this will be lesson two point three
and I want to talk about different kinds of definitions but before we get into
the specifics I want to say a little something about what this has to do with
arguments. when we're trying to understand arguments and when we're trying to
evaluate arguments an issue that comes up is the language that's used in
arguments now there are lots of ways in which language can be unclear let me
bring up a couple of pretty concrete examples and I want to talk about
ambiguity and vagueness you may hear these terms used interchangeably
sometimes but in the logic classroom ambiguity and vagueness refer to two
different phenomena ambiguity is when a word or phrase has more than one
distinct meaning so for example the word Bank can mean a financial institution on
the other hand can also mean the side of a river when the various meanings of
a word are completely different as we have with the two meanings of bank that's not so
likely to cause difficulty on the other hand if we have a word or phrase with
several distinct meanings but there's similar meanings and this can cause
confusion there's a famous example of this involvement the President of the
United States back in the 90s when Bill Clinton was president he was accused of
having a sexual relationship with his intern Monica Lewinsky
he came on TV and said I did not have sexual relations with that woman miss
Lewinsky so now the phrase sexual relations was interpreted by most people
to mean any kind of a sexual relationship so he didn't have a sexual
relationship then later it turns out there was a sexual relationship and
when he's accused of lying he says oh no no see I didn't lie. down in Arkansas where I come from sexual relations that means
one specific Act which is intercourse right and there was no sexual relations
if you understand what I mean by relations right, so an ambiguity in the phrase
sexual relations it caused some confusion, the meanings being
similar but not quite the same now vagueness is a different sort of
animal vagueness is where you have a word a phrase that even within one kind
of meaning doesn't have precise conditions of application that is we
know how to use the word as its intended but it's not intended to have
exact conditions where you apply it so for example the world the word tall we
know how to use the word tall we know there are examples of people clearly are
tall Shaquille O'Neal clearly tall people who clearly are not tall such as
Verne Troyer the mini-me guy but exactly how tall someone has to be in
order to be considered tall there isn't like a certain cutoff height certain a
certain number and you can't just say like it's the average that's you know
somebody who's taller than average is tall like taller than 5 foot 11 I guess
maybe for a man so if somebody's 511 and 1/8 they're tall but somebody else who's
you know 510 and 7/8 not tall you put them next to each other you can't be
once at all one which was not. That isn't... that doesn't seem to be how the word
tall is supposed to be used so instead it's a vague term but when this is
involved in an argument this can this can cause difficulty in deciding if it's a
good argument or not because right there's if the arguments conclusion
involves a precise conclusion right but the premise is something that's made
then you got a problem right and by the way a word to be both vague and
ambiguous so for example a word rich can mean more than one thing
it can mean food that's very sweet or it can also mean person has a lot of money
and both of those meanings... in both of those meanings it's also vague, right? Exactly
how much money or exactly how sweet is not precisely defined so those are some
issues that arise now there's various ways we could try to sort of resolve
these issues of unclarity and one of the main ways or maybe just the most
concrete way would be by giving definitions it's important understand if
you're giving definitions there's... or if someone's giving definitions, there's
different kinds of definitions so the type of definition being given might be
different. One... there's a couple of distinctions made in the book about
definitions that describe versus definitions to sort of use an example
it's not always better to have the definitions that describe so for example
somebody says if somebody doesn't know what a cockatiel is right and they ask
you what a cockatiel is you say look it up in the dictionary and you find
something like a cockatiel is a member of the species nyphicus hollandicus and now you know what it is, right? on the other hand someone could say what's the cockatiel and you show them
some cockatiels or pictures of some cocktails and say well cockatiel is a
bird like this or other similar related birds so now which of those two people is
gonna have a better understanding what a cocktail is I don't think it's gonna be
the dictionary definition so sometimes a description like that's not the best but
nevertheless it's sort of something we could say I think maybe more about so I
want to focus on giving definitions in terms of words, in terms of describing
the thing, and we can make some distinctions when it comes to this kind
of definition some subtypes the two main kinds of definitions of this type are a
stipulative definition and a lexical definition and I think it of these two as kind
of extremes on a spectrum where stipulative is a kind of one extreme and
lexical is the other so let's start with a stipulative definition a lot of
times I think people think of stipulation when you think of a
definition it declares a meaning so it declares what a word or phrase means a
lot of times it's gonna be the first time that this word of phrase appears and
the person just you know is making it up and just decides this is how I'm gonna
use this word so it can't be wrong I can use the word
however I want so for example let's say let's say I come up with a new product I
