Why in heck do definitions matter?
No, no, not working definitions and dictionary definitions and things that make life easier. Philosophical definitions, pursued as though they hold some kind of innate and objective truth. I read today about Bertrand Russel's laborious efforts to define an object as, roughly, a set of perspectives. The dialogues of Socrates, from what I'm told, are similar pursuits of definitive content.
And it hit me - why does it matter? Don't we have the privilege of, well, defining the definitions? Don't we, as the people who control language, just decide what they are and contain and say? When I define a floogleschnorppe as a 24 ounce dark coffee with seven shots of espresso, aren't I right by definition?
How can one meaningfully pursue a definition, and how can such a definition contain truth that we don't just assign it?
But it occurs to me that definitions for concepts established in the mind of society cannot be chosen willy-nilly. The pursuit is of a definition that satisfies the demands we place upon it. I could, were I stupider than I am, define Justice the way I defined floogleschnorppe, but that would not jive at all wit the ages of eager, thorough, and weighty discourse dedicated to the matter.
Once we find some definition that does meet the expectations we have placed on the idea (be it justice, reality, truth, number, coffee, or love) we can find corollaries that flow with crisp syntactical precision from the coherently expressed concept that we all already agree to.
I don't know whether this is the approached typically used by philosophers who pursue universal definitions of fundamental concepts, but it seems like a good approach (and a good justification for the effort) to me.
Cheers,
The Terrible Philosopher
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