Some definitions are culturally conditioned and vary from place to place. A person who lives in Somalia would have a completely different definition of the word poor than a person who lives in the United States. In fact, the income level that officially defines poor in America would equal a level of income that is considered quite wealthy in Somalia.
Scientific categories of biology are choice-inclusive in character. There is a choice to cut definitions in a certain way and not in others. We could, for example, classify whales by their habitat and method of locomotion, in which case they would be related to the elephant , or by their intelligence, in which case they would belong to the same group as humans and the great apes. Viewed in this light, the current “scientific” classification, based on method of reproduction and the feeding of the young with milk, loses its apparent privilege.
Each aspect of our perception of the nature of whale is reasonable, legitimate, and useful; each focuses on some interesting features of the animals and highlights their significant relation to other animals. To say that one and only one of them captures the way things really are amounts to a defamatory impoverishment of the complexity of the biological world.
What’s the point?
The point is not to argue the pros and cons of what is and what is not a firearm. The point is not to discuss the pros and cons of what is p. 92 or what is not a human. Nor is the point to tell you that a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable or a berry. The point is not to tell you that the word poor means a level of poverty in Somalia quite different from that in the United States. Nor is the point to trash the currently accepted biological classification of cetaceans.
The point is to clearly demonstrate and demonstrate clearly how important the definitions are in reaching conclusions. One might even say that some definitions that are accepted will lead to certain conclusions almost automatically.
So watch out. Make sure you know what you are talking about. Make sure you know what the other guy is talking about.
Lesson: Pay attention to the definitions. They can be the key to understanding and can make all the difference.
As mentioned, a great number of words have several meanings. Some words have a particular meaning, and no confusion exists when they are used. Hydrogen or quark or pancreas by general agreement refer to a specific element with one proton and one electron, a nuclear particle three of which make a proton or a neutron, or the exocrine-endocrine organ in the abdomen, respectively. No argument about the meanings of those words and no confusion of one with the other. Well, not exactly no argument. Even with these scientific terms arguments can arise. But not many.
The case with other words is quite different. Widely divergent interpretations appear when we use more abstract words such as law, nature, and democracy.
The trouble with such terms is that they try to say too much by representing concepts of great scope and complexity. Each word may mean different things to different people. Let’s talk about democracy for instance.
Reading the ancient texts such as the Anabasis by Xenophon, we find the Greeks elected their generals and their captains. In fact, the Greek army held a council every day in which the ordinary soldier was free to express his ideas about what should be done and when and who should do it. Furthermore, at these councils the action taken was always that agreed on by the majority of the soldiers there assembled. Those soldiers considered any other way of running the army a form of slavery. These Greek soldiers routinely considered anyone who followed the orders of a non-elected official a slave.
By contrast, the American army has its generals appointed by the p. 93 president and approved by the Senate. American soldiers do not vote or even express an opinion on the important daily question posed to ancient Greek soldiers: Who do you wish to command your army today?
This being the case, ancients Greeks would not consider the American army a democracy in the sense in which they understood the meaning of the word. And they should know. The ancient Greeks invented democracy. In fact, democracy is a Greek word meaning government by the demos, the mob.
On the other hand, most Americans have a different definition in mind when they think of democracy. Most Americans would consider the idea of an army democracy silly, stupid, and unworkable. To most Americans, democracy does not mean government of the people. It means something like personal liberty and the ability of the people, if they so desire, to change their government. If that is the definition of democracy, then America is a democracy. If it is not the definition of democracy, then America is not a democracy.
During the cold war, there was a lot of acrimonious debate between communist USSR and capitalist America about which government was truly democratic. The Russians claimed that they were the democracy and that America was not. To the Russians, democracy implied a classless society in which the means of production are owned in common, something they had accomplished and America had not. They thought it irrelevant that the supreme power was wielded by an oligarchy in which opinions were silenced and individual rights suppressed.
Using different definitions, the USSR and America accused each other of being undemocratic. The point at issue is what definition of democracy should be used. If we use the American definition, then America is the democracy. If we use the Russian definition, then the USSR is the democracy.
Well, which is it?
And more important: Should we have gone to war over this issue? Should we go to war over a disputed definition?
See! The question of definition is not trivial. It can’t be trivial because war is not trivial. In fact, major wars have been fought over smaller stuff than that. Perhaps both the Russian and American definitions of democracy are deficient. Perhaps we need to apply something different. How about Lincoln’s definition at Gettysburg? What kind of definition was it? “Democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
p. 94 If you guessed that the above was a divisional definition, you were correct because the definition breaks down, divides itself, like ancient Gaul, into three parts. If you answered a generic definition, you were correct in the sense that the definition was stated in a complete sentence. If you guessed that it was a definition by example and specific criteria, you were right again.
