On Words
A large fraction of difficulty in reasoning arises from the misuse of words; a smaller but more dangerous difficulty arises if misuse is avoided by margins so large, that use is lost.
Of misuse, some is deliberate, and some is negligent.
Life on earth is life beneath the Father of Lies, who, for a time, hold dominion here, and deceives the nations.
A high priority of the Prince of Darkness, perhaps paramount, is to teach mankind to ape him, so that man naturally welcomes lies in the form of flattery or newspaper headlines, tells lies in order to win friends and influence people, advertise goods, and advance political or social agendas, and believes lies and comes to love them, in order to create an inner world of self-esteem where one’s own self-identity is unmoored from the constraints of reality.
The final absurdity of lies in this last respect has been achieved in the current generation, to the point beyond parody, when a male is told he has the power to create a female identity in his inner world, and moreover told society has a moral duty to aid the pretense by any means possible, including imposing on all others a positive duty to lie, to call him by dishonest pronouns, to call him by dishonest names, to pretend he can get pregnant and nurse the young, or that athletic competitions between him and real girls are fair and evenhanded. Hence, we have reached the final, satanic absurdity of a code of conduct that promotes a duty to lie as a positive good.
Of the deliberate misuse of words to tell and to welcome lies little need be said. The self-destructive nature of devotion to deception is clear enough for any with eyes to see.
There are prices, known and unknown, a liar pays.
One known price of being a liar is the loss of reputation for honest among honest men. The liar lives on barrowed time until such time as his habit of fraud is revealed, and, as a practical matter, it always eventually is.
There are also unknown prices, which a man rarely contemplates before embarking on a life of lies.
One price is that one becomes enslaved to whatever lie one tells, and must tell more lies to cover the first, until eventually, everything out of one’s mouth or pen is a lie.
Another price is that a life of lies mars the social machinery of whatever institution accepts lying as routine, so that no matter what its original purpose, the institution no longer can perform it. Newspapers cannot tell news. Statemen cannot govern the state. Doctors cannot practice medicine, nor lawyers practice law, nor scientists study nature, nor professors teach the young once the institution makes lying obligatory. Once a paleontologist or policeman is told he can no longer identify a dead body as male or female, he can no longer do his work.
Even a job as simple as watching sheep, or so the Aesop fable tells, cannot be done with success by the boy who cried wolf. Let it not be forgotten that the end of that fable was not only that the boy was dead at the jaws of the wolf, but that the flock was ravished.
A price more terrible is that the liar loses his own ability to distinguish lies from reality, he becomes a prey himself to lies. In the modern day, this phenomena is carried to an absurd extreme, sometimes called life in an echo chamber, or life in a bubble, where all channels of information lead back to the same source of lies into which the liar himself contributes, resulting in the perfect self-deception of a thought-prison, a prison that cannot be escaped. It is a self-inflicted divorce from reality, indistinguishable from madness. Men can get pregnant.
The negligent misuse of words is a more interesting topic, because such negligence is so rarely deliberate, particularly among those interested in abstract topics, lawyers and scholars and poets, rhetoricians and news-gossips and pundits, and others who earn their bread by words.
Words have souls.
A soul is the internal principle that gives any incarnate being its form or shape, and moves it to life. Those who believe that words are dead things, merely assigned as labels arbitrarily by the human mind, or assigned deceptively as part of a system of institutional oppression meant to maintain a social hierarchy are men who, by their own admission, speak arbitrary hence meaningless words. Their own argument against themselves is sufficient that no additional argument need be adduced. They men are called nominalists. From their error springs all the philosophical heresies of the modern day. No more need be said of them.
As with other incarnations, there is a nonmaterial reality, independent of time and space, which we call formal or ideal. A form or ideal that are constructed by abstracting an essential property from a number of particulars is called an abstraction. When a shared property is found between two groups that also possess other properties discriminating them from each other, this is called a distinction or definition. Words are necessary both for abstraction and discrimination.
For example, if we see a red ball, a blue ball, a blue cube and a red sunset, we can abstract the redness from the sunset and the ball, and call this red; and we can abstract the balls, regardless of color, from cubes, and call them balls.
What is essential to one definition can be nonessential to another. The ball is defined by its shape that is, how closely it approximates the theoretical ideal of a sphere, a volume whose every surface point is equidistant from a center, regardless of hue; red defined by a hue, regardless of shape. Likewise, we call all variations of the visible spectrum both bright and dark, between purple and orange by the name red. Hence the ideal sphere, or sphereness, is colorless, while the idea hue of red, or redness is shapeless.
Any incarnate form, including words, of necessity shares its form with other incarnations.
Hence, for example, Christ, as the Son of Man, took on a body shaped like Adam, the primal Man, hence sharing the essential properties of all other sons of man.
But defining this essential property is a matter of some delicacy, particularly when indulging in speculations. If we say man is a featherless biped, we have a generalization that is generally true, but an exception must be made for Long John Silver. Likewise if we say man is a rational animal or political animal, exceptions must be made for Don Quixote, who was mad, or Robinson Crusoe, who was alone.
