RE: Academic Wank and the conservative backlash

I don’t think that’s at odds with what I said. When you talk about “understanding the concepts”, you’re talking about distinguishing the thing signified from the signifier, not about confusing them, as with these “symbols”.

If we were to be visited by aliens, they’d almost certainly use different signs for all of those concepts, but the concepts themselves would likely be quite similar. Every engineer recognizes that situation implicitly, and finds nothing odd about it, because they do distinguish them.

Engineers don’t feel that changing the way they write Faraday’s Law will have any effect on the relationship it describes between the electric and magnetic fields of a system, but isn’t that exactly what the soldier hopes when he risks himself to save a flag, that his symbolic action will somehow change the outcome of the situation it represents?