Transhumanism and the denotation-connotation gap

This sounds like the objections to human reproductive cloning. If you can do it safely (i.e. negligible increase in risk of birth defects, and so on), then human cloning is essentially just a delayed twin with a different developmental environment. Hardly something to get worked up about. It's the connotations that get people: there's this crazy meme that a clone of someone will be an identical copy, and even among people who know better, there are still connotations of "violating nature" or "playing God". And so people tend to just take it as a given that human reproductive cloning is inherently immoral and should be illegal. Meanwhile, people who are working in denotation-mode with regards to cloning have trouble understanding what all the fuss is about. The issue seems pretty obvious to everyone, just not in the same way.

I'd like to think that your notion of the denotation-connotation gap would help people understand their own views on human cloning and have an actual, fruitful discussion -- but it would probably just be interpreted by people in connotation-mode as "You're stupid." So, here's my big question:

How do you explain to someone that their opinion on something is based on inaccurate connotations without having this perceived as an insult?

A friend of mine once remarked, "transhumanism isn't really transhumanism. It's transmonkeyism."

I really like that. To me, it implies that humans are an ongoing evolutionary project that still has undesirable remnants from a monkey past - e.g. immature, violent, stupid - and that deliberately improving/removing the beastly parts might leave us more human.

Could we think of the connotation of a sentence as related to the Bayesian evidence about the speaker when get from the fact that he is the sort of person who would say that sentence?

For example, 'there are differences in ability between races' has the connotation of normative racism, because normative racists are more likely to utter it.

You seem to be alluding to the sort of things George Lakoff explores with the idea of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor

Lakoff views political ideology in the US as fundamentally a "family metaphor", with conservatives espousing a "strict father" model and liberals a "nurturing parent" model. Whether or not that's the case could use much more research, but the core idea of metaphor as the structure upon which other thought builds is compatible with your appeal to more connotation-aware discourse.

Perhaps a way to address what you're getting at would be to portray Transhumanism within the family metaphor; children growing up seems particularly fitting to me. What do you think?

An additional benefit of this framing would be to move the locus of attention away from the human-nonhuman issue, as the family metaphor would put connotations firmly within the "human" realm.

A word's denotation is our conscious definition of it. You can think of this as the set of things in the world with membership in the category defined by that word; or as a set of rules defining such a set. (Logicians call the former the category's extension into the world.)

Logicians also call the former "denotation", and call the latter "intension" or "connotation".

Connotation isn't a bad thing - it's part of what makes us vertebrate, after all.

Can you explain this? You're not saying that it makes us metaphorically vertebrate (i.e. we have "backbone"), are you?

I liked this post, and agree that it's important to remember that we can't deny (even in ourselves) emotional/associative thinking.

I don't agree that people who never perform denotationally strict reasoning are in any way more correct or consistent than those who choose to (presumably in high-impact situations only, since it's impossible to only and always think in that mode), except in the surface sense that they're consistent in never exercising any formal discipline of thought.

Terminology quibble:

I get where you get this notion of connotation from, but there's a more formal one that Quine used, which is at least related. It's the difference between an extension and a meaning. So the extensions of "vertebrate" and "things with tails" could have been identical, but that would not mean that the two predicates have the same meanings. To check if the extensions of two terms are identical, you check the world; it seems like to check whether two meanings are identical, you have to check your own mind.

Edit: Whoops, somebody already mentioned this.

Don't know if anyone's ever thought of this google 'seo' hack but make the name of the generic service in the first part of the name so google suggests it when people search for it. Like if it's about trees, call it treely.

connotation can mean the emotional coloring of the word

With emphasis on "can", I can agree with that. But, connotation has a wider meaning than that, all of the non-explicit shadings and fuzzy edges of concepts, not just "emotional coloring". The problem is you then go on to use "connotative" reasoning as opposed to "analytic" reasoning.