All men on earth, or so genetic science tells us, descend from a primordial common ancestor, so man can perhaps be defined by a rule of succession. Whatever is a son of man is man. But if Darwin is to be taken seriously, the first man was either born of an apelike primate; or if Genesis is to be taken literally, he was born of dust. On the other hand, if Nietzsche is believed, or X-Man comics, the last man will give rise to the superman; or if St. John on Patmos is believed, the last man will rise again as a saint.
And if we indulge in speculation about intelligent beings on other worlds, or artificial intelligence, the question is legitimate whether the inhabitants of the Island of Dr Moreau, or in the hoods of Martian fighting machines on Horsell Common, or beneath the sphinxlike statue of AD 802701, in fact are men, and should be treated as we treat other men, not as we treat animals.
No matter what property we name to define man, we must extend an exception to offspring, who, at some point early in development, without the womb or within, did possessed that property in potential only.
Hence any incarnate form, including words, participates in the form that forms them, perhaps partly, perhaps potentially, but in any case with different non-essential properties. Note that each human face is as individual as a snowflake, no two precisely the same, not even twins, while, like the snowflake which is always hexagonal in structure, each face has features in common, eyes, nose, mouth, and so on. Even badly damaged or deformed faces had this form either at one time or in potential.
Please note how rare are cases where the question is open to debate whether a given man is or is not a man. Indeed, in real life, where neither Martians nor Morlocks are likely to be encountered, the sole case where a debate is likely to be created, is when a Leftwing rhetorician, either a Nazi denouncing a Jew, or an Abortionist denouncing a babe, calls a human non-human in order to depersonalize him prior to genocide or aborticide, hence to muffle the alarm-ring of the conscience.
But also notice that the natural faculty of language, which enables us to group all the incarnations of a given form into one group, operates by seeing likenesses. A close likeness is literal, and a remote likeness is metaphorical. All language hence is poetry; but some poetry, seeking precision, restricts itself to prose, seeking literalism.
In normal speech, which is poetical, we use words as generalizations to capture a large number of incarnate abstractions, but finding other words to express the property which all cases of any object participating in that word hold in common is rarely easy. The imagination of man is sufficiently flexible to be able to concoct an exception to any general rule, or discover an ambiguous case.
No matter how carefully we define the word “man” it is likely someone can invent an ambiguous case. If nothing else, we can ponder the imaginary case of the Tin Woodman of Oz, whose every body part, one part at a time, was replace by a prosthetic of tin, so drawing the exact line, or saying how many braincells in a brain can be replaced by cybernetic parts, before humanity is lost, or if it is, becomes difficult. This is like seeing a family resemblance in a family, and trying to put into words what the definitive property is.
But in precise or technical speech, we do the opposite. Instead of starting with the general form, and then trying to find words sufficiently precise to distinguish essential from nonessential, we start with a precise definition, and relegate any objects either to be members of the set of things called by that name, or not, depending on what fits the definition.
Definitions of the first type are descriptive, trying to find a box of the right shape to cover the objects meant and exclude those not meant; the second type are prescriptive, starting with a box of a given shape, and excluding whatever falls outside its boundary. In normal speech, there is some by-play between the two approaching, as objects are adjusted to fix into boxes, or boxes expanded or contracted to fix to the objects. It is the particular pastime of modern philosophy, which is all based on falsehoods, to warp definitions out of recognition, or coin new terms to carry connotation the opposite of reality.
In geometry, for example, a triangle is defined as the plane figure enclosed by three straight lines. As a matter of logic, any plane figure so defined necessarily posses other properties deduced from this essential property, such as, for example, the three angles in a triangle sum to two right angles.
Various particular triangles can be right triangles, isosceles, or equilateral, and have the qualities particular to them, but the essential property is the definition. Doubling the area of the triangle changes no essential property; whereas adding another line does. Adding a line to a triangle makes it a quadrilateral, whose angles sum to four right angles.
If words did not have souls, that is, if words were merely arbitrary labels invented merely for human convenience, or as a social artifact, then words could be used arbitrarily, while still keeping their meaning.
If so, then the word “triangle” could both be defined as a plane figure enclosed by three straight lines, and be defined as not summing to two right angles. But there is no way to do this without making one or more of the words into something dead of meaning.
Hence words cannot be merely arbitrary. For the purposes of precise and literal speech, as when discussing law or geometry, physics or moral philosophy, or any field where excruciating precision is a necessity, certain terms can and must be used arbitrarily in order to be used as axioms, but the deductions of these axioms, spring from the soul of the word. The connotations fathered by the word come from the word itself, once seen in context, not from human fiat. Humans, try as we might, can tame but cannot control the flow of logic, or the fatherhood of connotations.
Even as the spirit wars against the flesh, so, too, often enough, the connotation of a word will war against the denotation. An obvious example is the pronoun “he” which, in English, refers to a person of either sex, when the sex is unknown or undetermined; but is also refers to a male. Likewise, the word “man” refers to a human of either sex, man as opposed to beast, but also refers to males, man as oppose to woman, and refers to adults, man as oppose to child, and refers to man of a certain character and courage, man as opposed to weakling.
