Words and Philosophy

Many of my posts get into questioning Gangadean's definitions. I've come to recently think that so much of our dispute comes to a fundamental difference in how we think about and use key words. I've sometimes referred to Gangadean as a "semantic chauvinist" or as merely asserting a definition without ever justifying it. Sometimes in ordinary discourse, you hear someone say, "that's just semantics" to which they mean to convey that some potential dispute is nominal because the two parties are using some terms in slightly different ways making for an appearance of disagreement only. Once definitions are clarified, there will be no genuine dispute. But that's not what I think is going on between Gangadean and me. Indeed the semantic differences are deep and philosophically important at least that's what I'll try to show.

To begin, here is a list of just a few of the words or expressions which Gangadean either explicitly defines or at least tacitly assumes a particular definition of.

1) 'Knowledge'

2) 'Reason'

3) 'Cause'

4) 'Eternal'

5) 'Good'

6) 'Evil'

7) 'Human'

8) 'God'

9) 'Meaning'

10) 'Authoritative'

11) 'Clarity' (or 'clear')

12) 'Can' (or 'could')

13) 'Potential' (or 'capacity)

14) 'Justification'

15) 'Self-attesting'

16) 'Self-evident'

17) 'Basic'

18) 'Affirm'

19) 'Common Ground'

20) 'Inherent'

21) 'Free will' (or 'freedom')
22) 'Inexcusability'
23) 'Historic Christianity'
24) 'Best minds'
25) 'Much discussion'
26) 'Essence' (or 'nature')
27) 'Spiritual life/death'
28) 'Justice'
29) 'Mercy'
30) 'Art'

Some of these are going to be derivative of others so that what I have to say about them will indirectly apply. Now when it comes to assessing arguments, the definition that one attaches to the words featured in the premises or conclusion is of fundamental importance. It's a Gangadeanian dictum that "meaning is more basic than truth". You can't know whether a statement is true or false unless you know what it means. Arguments are sets of statements which purport to have a particular kind of relation to one another. When an argument is deductively valid, the premises entail the conclusion. When it's inductively strong, the premises make the conclusion probable. When abductively good, the conclusion provides the best explanation for the truth of the premises. Since we're dealing with statements (linguistic entities), we cannot escape the centrality of definitions in evaluating any and all arguments. Arguments are linguistic things. 

This is why I make such a big deal out of Gangadean's definitions. Heres' the thing: Whether an argument looks to you to be deductively valid and sound will in large part depend on your vocabulary. But there are ways that people nominally use the same vocabulary, while attaching slightly different definitions to the very same set of words. And I'm beginning to think that a large reason why I could never get through to Gangadeanians was that they had come to learn to use key words like those just enumerated in a particular way. That is to say, they learned to associate Gangadean's definitions or adopt his particular vocabulary. Of course, I too, once learned to do so. I'm not suggesting that he sat us all down and had us memorize a list of such words and his definitions. We learned it in much the same way that young children learn to speak a language. It was through hearing him use the words in particular ways and in certain contexts and memorizing large statements or arguments, and reciting them repeatedly (Gangadean refers to this part of learning as the "grammar stage"). It was largely through constantly hearing and saying larger chunks of language, through actual usage, that I had come to pick up, more or less, the Gangadeanian vocabulary. Interestingly, in my nearly 5 years at the church, around the people, I never once heard disputes about the definitions. Nobody ever questioned the vocabulary. 