come up with a shoe that has clock the clock in the toe of the shoe right and I
think this would be great look cool have a little clock in there and also you
could look at your... you could if you're holding things in your hands you can't
take out your phone and see what time is you can just kind of hold up your
foot and look down on it and say, oh it's after noon, I gotta go. So I come up with this thing I designed this
shoe clock this shoe with the clock and I wanna I have to come up with a name
for it so I say it's gonna be called orascarpa so orascarpa is a shoe
with the clock in it. now it can't be wrong Nobody can tell me that's not what orascarpa really means means I think that's ridiculous I just decided that
that's what it means and the only thing it would be
misleading especially if somebody uses if somebody declares a new meaning for a
word that already means something else right it's just kind of strange thing to
do but I guess you know people could do it if I say um I want you to come over
my house and I'm gonna make some chicken and then you come over and you're eating
this stuff and you say well this you know it's the strangest chicken that
I've ever had and I say oh I forgot to tell you right I use the word chicken
see in a different way when I say chicken I always mean human flesh and
this is how I use the word. Technically am I...am I... is that an incorrect use of
the word? well I mean I can stipulate that I use this word in a different way
it's kind of strange because it seems to be defeating the point of language so
it's kind of a strange thing to do but I guess technically it's not incorrect
it's misleading though and then the other extreme is a lexical example or a
lexical definition an lexical definition, instead of declaring the
meaning it's trying to describe an existing meaning so we have a word or phrase
and it already means something and normally normally we're gonna be talking about it a word
or phrase with origins in ordinary language so or... when words arise an ordinary
language they're... the how that process works it might you might think well it
probably starts as a stipulative definition right and then somehow it
becomes standard usage but it may be more murky than that because when you
look at recent arrivals in terms of words, look at the word selfie right?
recently the Oxford English Dictionary the Webster's dictionary all the main
dictionaries, they include the word selfie now how did that become a word selfie?
where did it come from? was there like a stipulation was there a
moment when someone you know put a maybe a video out there on the internet or or
a page web page and they declared I have invented a word, selfie, and
here's what it means exactly and they stipulated that? I don't think that's quite how that happens. No, there's this kind of murky process where somehow or another
somebody starts using the word then somebody else picks up on that they
never really officially declare maybe what it means so they have this murky
origin and these types of words typically are the kind of words that we
see lexical definitions for and if you look up words in the dictionary the
dictionary definitions are almost all lexical they're never stipulative
there's some other types that we'll talk about but they're mostly lexical
definitions dictionary writers try to figure out how ordinary people are using
words or if they're specialists in some cases you know maybe they may try to
figure out how specialized communities are using words and then they try to
describe that. Here's a little bit of a tangent but I think it's significant to
understanding of lexical definitions. The dictionary is not there to clear up
imprecision in word use that hasn't been cleared up by the linguistic community
already so they can only describe and and like the dictionary writers are not
like Lords of language they're not there to declare here's how you must use this
word so for example if we have a word like in another phi....philosophy class
we might talk about something like now I should say exactly what is knowledge? and
start thinking about cases where... it's... you know you might question whether
something counts as knowledge or not and sometimes students will sort of out of
frustration just say I'm just gonna look it up in the dictionary. Here look it up in the
dictionary, here's what it says in the dictionary. And if you understand this about dictionary definitions then you
see that that's that's not going to help right because if there's something that
the linguistic community hasn't cleared up about exactly what knowledge is the
dictionary writers don't sit down and say well we're gonna we're gonna fix
that we're gonna tell everybody how to use it they just... they can only describe
up to what the linguistic community has already sort of resolved so that's
that's not what those definitions are for. And
dictionary definitions can be wrong lexical definitions can be wrong in fact
we're gonna get into problems with lexical definitions next and you'll see
it's quite difficult to come up with a perfect lexical definition maybe most of
the definitions in the dictionary might not be perfect in any case that's the
essence of a lexical definition now there are a couple of other types of
definitions that I would say fall somewhere between stipulative and
lexical on this sort of scale that I'm describing and one is a precising definition. A precising definition is... involves a certain amount of stipulation
but it also involves the ordinary meaning of a word because a precising
definition sort of starts with the existing meaning and then modifies it it
modifies it just by declaring precise boundaries so that it becomes precise so
for example word that is vague we talked about the word rich being vague but
suppose you needed it to be precise because you wanted to use it like say in
a legal context or something in tax form or something I mean not that they do but
