innocent
adj.
- Uncorrupted by evil, malice, or wrongdoing; sinless: an innocent child.
- Not guilty of a specific crime or offense; legally blameless: was innocent of all charges.
- Within, allowed by, or sanctioned by the law; lawful.
- Not dangerous or harmful; innocuous: an innocent prank.
- Candid; straightforward: a child's innocent stare.
- Not experienced or worldly; naive.
- Betraying or suggesting no deception or guile; artless.
- Not exposed to or familiar with something specified; ignorant: American tourists wholly innocent of French.
- Unaware: She remained innocent of the complications she had caused.
- Lacking, deprived, or devoid of something: a novel innocent of literary merit.
Umm.. D, I think that would be moving away from the original intent of the OP. What was meaning when it was mentioned that children are innocent was not that they weren't experienced, but that they were not sinful (hence the analogy with Adam and Eve before the Fall). If we are to suddenly change the definition of innocent to mean
Not experienced or worldly; naive" We would be committing a Straw Man fallacy, or maybe even the fallacy of equivocation. Don't want to be doing that now, would we? Let me give you another example of a Straw Man Fallacy from a book that I have read...
"The following is a letter to the
Globe and Mail, September 6, 2005, commenting on the aftermath of hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans and its surrounding areas:
"Regarding your Quote of the Day for Sept. 2, 'Philosophers tried to imagine what a '''state of nature''' looked like - we're now seeing it inside the United States and it's really brutal.' I am hard pressed to find anything remotely natural about thousands of dispossessed people living in a football stadium. It would seem that if a healthy state of nature had been allowed to exist - wetlands and barrier islands left undeveloped and in their natural state - the effects of hurricane Katrina would have been considerably less brutal." [Christopher W. Tindale,
Fallacies and Argument Appraisal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 38.]
That's a fallacy because what Philosophers mean by "state of nature" is not what the author of this letter to the editor means. He is diverting the attention from the real meaning of "state of nature" as meant by philosophers, thus committing a Straw Man.
Don't divert the attention from what the real meaning of innocent actually was.