Avoiding Stupid Word Games

How to look like a genius at your next blunt rotation

Humans are brought bewildered into the world, and few do much to change this. Most people have an incredible ability to be confused by playing word tricks on themselves. This is incredibly stupid, and also annoying to bear witness to, hence why I thought I would employ my galaxy-brain-genius for once, and show how amazingly banal many things people actually think hard about are. I honestly feel like one of the most jarring effects of being interested in philosophy (especially the analytic tradition) is becoming disillusioned with stupid word games (though not always, as we’ll get to). You could certainly achieve this through other means, but philosophy definitely helps. And it’s fucking incredible how many “deep” disagreements people have are just stupid verbal disputes, once you notice it. Like the amount of times I’ve borne witness to people shouting at each other over something that seems like a disagreement, but which just comes down to defining a damn word. Enough wasting your time with introductions, let’s just look at some examples already:

If a Tree Falls in a Forest…

A wise Chinese man with one of those long thin moustaches once asked me: If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Wow, omg, this is such a deep question! Is this a philosophy? Well, it’s certainly incredibly stupid.

The reason this question sounds difficult is that the word “sound” actually covers two separate phenomena that coincide in every case we observe. The one is the auditory experience, and the other is the physical phenomena that cause the auditory experience (pressure waves and all that). Seeing as the latter always cause the former when we’re there to see it, we always observe the two together. If we then imagine a case where the two come apart, our linguistic apparatus is too coarse-grained to capture this. The way to answer the question is then simply to be clear whether by “sound” you mean the experience, the physical phenomenon, or the combination of the two. Once you do that there’s no mystery left.

Now thinking about this question might lead you to consider whether idealism is true. It of course probably isn’t true, but it’s at least a more interesting question. In any case, this just isn’t the ostensible target of the question to begin with. Rather it’s a stupid question which hinges on a linguistic ambiguity.

Is Water Wet?

Well the question “is water wet” begs the question “what do you mean by ‘wet’?” Because when you are dealing with fundamental realities and you pose a question, you have to understand that the reality of the concepts of your question, when you’re digging that deep, are just as questionable as what you’re questioning.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the story is the same here as above: When using our word “wet” we only ever really apply it to non-water objects with water on them. After all, there’s no point in specifying that some water has water on it, seeing as you can’t ever see a single molecule of water. But when we then try to apply the term “wet” to a non-non-water thing (i.e. water) our word is underdetermined to handle this case.

To solve this problem you then simply have to specify whether by “wet” you mean something with water on it, or something non-water with water on it. Now it’s obviously the former, as the latter is arbitrary, but you can fight me about that in the comments.

The Chicken and the Egg

Wow, this is an oldie! If you’re a real one, you’ll know that the very first post on this revolutionary blog, which future generations will know by the name Wonder and Aporia, addressed exactly this question: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? The answer is largely unchanged (barring some musings about vagueness I do in the original post).

Firstly it’s obviously meant to be “chicken egg” not just “egg,” as non-chicken creatures made eggs far before chickens. But once we make that clarification, it’s equally obvious that the question simply boils down to whether chicken egg means “egg laid by a chicken” or “egg containing a chicken.”¹ Seeing as the eggs laid by chickens also usually contain chickens (or at least stuff that could’ve turned into a chicken with a little love), the term “chicken” egg is ambiguous between these two meanings. Once you disambiguate, the problem disappears (I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to see why—I believe you can do it!).

What is a Woman?

This is where it’ll get a little more controversial (though it shouldn’t). People loooove to tear the heads off of each other over whether, say, trans women are Real Women®, attempting to reach the Objective Truth of the matter, one side insisting that the word “woman” obviously objectively refers to a biological category, and the other side insisting that it obviously objectively refers to a social category—and whoever disagrees with me is factually wrong and smells bad.

The truth is that the colloquial use of the word up until recently has been underdetermined to handle the cases of trans people. In the circumstances where the word “woman” has been used historically, it has referred to people who both fit the biological criteria and weren’t recognized as identifying as not-women. But when it gradually became accepted that some people really do identify as not being a woman, while having the biological characteristics otherwise associated with women, the word turned out to not be precise enough. Thus we simply have to decide which of the two properties, which coincided until now, we map the word onto. Because people for some reason assume that there already is an objective matter as to what the word really means, they think that whatever option they feel is right really is factually right, and the people disagreeing are factually wrong—even though it is simply an arbitrary choice based on their values.

Now, I think that we should clearly map the word “woman” onto the social category, since not doing so would just make trans people unnecessarily miserable for no reason. As an analogy, imagine that a single mother marries someone who is not biologically the father of her kids. The word “dad” usually refers to a man who both has custody over the kids and is their biological father. But in this case the two come apart, and the family has to decide how to use the word “dad.” Now suppose that the guy really wants to feel like he belongs in the family, and really loves the kids, etc. In that case it would obviously be incredibly cruel and stupid to insist that the word “dad” should only be used for biological parents, meaning they should clearly decide to call him dad. This is not because it is really true or false that “dad” applies in the case or not, but just because it’s the best way to use the word.

