S1-303 – What a word must do – The Conscious Look

Categories, definitions, and the preconditions for communication

There is a word that has appeared in political discourse with increasing frequency over the past two decades, and whose use in that discourse has produced a peculiar effect. The word is “violence.” In its traditional usage, violence refers to the physical harm of persons: the infliction of bodily injury, the use of physical force to coerce or damage. The extension of the word to include speech (the claim that certain kinds of speech constitute violence) began as a metaphor, then became an argument, and has since, in certain communities, become a settled definitional claim. On this extended definition, speech that causes emotional distress, that challenges deeply held beliefs, or that denies the legitimacy of a person’s identity constitutes a form of violence equivalent in relevant respects to physical harm.

The people who use the word in this extended sense are typically not being careless or dishonest. They are making a substantive claim: that the distinction between physical harm and psychological harm is less important than is commonly assumed, that words can produce genuine damage to persons, and that a framework that treats only physical harm as actionable misses something morally important. These are not trivial points. The psychological harm produced by sustained harassment, by deliberate humiliation, or by systematic denial of a person’s basic dignity is real and measurable. The extended definition is trying to capture something genuine.

And yet the extension produces a specific and serious problem that is not primarily a problem about politics or ethics. It is a problem about communication itself. When a word expands to include things that its previous definition excluded, the word loses the ability to mark the distinction that the previous definition tracked. If violence can be committed by words as well as by fists, then a sentence that says “there was violence at the demonstration” no longer tells the listener whether anyone was hit. The word has lost a piece of its communicative function. It can no longer do the work it previously did.

This article is about what a word must do to function communicatively: about the conditions that definitions must meet if they are to serve the purpose for which definitions exist, and about what happens when those conditions are not met.

What definitions are for

A definition is not a description of the essence of a thing. This is a tempting and historically influential view (Plato’s theory of forms rested on the idea that the definition of a thing captures its eternal, unchanging nature) but it has been discredited by two and a half millennia of philosophical failure to produce definitions that satisfy the conditions it requires. Every proposed definition of a concept (justice, knowledge, art, life) has met with counterexamples that reveal either that the definition is too broad (admitting things that clearly should not be admitted) or too narrow (excluding things that clearly should be included) or both.

The more defensible account of what definitions are is pragmatic: a definition is a tool for coordinating the use of a word among speakers of a language. A definition succeeds when it enables speakers to apply the word consistently (when a speaker’s application of the word to a case matches the application that other speakers would make to the same case) and when it enables the word to perform the communicative function for which it is used. A definition fails when speakers cannot agree on how to apply it, when the word no longer marks the distinctions it was supposed to mark, or when the word’s use has drifted to the point where different speakers are making systematically different claims with the same word while believing they are in agreement.¹

The criteria for a functional definition that emerge from this pragmatic account are three. A functional definition must be publicly accessible: it must be available, in principle, to any competent speaker of the language, not confined to the private experience of a particular individual. It must be speaker-independent: the definition must pick out the same things regardless of who is applying it; it cannot be a definition if applying it requires the speaker’s subjective judgment in ways that produce systematically different results for different speakers. And it must be action-guiding: it must be precise enough to settle, at least in most cases, whether a given thing falls under the concept or not.

These three criteria do not require that definitions be perfectly precise: ordinary language does not work with the precision of formal logic, and the zone of penumbral cases where a concept’s application is genuinely uncertain is a normal feature of language rather than a failure of definition. But they do require that the core of the concept be clear enough that speakers can coordinate on its application, that the application not be entirely hostage to the speaker’s subjective state, and that the concept mark a distinction that makes a difference to something.

Wittgenstein and the impossibility of private language

The requirement that definitions be publicly accessible rather than grounded in private experience has its deepest philosophical grounding in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s private language argument, developed in the Philosophical Investigations.² Wittgenstein’s argument is among the most important and most debated in twentieth-century philosophy, and it cannot be fully reconstructed here. But its core claim is directly relevant to the question this article is addressing.

Wittgenstein asks: could there be a language whose words refer to things that only the speaker has access to: private experiences, private sensations, private mental states that no other person can observe or verify? His answer is that such a language is not genuinely a language at all, in the sense that it cannot perform the communicative function that language exists to perform. The reason is not that private experiences do not exist (they may) but that a word whose application is determined entirely by a private standard has no criterion of correctness. If the word is applied on the basis of a private sensation, then there is no possible check on whether today’s application is the same as yesterday’s application, no standard against which an incorrect application could be identified, no way for the speaker to distinguish between applying the word correctly and merely believing they are applying it correctly. A word without a criterion of correctness is not a word in any functional sense. It is a noise.³

