one purpose.  Often it is used
purely for communication - and the most pure example I can think of is
instruction, where one wants to communicate the steps that need to be
followed in order to reach some specific goal. 

But language is also used to cause an emotional change in the hearer
or reader - for example, not just to communicate the fact that Romeo &
Juliet love each other, but to inspire in us the feelings of sympathy
for their reckless passion and sadness at the resulting tragedy. 

And language is also used to manipulate - to inspire strong emotions
which will, in the intent of the speaker or writer, lead to some
action being taken.  I suppose the best example of this is persuasion
(convincing a loan officer or job interviewer to have confidence in
you) or seduction (trying to inspire lust in some hot young thing so
she (or he, depending on your tastes) will have hot sex with you). 

At its worst, language can be pure demagoguery; Hitler's [1] rants to
the German people about how they are destined to greatness, and have
been held back by those who are not pure Aryans, which were meant
to inspire nationalistic fervor & militancy, and a willingness to
accept the Nazi party's policies and actions.


Getting back to "hopefully", I don't think it means exactly "I hope" 
or "you hope" - those are emotions specific to the speaker or the
listener, and if the speaker wants to be that specific, he is
perfectly free to say one or the other - to use the chef's knife, as
it were.

I think the word "hopefully" is used when the speaker is referring to
himself, but wants to persuade the hearer to agree, but is unwilling
to attribute that emotion without knowing the hearer's internal state. 
Being deliberately vague as to who besides the speaker is hoping
allows the hearer to agree (which affirms the speakers hopes) or
disagree (which may clash with the speakers intentions, but it is not
a direct contradiction since no specific feelings of hope were
attributed to the hearer), and if the hearer *does* disagree, holds 
the possibility that others out there *do* agree.

So yes, I think "hopefully" is shorthand for the phrase "I hope, and
all right-thinking people (that is, those that think like the speaker) 
also hope", and it's shorter and less clunky than that phrase. 

Or, to put it in terms of your kitchen, this isn't a matter of turning
your Chef's knife into a butter knife.  The proper analogy is that of
taking one of your extra bread knives and turning it into a peeler, or
even a melon-baller - a new tool that does something similar to what
you could do with the old tool, yet is obviously [2] easier & less
clumsy with the new tool. 


Hopefully, you will agree.  :-)


[1] Oh, no!  I killed the thread!

[2] Obvious to me, and it should be obvious to you too.  :-)