DEFINITIONS, DEFINITIONS, DEFINITIONS!

How many languages does an educated person speak? Ten or twelve, or even more, counting a phrase here and a phrase there?

How many languages can one understand? Sometimes none, including one’s own native tongue!

The following quotation from myself comes handy, perhaps, in clarifying this uncomplicated charade.---

“How often do we engage ourselves in a passionate debate, marveling at the complexity of issues involved, yet hardly realizing that all this complexity proceeds from the simple fact that we don’t know what we are talking about.” (From my already much-quoted March 2003 article Democracy or the Republic?)

I said it before and I will say it again, definitions, definitions, definitions! This time, however, I might say it differently, appealing to an authority of nineteen hundred years ago, the honorable Epictetus.

Talking about definitions, and our uncritical use of poorly, if at all defined terminology, which turns us into slaves of the powers that are shoving their own calculated usage down our throats, here is another precious excavation, from Epictetus’s Enchiridion: “First learn the meaning of what you say, and then speak.”

Bravo, Epictete! How current!

So is it that simple? Hardly. Here comes the great Wittgenstein complicating our life with his Philosophical Investigations. Meaning is determined by usage, he insists. There is no meaning without a context, and the very same phrase can mean very different things depending on who says it, when, where, and why. In other words, whenever we are talking about something going by a certain name, it is more likely that we are talking about different things than by a remarkable coincidence we happen to hit the same bull’s eye.

So is it that difficult? Hardly. There are two “rules of engagement” to follow in a discussion of that nature. One is to convey our contextual meaning to our interlocutor, demanding the same from the other party. The other is to be aware of the conceptual problem here, and to stay alert to ambiguous or untested usage.

Definitions, definitions, definitions. Insisting on them up front in any discussion, and presuming nothing on a hunch, ought to take care of what would otherwise present us with an insurmountable difficulty.

Simple? No!