The philosophical argument has been given a narrative form that is more memorable than any abstract statement of it, and that is likely to be familiar to German-speaking readers who encountered it in school. In 1969, the Swiss writer Peter Bichsel published a short story (“Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch,” A Table Is a Table) that dramatizes the private language argument’s consequences with the precision of a philosophical thought experiment and the economy of a fairy tale.⁴ The story concerns an old man, lonely and bored, who one day begins renaming the objects in his room. The table he will call “carpet.” The bed he will call “picture.” The chair he will call “alarm clock.” He applies himself to the project systematically, memorizing his private substitutions, and finds it amusing, even liberating, a small act of sovereignty over his own language. But the story ends where Wittgenstein’s argument predicts it must end. The man gradually loses access to the shared language (the public vocabulary) that connected him to everyone else. When he hears people speak, he can no longer follow them. When he wants to speak, he cannot find the public words. The private substitutions have replaced the shared ones. He falls silent. The story ends not with freedom but with complete communicative isolation: a man who has, by insisting on his own private word-world, made himself unreachable by anyone else. Bichsel writes that the man could no longer understand the people, because he had a different language. This is the destination that Wittgenstein’s argument maps from the other direction: the private standard that cannot be corrected, that accumulates errors without any mechanism for identifying them, that replaces the shared word-world with one that only one person inhabits, and that produces not liberation but silence.

The relevance to definitions is this: a definition that grounds the application of a word in private experience (in how something feels to the speaker, in the speaker’s subjective sense of having been harmed, in the speaker’s private judgment of whether a situation meets the concept) fails the requirement of public accessibility in exactly the way that Wittgenstein’s private language fails. It produces a word that different speakers apply on the basis of their private states, with no shared criterion for resolving disagreements about correct application, and with no possible check on whether any particular application is correct or merely believed to be correct.

The violence example is instructive here. The traditional definition of violence (physical harm to persons) is publicly accessible because physical harm is, at least in paradigm cases, publicly observable: there is a criterion of correct application that does not depend on the victim’s subjective experience. The extended definition (harm that causes emotional distress or challenges one’s sense of identity) grounds the application in private experience that is not publicly accessible in the same way. Whether a particular speech act constitutes violence, on the extended definition, depends on how it is experienced by the recipient, and because that experience is private and variable, two speakers applying the extended definition to the same case may reach different conclusions, with no shared criterion to resolve the disagreement. The word has lost the speaker-independence that functional definitions require.

Definitional revision vs. definitional dissolution

It would be wrong to conclude from the preceding argument that definitions cannot change, or that all changes to definitions are illegitimate. The history of language is the history of words changing their meanings: sometimes productively, sometimes destructively, and often in ways that are difficult to evaluate at the time. The question is not whether definitions change but whether a particular change preserves or destroys the word’s communicative function.

There are two fundamentally different kinds of definitional change. Definitional revision is the kind of change that extends, narrows, or refines a word’s meaning in ways that preserve its ability to mark distinctions and coordinate use. The extension of “computer” from a person who performs calculations to a machine that performs calculations is a definitional revision: the concept was extended to a new domain, but the core function (marking things that perform computational operations) was preserved, and the extension was licensed by a genuine similarity between the original and extended cases. The narrowing of “theory” from its ordinary-language sense of “speculation” to its scientific sense of “well-supported explanatory framework” is a definitional revision: the narrowing clarified the concept for scientific purposes and marked an important distinction that the ordinary-language usage obscured.

Definitional dissolution is different: it is the kind of change that expands a word’s application to the point where the word can no longer mark the distinction it was tracking. When “theory” is used interchangeably with “speculation” in public discourse about science (when people say “evolution is just a theory” meaning “evolution is just a speculation”) the word has undergone dissolution rather than revision: the distinction between well-supported explanatory frameworks and mere speculation has been obscured rather than refined. When “literally” is used to intensify figurative speech (“I literally died laughing”) the word has undergone dissolution in the specific domain of intensification: it can no longer mark the distinction between what actually happened and what is being described figuratively.⁵

The political consequences of definitional dissolution

Definitional dissolution is not merely a linguistic inconvenience. It has specific political and social consequences that follow from the analysis of this article, and that are worth stating directly.

When the meaning of a word in public discourse becomes contested to the point where different speakers are using it to make systematically different claims (when “violence,” “harm,” “safety,” “truth,” “censorship,” or “democracy” mean fundamentally different things to different communities of speakers) the word loses its ability to coordinate action or resolve disagreement. It can no longer do the work of identifying shared problems, comparing proposed solutions, or establishing what evidence would be relevant to resolving the dispute. Instead, it becomes a tribal marker: a signal of which community of usage the speaker belongs to, and therefore of which side they are on, rather than a claim about the world that could in principle be evaluated by anyone.

