Defining Terms or Describing Things

TLDR: There is no guarantee that definitions are dependable guides to the life facts unless the terms defined are adequate representatives (in the given culture) of the facts in question.

Abstract: THE CENTRAL THESIS of this paper was provided by one of the "big five" precursors of general semantics. It was Cassius J. Keyser who said: I can think of no greater improvement in our human discourse than that which would result if writers and speakers would stop the well- nigh universal and vicious practice of confusing definition and description ... In any useful sense of the term definition, a thing is definable if and only if it is possible to indicate at least one mark serving to discriminate that thing from all things else. But any true statement about a thing, even if true of a million other things, is a partial description of it. A vast majority of the so-called definitions encountered in literature are, even when true statements, nothing but partial descriptions. And when such a partial description is submitted as a genuine definition, one is bound to infer that the author either does not understand the essential nature of definition, and so is fooling himself, or is engaged in trying to deceive others. (1) If the voice of Keyser were the only one calling for this discrimination between two levels of abstraction, it might be dismissed as a mere personal whim. But such is not the case. In Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell declared that "... a definition is concerned wholly with the symbols, not with what they symbolise." (2) And one might add that a description is concerned with what the symbols symbolize, not with only the symbols themselves. And then Jacques Rueff has said: "... the statement that the definition expresses the essence of an object of the external world does not and cannot have any sense. An object is the sum-total of sensations. A definition, on the other hand, is a sum-total of non-contradictory words. The two are of distinctly separate orders." (3) These voices, among others, afford strong support for a fundamental postulate: namely, definitions are always language directly about language, whereas all of those descriptions of interest to us are language directly about non-verbal things. According to this postulate, it is only one step from a description to the thing described; whereas there are at least two steps from a definition to the non-verbal realm. All of the traffic from definitions to the non-verbal things must take a detour through language. According to this postulate, there is no guarantee that definitions are dependable guides to the life facts unless the terms defined are adequate representatives (in the given culture) of the facts in question. If we agree to call an apple by the name banana, a new definition of the term banana would be needed. But to re-define the term banana without concern for the things now called apples, however entertaining the process, would not serve to distinguish apples and bananas. As the Columbia Associates in Philosophy have pointed out, "the definition must prove the means of identifying the thing defined and no other." (4) Now in place of the terms apple and banana, substitute such terms as appeasement and negotiation, and you will surely realize a legitimate need for the rigorous, keyserian usage of the term definition. But the keyserian usage is not the conventional usage in speech circles--nor many other circles, for that matter. Take the argumentation and discussion literature for example. Under the single label of definition we find both definition and description in the keyserian sense. According to the speech authors, an object is defined by explaining its purpose or function or how it works; a term is defined by the substitution of other terms; either an object or a term is defined by citing examples; such things as the Monroe Doctrine are defined by their history; a term is defined by etymology, usage, or context; and either terms or objects are defined by association, negation, analysis. And the most common pattern of these 'definitions' was presented as if, in defining terms, a non-verbal thing were assigned directly to a broad class (called genus), then to a narrower sub-class (called species), followed by a differentiation of the given thing from other things assigned to its sub-class. …