This ambiguity is unavoidable in common speech, because common speech is and is meant to be poetical, and see resemblances between disparate objects, and see generalities useful if not crucial to be seen in the vast majority of cases. The reason why exceptions are called exceptions is because they are exceptional, that is, rare. Those who rail against this ambiguity are liars, because what they are really railing against is not that our language is too nonliteral for daily use, but, rather, they are railing against the accumulated habits of thought the wisdom of generations of forebears have deposited in our speech, carried on as legacies from generation to generation.
Hence, in the large majority of case, even a word like “man” can find a definition that will cover all but the most exceptional of cases —myself, I suggest calling man a rational incarnate being is sufficient, if by rational we mean only the potential for reason, and if by reason we include the moral reasoning of a being able to grasp the moral implications of, and to be rightly held responsible for, his actions — nonetheless some imprecision will always remain. There is always a risk of confusing an essential for a nonessential, sometimes with malign and catastrophic results, as when the Marxist conflates charity with coercive redistribution of wealth, or as when the Cultural Marxist conflates womanhood with a fetishist desire to playact at being a woman, or as when an advocate of child-murder conflates a stage of human development, such as the foetal stage, with the absence of human nature, in order for the murder to seem like butchery, that is, the slaying of livestock; or perhaps the child-murderer conflates a stage of human development with the absence of human life, in order to make the butchery seem like a medical process, like removing a cancer, or a mole, or some other cell growth not forming an organism.
Proper definitions of words, calling things by their right names, is the primary duty of philosophers, if not of all honest men, for there is no evil howsoever hellish which cannot be called by some benevolent or nonprovocative name, in order to disguise its nature.
Philosophers tell us that the map is not the territory and the word is not the thing it represents. This caution warns us how easily we might fall prey to overgeneralization which creates bias, or to drawing, frivolous distinctions, which creates hairsplitting and pettifoggery, which in turn can lead to bigotry, fanaticism, falsehood, and the thought-prison of ideology.
But, as in all things, the opposite extreme holds a danger as well: it is a debate tactic easily used dishonestly to dismiss any word as insufficiently precise because applies only to general cases. A common example is to liken perverts to women, by saying sterile women cannot bear children, nor can men, therefore men and women are indistinguishable.
Sadly, there is no word so precise that additional precision cannot be demanded as a delaying tactic. Even the most closely defined words will embrace two or more objects, and therefore whatever distinguishes the two from each other, will be left out of the description of what they have in common.
So no word will be perfectly accurate, if by perfectly accurate we mean a word that describes an object in every detail, and every aspect, only at one infinitesimal moment of time, with no possible ambiguity between it and another object called by the same name, while giving an exact count of all its constituents, atom by atom, each with its own individual and unambiguous name. The call for infinite precision can be infinitely repeated, and, after a certain point, can be dismisses as insincere.
The human attempt to grasp reality by means of words, like all things in the human condition, is limited, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfying. Even the most brilliant poet cannot put into words such basic and sacred or scary things as love and death; even those most skillful philosopher cannot remove all paradox and ambiguity from the fundamentals of virtue and vice, volition and compulsion, reason and nonsense; even the saintliest theologian cannot define God, except, perhaps in saying what He is more than, or supreme in. Even the wisest of men, Socrates, begins his dialogs in earnest inquires into the meanings of words like truth, justice, virtue, and end in metaphors and myths. We are all trapped in the Cave of Socrates, and all obligated to seek the truth behind the shadows of shapes reflected on the walls.
Now, one surprising conclusion of realizing that words have souls, and a life of their own, and realizing that this sets limits what human domestication can train them to do, not only gives an objective standard by which the truth of denotation can be measured, but also a standard of the aptness measuring connotations.
A more surprising conclusion is that words cannot have souls in any universe where souls are not possible, or where ideals have no place to lodge. If words are incarnations of nonphysical forms, disincarnate reality must be real. This puts paid to panphysicalism, materialism, and naturalism.
Word cannot have souls in any universe not created by a Creator. If words have meaning over and above meanings arbitrarily granted by human will, and if meaning cannot arise from nature alone, nor from matter alone, means that a Supreme Being, a Logos, supernatural and immaterial, arranged this.
This does not mean God wrote seventy dictionaries during the fall of the Tower of Babel. Rather, it means that the human faculty of speech, by participating in a nonmaterial and timeless realm of pure concepts or pure logic, reaches a realm where meaning exist but outside nature and time, hence supernatural and eternal. Meaning cannot arise from meaninglessness, any more than logic can arise from illogic. The creator of the realm of pure concepts or pure logic must itself be a being capable of conceptualization and logic, or some mental process unimaginable to man more fundamental to thought than thought itself, yet foundational to it.
Ironically, then, the use of any word, merely by being a word, proves the universe to have been created by a creator able to create word-meanings. So the word atheist, merely by being meaningful, proves itself false.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