The shift from word-as-claim to word-as-tribal-marker is one of the most consequential epistemological developments in contemporary public discourse. When a political actor uses the word “democracy” and a critic responds that what they are calling democracy is not democracy, the disagreement is no longer about the concept: it is about the definition of the concept, which is a definitional dispute. But definitional disputes, unlike factual disputes, cannot be resolved by evidence. They can only be resolved by agreement on the criterion of correct application, and in a community where the criterion is contested, no such agreement is available. The result is a discourse in which words inflame without clarifying, in which disagreements multiply without being resolvable, and in which the social function of language (the coordination of belief and action across speakers) is undermined by the very words that are supposed to perform it.⁶

A few of these words carry stakes past epistemology, into permission, because they do not only describe but license. “Violence” is the clearest case. To establish that something counts as violence is to attach to it the response that violence is widely agreed to warrant, so the contest over what the word covers is also, and more quietly, a contest over who may use force.⁷

This is not an argument for definitional conservatism: for freezing words at their current meanings and resisting all change. Language changes, and the resistance to all change produces its own pathologies. It is an argument for definitional clarity: for being explicit about what one means when using contested words, for distinguishing between revisions that preserve communicative function and dissolutions that destroy it, and for maintaining the distinction between an argument about the world (a first-order dispute) and an argument about words (a definitional dispute) so that the two are not confused.

What a word must do: a summary

A functional definition, in the account this article has been developing, must meet three conditions: it must be publicly accessible, speaker-independent, and action-guiding. A word that meets these conditions can do the work that words exist to do: it can coordinate the use of concepts across speakers, mark distinctions that make a difference, and enable communication to succeed, which is to say, to produce in the receiver a reconstruction that approximately matches the sender’s original.

A word that fails these conditions cannot do this work, regardless of the importance of the experience it is trying to capture or the legitimacy of the motivation behind the definitional extension. The failure is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of the instrument: a failure of the word to perform the function that makes it a word in the relevant sense.

The practical implication for The Conscious Look is specific. Before engaging with any argument that uses contested terms (before trying to evaluate whether a claim is true or false, whether a policy is effective or ineffective, whether a concern is legitimate or illegitimate) the first step is to determine whether the words being used meet the conditions for functional definitions. If they do not (if the word is being used in a way that makes it impossible to determine, on publicly accessible criteria, whether a given case falls under it) then the appearance of an argument is misleading. What is actually being presented is not an argument about the world but a definitional proposal, and the appropriate response is not to evaluate the evidence for the claim but to examine whether the definition proposed is a revision that preserves communicative function or a dissolution that destroys it.

This is more demanding than it sounds. The conversational conventions that Grice described (the assumption of cooperative communication, the inference of implicatures from what is said) create strong pressure to engage with the apparent argument rather than the definition, because querying the definition feels like a derailment, a pedantic interruption, an unwillingness to engage with what is really at stake. Sometimes it is. But when the definition is the source of the disagreement (when the argument cannot be evaluated because the words do not mark the distinctions they appear to mark) then querying the definition is not a derailment. It is the argument.

Notes

¹ The pragmatic account of definitions developed here is associated primarily with the later Wittgenstein and with the American pragmatist tradition, particularly the work of William James and John Dewey. The alternative (the essentialist account, on which definitions capture the necessary and sufficient conditions for concept application) was the dominant view in philosophy from Plato through to the early twentieth century, and was definitively challenged by the failure to produce satisfactory essentialist definitions of any ordinary concept, and by Wittgenstein’s demonstration in the Philosophical Investigations that many concepts are organized not around necessary and sufficient conditions but around family resemblances (overlapping networks of similarities without a single common feature).

² Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell. The private language argument occupies sections 243-315 of the Investigations, though it is prepared by the preceding sections and cannot be fully understood in isolation. The argument is one of the most interpreted and contested in analytic philosophy, and the reading given here is one among several defensible interpretations. The aspect most directly relevant to this article (that a word without a publicly accessible criterion of correct application is not a functional word) is among the least contested elements of the argument, and is sufficient for the purposes of this article even if the stronger conclusions of the argument remain disputed.

³ The specific problem that Wittgenstein identifies (that a private standard provides no criterion for distinguishing correct application from merely believed-correct application) is related to the epistemological problem of introspective reliability discussed in article S1-211. The crony belief framework showed that the feeling of conviction is not evidence of correct belief. The private language argument makes a stronger and more structural claim: that a word grounded in a private standard has no criterion of correctness at all, which means that the question of whether it is being applied correctly or incorrectly cannot even be coherently asked. The practical implication is that concepts defined purely in terms of private experience (how something feels to the speaker) are not merely unreliable but are not functioning as concepts in the sense required for genuine communication.

