I always took the central point about conflation to be the unwitting mixing up of separate ideas - usually but not always to the mild confusion or detriment of both.
FT2
Good research topic: What characteristics of ideas or facts lead to conflation. To take a notorious example, when Sarah Palin was asked about her foreign relations experience with respect to Russia, she replied that you could see Russia from Alaska. But true conflation, as a menace to discourse, includes much less easily distinguished concepts.
Fred
On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:51 PM, Fred Bauder fredbaud@fairpoint.net wrote:
And Larry Sanger and Magnus may be remembered for popularizing "disambiguation" outside of linguistics...
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/sj/2009/06/25/on-disambiguation-and-the-atomiza...
SJ
Disconflation gets only 45 google hits while unconflation gets 267. Conflation, I guess, refers to confusion of similar ideas rather than similar words.
Fred
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