Using Lincoln’s definition, let’s consider the American government. Is the American government a democracy according to Lincoln’s definition?
Item: Government of the people? Of course! How could any government not govern the people? (I am only kidding.)
Lincoln did not mean government of the people in the sense of the government controlling the people, telling them what to do, or ordering them about. Quite the opposite. The confusion here arises because the little word of has several meanings. In this context, it is the possessive. It means that the people own and control the government, not vice versa. According to Lincoln, legitimate government was a created instrument of the people, lacking any independent existence, and it is the people who tell the government what it was allowed to do, not the other way around.
Whether this is the case in contemporary America is debatable. The fact would have to be decided by the consideration of a large body of evidence. Recent disclosures of the roles of lobbyists (64,000 of them registered as of January 2002!), corporations, and big money in controlling politicians who, in turn, control the government raise serious questions about whether Americans have a government of the people—owned and controlled by the people—as Lincoln meant it. It is possible that selfish business interests own more of the government than the people do.
Item: Government by the people. A problem. In fact, a big problem. Most people feel that the government is something and they are something else. Most people I know feel harassed by the government, controlled by government, not vice versa. Other than once in a while (on election day), real power doesn’t seem to reside with the people but with the bureaucracy (government by offices).
Item: For the people? I’ll leave this to you to answer. My own
suspicion is that most of the evidence indicates the present American government is for particular special interest groups and not for the people as a whole.
Precision and accuracy: Call me at six on the dot; little things mean a lot.
p. 95 If a little two-letter word like of has multiple meanings, you can imagine the difficulties we get into with bigger words. Consider the three-letter word lie. My dictionary has ten definitions, including one that is often used with down and another, which we discussed previously, that describes lie as a deliberate false statement. What would a young woman think if I said to her, “I want to lie about you.” Should she sue for slander, for sexual harassment, or both? Should she hop into bed with me or shun me as an enemy? Or should she be preemptive and belt me one in the face?
Sometimes the confusion about the meaning of little words arises from the fact that people are not aware that the word has several meanings. Take the statement “The coffee is cold,” in which the word is is technically known as a predicative because it exactly describes the current state of the coffee. On the other hand, the statement “There is a God” contains a completely different is; the is in that sentence is not a predicative (although it looks exactly the same as the predicative is). The is in that sentence about God is technically known as the is of existential assertion. This dual meaning for the little word is leads to a fallacy, that of confusing two senses of the verb is, which, in turn, reflects two senses of the verb to be.
Among many other uses, the verb to be can be used both to ascribe a property (the is of predication) and to assert existence (the is of existential assertion). The later fallacy, the basis of the ontological proof of the existence of God, arises from the fact that the assertion of the existence of a thing grammatically resembles the predication to that thing of some property, so that an assertion of existence, like a predication, appears to presuppose the existence of the very thing whose existence is asserted. This makes positive existence assertions a circular form of false reasoning known as a tautology. The process is called tautological.
Once I told an attorney who was cross-examining me that he was being Sisyphean. Whereupon the opposing attorney jumped in saying, “and needlessly repetitive as well.” That’s what tautologies do. They waste our time with needlessly repetitious or trivially obvious observations: They are Sisyphean.
“He’s poor because he is always broke.” “Our annual report comes out every year.” “The homeless are homeless because they have no homes.”
Here are some tautological gems from President Bush:
“A low voter turnout is an indication of fewer people going to the polls.”
p. 96 “It isn’t the pollution that is harming our environment. It is the impurities in our water and air that are doing it.”
“The vast majority of our imports come from outside the country.”
After hearing those tautologies, we are left blank. We are not one bit more informed than we were before. Since a tautology doesn’t get us closer to the truth and doesn’t inform us about reality, I consider it an error in thinking.
“Either George Washington died in 1999, or he did not.”
On one level, the linguistic level, some people might regard that statement as true. I think it’s just bunk because it doesn’t inform us about anything. After we have read it, we remain just as unenlightened as we did before. In fact, the statement is always true and therefore it is a tautology. The formal proof of this is:
Let P equal “died in 1999.”
Let not P or ∼P mean “did not die in 1999.”
Let T = true, F = false, and P ∨ ∼P mean “P or not P,” with the or meaning the inclusive meaning of or: one, the other, or both.