suppose you did so you want to say exactly what it means you know you want
certain... you want rich people this tax form and then you know other
people file a different tax form let's say so you make a stipulate you you
partially stipulate the meaning of rich so you say rich for our purposes in this
form or whatever means that you earn more than three hundred thousand dollars
a year and there's a phrase like for our purposes or for purposes of or something
like that is... a lot of times of accompanies of precising definition because it sort
of indicates that you're aware there's this ordinary definition then you're
slightly modifying slightly changing that so that's a precising definition
now even more with the stipulative side of things that a precising definition is
what we call a theoretical definition and what I mean by theoretical here is
that it declares the meaning of a word a phrase within the context of a theory so
there's some kind of background theory involved understanding of which may even
be necessary for understanding the definition itself and it may involve
other other terms from that are involved in this theory that are defined in other
ways a lot of times a theoretical definition would be the kind of
definition that a specialist or a definition that... a technical definition
that specialist sits down and comes up with It defines a term in a certain
way to make a theory work and a lot of times the theoretical definitions gonna
specify a way to measure this whatever is being defined one thing I should make
clear about this... and I make this point about it being a specialist definition
that's one way of distinguishing theoretical from lexical definitions
normally a lexical definition is not like the kind of definition that a
specialist say in some science biology or physics or something
sits down and comes up with this definition it says a word that just
appears on the scene in whatever weird way ordinary language makes words appear
on the scene and then a theoretical definition is something that someone, you
know, sits down, a specialist sits down and comes up with this definition one thing
I don't mean by theoretical definition (it's important to get this) is like
theoretical in the sense that something might be wrong like it might be
incorrect like theoretically "theoretically he should be there but he
might not be there" that's not what I mean theoretical here. It means that it's
involved in a theory. It doesn't mean that the theory is something we're
not sure about an example of a theoretical definition would be the
definition of force in Newtonian physics which is mass times acceleration I think
that's a defining an equation there are a couple other equations but I think that's the defining one, and I think, you
know that, you have the definition of acceleration like in terms of
mathematics and then in turn the definition of mass in terms of the
amount of matter and the matter is sort of a... sort of a basic concept you can
tell that this is a theoretical definition as opposed to a lexical
definition The word had some kind of meaning in an ordinary
language before modern physics came on the scene but that meaning was something
you could probably only describe in kind of... almost circular way or just give a
synonyms for you know you'd have to say force is like a pushing or making
something happen or something like that it wouldn't be this you know ordinary
people wouldn't have come up with this mass times acceleration definition so that's
one way of distinguishing, most of the time, to tell the difference between
theoretical and lexical definitions now there's one more type of definition that
is separate from this whole scale between the stipulative and lexical
thing and that is what we call a persuasive definition. It doesn't have
anything to do with stipulating or not. when someone gives a persuasive
definition it's a bad thing it's a kind of definition that you shouldn't be be
giving or someone should be giving you because it's a definition that's more
concerned with making the thing sound good or bad then actually describing
what it is so for example say somebody... say somebody wants a definition of
matrimony say a little say little kid is... at school hears the word matrimony so he
comes home and asks his dad, "Dad, they were using the word matrimony at school. And I don't know what that means. What's matrimony?" So his dad tells him, "Son, matrimony is the point in a man's life
at which it becomes futile for him to go on any longer. He become enslaved to this
other person who tells him what to do, he can't go out with friends anymore, and it
sucks." And so you know kid's gonna say or imagine he goes to somebody you know
somebody makes it sound good... to his priest or something you know, and says, "Fr. McGillicutty, I heard the
word matrimony being used what does that mean?" and you know, Fr. McGillicutty's gonna say, "Oh, my son, matrimony is the holiest of sacraments, and the
Blessed way in which God intended human beings to go about this Earth two by two."
And he's gonna say oh that sounds... sounds fantastic. I still have no idea what it is right so
that's that's a persuasive definition of course it's only a persuasive definition
that makes the term sound good or bad unnecessarily, unnecessarily so for
example if the word just actually just means something is bad then it's not
persuasive to say it. like if I'm defining evil and I say that you know evil is
maleficence or causing harm or cruelty you know especially a supernatural force
that's malevolent, you shouldn't say "well that's just a persuasive definition. You're
trying to make evil sound like something bad" well I'm not trying to make
what the word means so that's not persuasive definition in that case so
let's just focus on the five types of definitions that are described in
section 2.3 and you should be able to identify what kind of definition you're
being given based on what we said here.
