Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ig!arizona!gudeman
From: gudeman@arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Syntax vs Semantics (silliness!)
Message-ID: <10198@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 89 19:32:21 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 21

In article  <5160016@hpfcdc.HP.COM> marc@hpfcdc.HP.COM (Marc `Play Ball!' Sabatella) writes:
>
>One of my pet peeves is when two people are arguing over some fine distinction
>is the the exact meaning of a word, and one will exclaim, "That's just
>semantics".  I always wondered what it is that this person thinks is more
>high-level than semantics, and what he would call it.

When someone says "That's just semantics" he probably means that the
argument is based on misunderstanding.  Example:

A: This grammar generates this set of strings.

B: No, it doesn't

They think they are disagreeing about what set of strings a grammar
generates, but a little more discussion may reveal that to B the word
"generates" means "generates all and only this set of strings" and to
A it means "generates at least all the strings in this set".  Their
disagreement then is one of the semantics of their medium of
communication, they are not disagreeing about what they thought they
were.