A statement is a sentence that makes a definite claim. A truth table is a table that shows all the possible combinations of the claims in a given statement with their resulting truth or falsity. Thus, consider statement “p.” If “p” is true, then its denial is not true. All possible combinations of p and not p and their truth or falsity can be thus symbolized by the truth table:
p not p
T F
F T
The table conveniently tells us that there are only two cases. Case 1—when p is true, not p is false. Case 2—when p is false, not p is true. There are only two possibilities of p—it can be true, or it can be false. There are only two possibilities of ∼p—it can be false, or it can be true. Then, all cases and possibilities would be described by the following truth table:
P
∼P
P ∨ ∼P
Case 1
T
F
T
Case 2
F
T
T
p. 97 Since P ∨ ∼P (read as “P or not P”) is always true, no new information comes to us by the statement, and the statement is a tautology.
Reporter: “What are you going to do about the current economic situation in the United States, Mr. President?”
President Truman: “Well, we’re going to do something. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll do something else.”
Truman has said nothing substantive except that he is predisposed to action.
“Why can’t women serve in combat?”
“Because established federal law explicitly prohibits any soldier in the American armed forces, under any command, and in all circumstances whatever, from serving in combat unless he is an able-bodied, adult man.”
Complete bull!
The so-called reason is no reason at all—it’s merely a restatement of the government’s policy. It is a cop out and a tautology. The questioner asked why. All she got was a repeat of the policy itself, not the reason for it. Incidentally, no reason is stated because it would be hard to justify the exclusion of a properly trained female soldier from combat. The rationale at the root of the government’s attitude is the overgeneralization “All male combat soldiers are superior to all female combat soldiers.” If this generalization is false, then (as women increasingly appreciate) the government has a good reason for altering the policy, which it has. Two women were killed in combat in the Gulf War, and many more were captured.
“Too much caution is not good.” This statement seems to repeat what is already contained in the subject. If anything is “too much,” the implication is that it is not good. We get the idea, though. We would have gotten the idea better if we were told why too much caution is not good or if we had been given an example proving that under one circumstance too much caution was bad.
Negative existential assertions are contradictory.
The same process that makes positive existential assertions tautological makes negatives ones contradictory, leading to such confusions as nonexistence must exist since it can be the subject of a negative existential assertion. This error in thinking can cause lots of problems—for instance, the argument that the nonexistent exists, since the nonexistent is the nonexistent. That the unknown is known, since the unknown is known to be unknown. Or worse, the unknown is known as one schoolboy told his mother: “It is X!”
p. 98 Similarly, since the improbable happens, it is probable (given enough time) that the improbable will happen. Hence the improbable is probable (classic false reasoning).
Using such confusions of the meaning of the verb to be, it is possible to make weak arguments appear stronger and to delude ourselves and others into error. Languages other than English sometimes try to get around this by having several words that are translated into English as forms of to be. Estar and ser are examples in Spanish, indicating various aspects of the verb to be. Tibetan (I am told) has even more.
The confusion we owe in large measure to the officious ubiquity of the little word is and its removal to an Italian mathematician and logician, Peano, who recognized the difference between is and is a and honored the later relation with a special symbol ∈, the Greek letter epsilon. By means of a distinct notation, the relation of class membership may now be clearly distinguished from identi
ty, inclusion, entailment, or any number of other relations named by is. Thus, in symbolic logic to express briefly and concisely that Reynard is a member of the class “fox,” we can write:
Reynard ∈ fox,
which is read “Reynard is a fox,” bearing in mind that ∈ means “is a member of the class.” That way, we do not confuse it with other sundry meanings of is. With this meaning of is in mind, how do you read:
8 ∈ number
castle ∈ fort and home
Let’s do a little more work on this little word is. See if you can spot the difference among the other meanings of is that we mentioned.
What is the is in the statement, “God is just”? In that statement, is is predicative or assertive? Or both? What is is?
We have already seen that if we confuse the one is with the other, we might assume the statement “God is just” exactly, precisely, and specifically as true and as matter of fact as the statement that the coffee is cold.
See if your answer matches mine: The statement about God is an item of a different order than a statement about coffee. The statement about God is a mere assertion. As such the statement “God is just” asserts two things: It asserts by assumption that God exists, and it p. 99 asserts by predication that she is just. We are not required to believe mere assertions unless proven, and we have already learned how to prove general assertions wrong by finding the exception. By showing one instance of injustice that occurred under God’s control or supervision, we could prove that God is not just.
Truth, Knowledge, or Just Plain Bull: How to tell the difference Page 11
