Selling Tarnished Conceptual Brands with Kelley and Salsman

The Atlas Society Presents - Objectively Speaking

Join Atlas Society founder and Senior Scholar David Kelley, Ph.D., along with Senior Scholar and Professor of Political Economy at Duke, Richard Salsman, Ph.D., for a special webinar exploring how influential ideas often fail to persuade when their terms are misunderstood, emotionally charged, or used unequivocally.

"Intellectual influencers often fail to convince others of the truth of their concepts and principles when their targets don’t 'hear' what’s meant--or hear its opposite. Connotation (felt meaning) doesn’t always track denotation (literal meaning). Examples include atheism, selfishness, capitalism, power, equality, liberal, democracy, and progressive. Ideally, we define our terms and don’t equivocate, but each is likely amid today’s conceptual confusion, epistemological nominalism, and moral emotivism. People 'talk past each other' or dismiss debates as futile--'mere semantics.'"