It wasn't till I started graduate studies in philosophy and in particular worked on issues pertaining to the philosophy of language, that I realized just how tricky language is. Here's a descriptive observation: we depend on presumptive definitions, which we presume to have a common grasp of. If we didn't, we probably wouldn't bother talking to one another. In ordinary life, these presumptive definitions often serve our purposes sufficiently because ordinary life allows for comparatively wide margins of error, although of course even in ordinary life we hit bumps which get us talking about definitions. But within a philosophical context, where we want to get as precise as possible, there are more commonly key junctures at which disputes arise and such presumptions get called into question. Often enough two people looking at an argument will disagree about whether it's a good argument. In particular, they can look at a single argument and one will think it is deductively valid and the other will not. Or one will find a particular premise to be "obvious" while the other will not which then determines whether one views it as ultimately a sound argument or not. Again all of this is very germane to determining whether an inference is valid and whether an argument is a good one or not and ultimately which beliefs you take to be reasonable or rational to have. For instance, consider how Gangadeanians criticize someone like Lawrence Krauss for his claim that the universe came from "nothing". The main objection is that Krauss' definition of 'nothing' is all wrong. Or at the very least, he's using that word in a way that departs from the way that Gangadean uses it and perhaps large sections of other competent language users. That is to say, they are using different vocabulary. Of course noting the difference is not enough. There's a normative or evaluative claim here. Gangadean and other critics will want to say that Krauss' definition of 'nothing' is in some way less"correct" or less "appropriate" than his own. 

Sometimes Gangadeanians say things like, "it doesn't matter what we say about an argument, what matters is what Reason says". And maybe they'd say the same thing about which vocabulary is right or which vocab we should adopt at any rate. The problem is that this isn't in the least helpful. When I disagree with Gangadean on a substantive matter, including issues about which definition of 'knowledge' is the right one or best, I believe that reason is on my side and he believes reason is on his side. For either of us to respond to this by stating that we should just care what "Reason says" is useless. That's the very thing under dispute.  

I had a really good conversation yesterday with a friend that is sympathetic to Gangadean's worldview. But in the course of talking with him about my objections I found that my friend kept using some of the words I enumerated above in ways that I no longer adopted or at the very least in ways that I didn't take for granted as the de facto correct ways. And this led to substantively different evaluations of the arguments that we were discussing. Somethings struck me as "obviously" bad inferences while it struck my friend as "obviously" correct. And we had to spend a lot of time trying to hash out our respective vocabularies. This lead us to try and adopt a neutral vocabulary. For instance, my friend disagreed with how I was using the word 'intuition' and I disagreed with how he was using the word 'self-evident' or 'clear to reason' (in either case there was theoretical baggage with our respective uses of the terms). We were trying to describe one and the same phenomena (as far as we could tell) like the means by which you know things like, "every thought presupposes a is a". I noted that in order to know something like that, you had to think about thoughts and derive some property about the set of all thoughts. I said that ultimately that depended on intuition while my friend wanted to describe the process as deriving something that was 'self-evident' via the 'use of reason'. We tried using 'immediate' or 'non-inferential' as a kind of neutral expression. Sometimes my friend would use the word 'thought' in a way that made it definitionally true that all thoughts presuppose the law of identity. So it was, by his lights (but not mine), a trivial matter that without the law of identity, there would be no thinking. Then we got to talking about knowledge. And my friend had a really hard time separating 'knowledge' from (epistemic) certainty because for him, certainty is part and parcel of the very definition of 'knowledge' (the Gangadeanian definition). But for me, knowledge doesn't entail certainty and so it's not part of the definition (note I don't take it for granted, but think there are very good reasons to adopt my definition). These are just some of the concrete ways that definitions matter to philosophical discourse and ultimately to which arguments or inferences we accept as good ones and thus which beliefs we take to be acceptable. 

