General Purpose Disclaimer

[sophiaserpentia]

This may come across as snarky and/or cynical, but I have been thinking about doing this for months, and finally went ahead and added a "general purpose disclaimer" which holds for every post made in this journal, past, present, and future. It shows at the left of my format under the calendar, so that it can be accessed at any time.

The General Purpose Disclaimer reads as follows:

Your Mileage May Vary.

The author feels that generalizations are a useful tool in communication and rhetoric. The author also feels that intelligent readers should be able to discern that she knows that generalizations are limited in that they almost always have exceptions. The existence of a set of exceptions does not discredit a generalization unless that generalization is presumed to hold in a universal and absolute way, or the exception set is significant enough to render the generalization misleading or untrue.

So, while the author strongly values clarity in communication, she feels that it should not always be necessary to state an exception-acknowledging disclaimer along with every single generalization she employs.

Therefore it should be understood as a matter of course that all generalizations made in this journal carry an exception disclaimer -- even when no such disclaimer is explicitly stated.

It should also be understood as a matter of course that the author will never employ a generalization meant to hold the underlying implication that it is absolute and universally true.

Comments

[the-alchemist.livejournal.com]

*nods* I find this kind of thing very difficult to grasp for some reason. Of course it makes sense, but I guess I have vaguely autistic spectrum tendencies that mean in practice I often just don't get it. I'll do my best though - it's definitely useful to see it written down clearly.