Pain being a way to let you know that something is damaged is close to true--close enough not to quibble with. But fever is not a way to let you know that foreign bodies are being killed off--that's his claim, and it's wrong.
> But fever is not a way to let you know that foreign bodies are being killed off--that's his claim, and it's wrong.
querez's point is that the sentence is meant to be parsed as:
> pain and fever which are the bodies way of <<letting you know something is damaged>> and <<killing off unknown foreign bodies>> respectively
So the claim is that fever is the body's way of killing off unknown foreign bodies, not the body's way of letting you know something is killing off unknown foreign bodies.
The fact that one can ferret out what someone perhaps meant to say from what they did say doesn't change the fact that what they did say was wrong, and can be rightly criticized for being wrong. Someone else responded to such a criticism by writing "He said that" -- but that is false.
And I would make the point that these two things are not analogous, so they shouldn't be mentioned together in any case. The response to the misstatement that started this subthread was "I think what they're saying here is that you're not just suppressing a symptom, you're suppressing a sickness fighting mechanism", which is exactly right, along with a subsequent statement "Fever isn't just a symptom. It's a defense mechanism. The idea is that use of antipyretic drugs may make the infection worse" and which the misstatement completely muddies. It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason, while others are rationally pointing out how the statement is off the mark. Even with the edit, the statement serves no purpose, mixing up symptoms like pain that guide us psychologically with autonomic immune system responses.
> The fact that one can ferret out what someone perhaps meant to say from what they did say doesn't change the fact that what they did say was wrong, and can be rightly criticized for being wrong.
kruffalon said something ambiguous, with the intended interpretation (of that ambiguous part) being true and a secondary unintended interpretation being false - both interpretations grammatically valid.
querez tried to clarify the misinterpretation being made, but it looked as though their point was missed so I made it more explicit.
> It's weird how some people who didn't even make the misleading misstatement are so desperately trying to defend it for no good reason
I just saw some confusion so chimed in to try to clear it up. Only motive is that I feel like it's useful in a discussion for people to know what others mean, rather than arguing against a phantom point caused by miscommunication.