What this made me consider is the possibility that Gangadeanians and I (and their other disputants including perhaps the philosophical world at large and those they deem as "popular Christians") just have sufficiently dissimilar vocabularies. That's why their arguments look to them to be so obviously right and they look to me (and others) to be so obviously wrong. So much so that we may never see eye-to-eye. Maybe in this light it makes sense that our discussions would not be fruitful. Although this last result doesn't necessarily follow. As my friend and I attempted to do, we could recognize the subtle differences in our definitions, try to get clearer on our respective vocabularies and then try to adopt something that is sufficiently neutral. It's hard work for sure. Often times we use words which we've never defined to ourselves or seem beyond non-circular, definitions. We tacitly assume definitions because of the fallible and rather clumsy way that we learn a language, namely, via usage. (Things might be somewhat different when it comes to learning a second language, since we associate the meaning of the target language with words in our native tongue, but again the native tongue is in large part learned via usage rather than via explicit definition so ultimately the second language is going to be affected in the same way). So we could try as my friend and I did yesterday. What I hope was evident to my friend is that I wasn't trying to deny reason or anything of the sort (indeed even the ways we define 'reason' differ!). We were operating from subtly different vocabularies that are similar enough for us to cooperate and get by in ordinary contexts, but dissimilar enough to affect philosophical discourse in significant ways. So the discussion needed to shift to or at least centrally incorporate issues about how we might come to determine which vocabulary is correct or most appropriate or whatever--at least insofar as we're going to use language in giving and evaluating arguments. 

I don't see this ever happening between the Gangadeanian camp and me. While I'm at least willing to try and address the question of "which vocabulary is the best one to adopt?" I don't see Gangadean making such a concession. From what I can tell, his is a closed door policy. He's got the right definitions, he's got the last word on which vocabulary we should adopt (his own)---that's beyond dispute and his people will likely not call it into question because it's so deeply ingrained in their worldview. 

Moreover, this observation about the importance of semantic differences is likely not one that a Gangdeanian will appreciate because it threatens their worldview. If some of our important differences depend on our adopting different vocabularies, then we need a way of principally determining which vocabulary is the "correct one". And unless this is settled in favor of the Gangadeanian vocabulary, they will have to admit that it's at least possible that they've got it wrong. Hence it's at least possible that their argument for say God's existence, is unsound. That threatens the clarity of God's existence thesis without which the entire ministry is threatened. Furthermore, I think it will be hard to get to the bottom of this issue without employing further presumed definitions to words, and at root, immediate, non-inferential (what I call 'intuition') knowledge and empirical methods (seeing how people "out there" actually use words!). That itself undermines much of Gangadean's basic beliefs. 

Importantly, none of what I've said is self-undermining or self-referentially absurd (no doubt, we might even use those terms differently in subtle ways). So I hope not to see more comments from the Gangadeanian camp to the effect that I assume that I know the "right" meanings of words in order to call that very thing into question. Remember, Gangadeanians and I attach different definitions to 'know'. I'm not after certainty in the Gangadeanian sense with anything that I say. So I'm not claiming or presupposing that I am certain or even that it's clear to reason that my vocabulary is the correct one in order to raise the question about which vocabulary is correct. And again I think there are ways to make progress on this question and indeed Gangadean (perhaps without realizing he is doing so) employs some of them (whenever he thinks about the meaning of a word to form an analysis of something like knowledge or good, he's using his own intuitions). However, these methods are not going to sit well with Gangadean's fundamental views concerning reason and clarity. It's entirely compatible with my worldview that I adopt presumptive definitions to words, employ intuitions, while allowing the possibility that I'm in some way mistaken. And it's compatible with my understanding of the word 'know' that I'm even in a position to know that my vocabulary is favorable to Gangadean's even if I can't be certain, even if it rests on presumptions and a posteriori methods.

Additionally, and maybe I'm being foolish here, but a part of me reserves the slightest of hopes that some Gangadeanians might get what I'm saying here and realize that things are far more complicated than they had originally thought. That the rabbit hole is very deep and that persons that are equally committed to reason might reasonably disagree with them. That the language issues I raise are quite serious and fundamental and can explain how rational persons might disagree on basic issues. Which basic vocabularies we adopt largely influences our evaluations of arguments and what we take to be "true by definition" and it's no simple or straightforward matter when we get to talking about which vocabulary we ought to adopt. But I'm not holding my breath because this would require radical revision to their worldview.


{Footnote: I'm using 'definition' throughout to be a broad term to include things like 'analysis', 'theory', 'truth conditions' and the like. Philosophers sometimes shy away from using 'definition' in this sense, but I find it much more relatable for people outside of academic philosophy.}