A Matter of Scope
byXIAOLAIon2012/02/09·14 COMMENTS
Value judgments invite debates, or overheated quarrels. What if I assume “a Mac is better than a PC”? Some might agree, whereas others might even get angry.
“Which are better? Motorcycles, or cars?”
Wait a second before answering this question, first try to answer the question below:
“Which are better, Motorcycles, or cars?
… in terms of safety?“
Now the answer seems obvious, and even positive: cars, of course! (Or, you would realize now that the precise phrase added should be “… in terms of drivers’ safety.”
Why does the first question invite disagreements, while the second has an obvious and unanimous answer?
It’s a matter of scope. Some value judgments have too large scopes to be accepted by all.
It’s a simple yet important rule: to initiate a meaningful discussion, one must first narrow the scope of the topic to a manageable extent.
If I assume that “a Mac is better than a PC for me“, who cares? Since I’ve narrowed the scope of a value judgment into “for me”. Or, I could assert that “a Mac is better than a PC for bad spellers like me, because OS X provides a ubiquitous build-in spell checker”, and few would disagree.
Do not participate any discussion with an unlimited scope, especially ones that require value judgments. The topic of a discussion should be first clearly defined, and then meticulously restricted，otherwise the discussion would turn out to be an endless war, which nobody could live through.