Does Smith have knowledge?

The last one may be even more controversial, at least for the people whose autofill when typing “p” in Google is philpapers.org—the only thing they get off to. Basically I think that many cases of so-called conceptual analysis are no more substantial than the disputes covered above; they’re essentially attempts to give a precise analysis of a concept, when there is no fact of the matter as to the correct analysis, since we don’t have a single precise concept in mind to begin with. This is because, like with the above cases, many “philosophically interesting” concepts, like knowledge, are just amorphous blobs of potentially precise concepts, picked out by words that have been learned through examples and extrapolating rules from these. But any finite set of examples will be insufficient to determine a single fully precise rule (which is what conceptual analysis wants), meaning that there will be vague cases where it’s unclear whether the concept applies, and no correct way of precisely formulating a rule for applying the concept.

There are cases where “conceptual analysis” makes sense. These are the cases where we do have a single precise concept—namely one that picks out an irreducible property,² or a property which is sharply defined by combining irreducible properties with logical operators.³ For example, the concept “free will” is generally taken to denote whatever makes you morally responsible for an action (assuming there is such a property as responsibility). But then we actually already do know perfectly what we mean by free will. Still the disagreement between compatibalists and incompatibalists is not purely verbal, as finding out the conditions for something having this property of making responsible is a non-verbal question. Thus the scare quotes around “conceptual analysis” since it’s not really the concept you’re analyzing, you’re just denoting a basic property with the concept, and trying to find out the conditions for that property.

But it’s important that the concept picks out a basic property, or at least a property which is sharply defined in terms of basic properties. If it doesn’t, then there won’t be any precise core for you to analyze your way to. For example I might be interested in referring to people with a certain sort of hairstyle, and so I begin using the word “beard” and pointing to the people that fit what I’m interested in. Because I started with examples rather than with picking out well-defined properties, there is now no clear concept “beard” stands for, and no clear property or sets of properties is picked out. Rather the word is in a superposition of different possible precisifications, and there is no objective fact of the matter as to which is correct. After all there are infinite possible ways of making a rule for application that fits all the examples given thus far, so the “data” underdetermines which definition is correct.

Alternatively, I might say that it picks out the property of being a beard, settling on a single precise concept. The trouble is that nothing has the property being a beard—there is no basic feature of objects which is “beardness,” and due to the origins of the property as being a generalization of examples, there is no fact of the matter as to which actual basic properties the “property” of being a beard reduces to. In other words: Beard isn’t a concept; it’s a vibe.

I worry that something like knowledge is also just a vibe. Basically it’s just a word that you’ve learned growing up through pointing to examples. Thus when you try to give an account of it in terms of the (perhaps) basic properties of belief, justifiedness, truth, etc., combined with logical connectives, the data underdetermines which way of doing so is correct. Alternatively, you might just suppose that being knowledge simply is a basic property. But I mean, it just clearly isn’t, just like beardness isn’t! It’s just a word that’s useful for describing beliefs that we’re pretty sure are true in some way, not a basic property in the fabric of reality.

Thus the question to figure out before embarking on conceptual analysis is whether your starting point is actually a concept that picks out a basic property, or well-defined complex of these. If not, then “analyzing” the concept would simply amount to a herculean effort of absolutely nothing, trying to figure out the answer to an answerless problem you made for yourself. In that case you should just stipulate a meaning, rather than trying to figure out the right one (if you want a precise meaning at least).

And if the concept does pick out basic properties, then you already know what it means, and you should try to figure out the conditions for the property instead. This might look similar to analysis in practice, but I think being aware that you’re examining a property can avoid unfruitful cases such as “knowledge” or “woman,” where there clearly is no such property to be found.

So how to know whether I’m picking out a basic property, or just something I made up? It’s hard to say in general I think, but I would err on the side of reducing your property-population. Chances are that if you’re unsure whether a property is basic and real, it isn’t.

This isn’t to say that words that can’t be given a perfectly rigorous analysis aren’t necessarily interesting. The point is simply that when doing conceptual analysis, what we are looking for just is such a perfectly rigorous analysis, and so it’s nice to know in which cases there is an answer to be found, and in which cases there isn’t.

Now, my children, go forth and multiply! But most importantly, go forth and use what you’ve learnt here to never be fooled by stupid word games again.

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1. Or probably more precisely “egg containing chicken-DNA” to capture non-fertilized eggs, and to avoid the hot topic of whether chicken-life starts at conception.

2. Or relation, but I won’t mention that to make the reading less cumbersome (thank me later).

3. Such as “physical event at time t” which picks out those things that have both the properties of being physical events and at time t.