⁴ Bichsel, P. (1969). Ein Tisch ist ein Tisch. In Kindergeschichten. Suhrkamp Verlag. The story was first published in the anthology Dichter erzählen Kindern (1969) and subsequently collected in Kindergeschichten, the volume that received the Prize of the German Youth Book Award in 1970. It is among the most widely read short stories in German-language secondary education, which means it carries a particular resonance for German-speaking readers who may encounter the argument of this article in the context of something they read in school. The parallel to Wittgenstein is the article’s inference: Bichsel has never, to this author’s knowledge, cited Wittgenstein as an influence, and the story may have arrived at its conclusion through literary intuition rather than philosophical argument. The convergence is nonetheless precise. An English translation by Michael Hamburger, “A Table Is a Table,” is available and preserves the story’s spare, deliberate quality.

⁵ The phenomenon of semantic bleaching (the loss of a word’s specific meaning through overuse or extension) is a regular feature of linguistic change and is not always destructive. The word “very” originally meant “truly” (from Latin verus), and its bleaching to a mere intensifier represents a loss of the distinction between the true and the merely emphatic. Whether this loss was destructive depends on whether the distinction was being usefully tracked in contexts where “very” would otherwise be used. The evaluation of any particular case of definitional change requires asking whether the distinction being lost was doing important communicative work: whether anyone was relying on the word to mark that distinction in ways that the change now prevents.

⁶ The shift from word-as-claim to word-as-tribal-marker is a specific instance of the broader phenomenon that article S1-210 identified in the context of framework-speak: the use of technical vocabulary as a signal of community membership rather than as a precise analytical tool. The additional element introduced by definitional dissolution is that the shift is not merely a matter of function (the word is no longer primarily used to make claims) but of structure: the word can no longer make claims in the relevant domain even when the speaker intends to, because the conditions for functional claims in that domain are not met. The framework of definitional revision versus definitional dissolution applies, with equal precision, to several definitional disputes that are currently live in public discourse rather than settled in retrospect. The word “woman” is the most contested current example. Two communities of usage are currently applying the word on the basis of different criteria, one biological (sex determined by chromosomes and reproductive anatomy) and one based on gender identity (the person’s own identification with a gender category), and the two criteria produce different answers in a specific class of cases. This is a genuine definitional dispute in the sense of this article: the word can no longer reliably coordinate action across the two communities because the communities disagree at the level of what the word tracks. What the article’s framework does not and cannot do is settle the underlying moral question, which is not primarily a definitional question but a question about recognition, dignity, and which kinds of harm deserve legal and social protection. The definitional dispute is real and has real practical consequences in law, medicine, sport, and the organization of single-sex spaces. But the framework of this article (which asks whether a definitional change preserves or destroys communicative function) is a necessary but not sufficient tool for resolving it. A community might reasonably conclude that the moral case for recognizing gender identity justifies accepting some loss of communicative precision in the biological sense, just as a community might reasonably conclude that the practical and legal importance of the biological category justifies maintaining its precision. These are moral and political judgments that the linguistic framework illuminates but does not determine.

⁷ This is why the definitional contest over “violence” is waged so intensely: the word is permission-bearing, and extending it ports the license that already attaches to violence, that it may be answered with force. The move cuts both ways rather than belonging to one side. A definition can be expanded, as when speech is classified as violence, to license a forceful response, or contracted, as when property destruction is classified as not really violence, to withhold one, and both are permission-driven redefinitions rather than neutral descriptions. It should be stressed that the redefinition enables but does not by itself license the leap some make from non-physical harm to physical retaliation. That leap needs two further steps the redefinition does not supply: an equivocation between the two senses of the word, since the recognized right of self-defense was calibrated to physical and imminent threat rather than to the broadened sense, and a collapse of proportionality, since a granted right to respond does not authorize meeting a non-physical harm with a physical one. Often, too, the redefinition is reached for to justify a retaliatory impulse that arose on other grounds, rather than being its cause. The ethics of when a threat licenses force, and in what proportion, is a separate question, treated in the group-scale material on threat certification (S4-P3-04) and in the harm-principle tradition after Mill. The point here is only linguistic: because “violence” carries a permission, redefining it silently redistributes that permission, which is part of what makes such a change a definitional dispute worth resisting.

S1-303 – What a word must do

Categories, definitions, and the preconditions for communication

What definitions are for

Wittgenstein and the impossibility of private language

Definitional revision vs. definitional dissolution

The political consequences of definitional dissolution

What a word must do: a summary

Further reading

Notes

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S1-303 – What a word must do

Categories, definitions, and the preconditions for communication

What definitions are for

Wittgenstein and the impossibility of private language

Definitional revision vs. definitional dissolution

The political consequences of definitional dissolution

What a word must do: a summary

Further reading

Notes

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