Rarely Noticed Choices That Shape Your Debates

Key Takeaways

• Many debates hinge on definitions. Disagreements about God, personhood, love, justice and more can all turn on how key concepts are defined.

• Your 'theory of definitions' shapes how you argue. Perhaps without realizing it, you have made philosophical choices about definitions: You might be a monist or a pluralist; a descriptivist or a prescriptivist; a realist or an anti-realist; a pragmatist or an idealist.

• People can talk past each other when their theories differ. Even if you agree on a definition's wording, you can still clash if you disagree on the deeper theory of that concept.

• Understanding these choices can be helpful and interesting. It can deepen your understanding of your own views and other people's, and it can help to identify causes of disagreement that often go unnoticed.

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What counts as an atheist? 

For centuries, if you wanted to read Spinoza’s radical ideas, you had to do so at great personal risk. His ideas got him exiled from his community and his books banned across Europe. It was said at the time that his work was “forged in hell… by the devil himself” and that one of his books was “the most dangerous book ever published.” Yet his ideas spread anyway. Clandestine publishers printed his works without his name on them and bearing the marks of false publishers and locations. 

What was so dangerous about his ideas? It was the 1600s, and he argued for freedom of expression and the removal of religion from philosophy. He also argued against miracles, free will, the immortality of the soul, and many other things posited by traditional religious doctrines. So, did he count as an atheist?

He claimed that a God does exist (necessarily, in fact!), but his definition of ‘God’ was unprecedented. According to the Catholic Church, it was heretical. The full details of his definition are quite obscure because they rely on a complex framework for thinking about ‘substances’ and ‘properties’ that was common to his time but not ours. However, it is usually summarized with a simple slogan: God is nature. Rather than thinking of God as a being who judges and has plans and transcends the universe, Spinoza’s God is the universe itself. For example, he wrote:

That eternal and infinite being we call God, or Nature, acts from the same necessity from which he exists.

Does this make him an atheist? Some say it does, others disagree. Clearly, if we are to answer this question, it matters how we define ‘God’ (and ‘atheist’, for that matter) and what we think counts as a good definition.

This isn’t just true of the word ‘God’. Many fierce and important debates hinge on the definitions of relevant words, such as:

• Person: It is common to say that being a person entails having moral rights and entails that others have moral duties to you. So, is a fetus a person? Philosophers argue that debates over whether abortion is murder or morally permissible hinge, at least in part, on how you answer that question and therefore on how you define ‘person’.

• Love: Is love at first sight possible? That surely depends on what you mean by ‘love’. Those who argue against love at first sight say that it does not contain things essential to love, like commitment or intimacy, and is instead a feeling composed of things like excitement and exhilaration, or a story that couples tell themselves retrospectively. Yet plenty of people report having experienced love at first sight, and swear that it was true love.

• Woman (and also man): The current moral panics and debates related to trans people often hinge, in part, on questions of how to define words like ‘woman’.

The same kind of issues arise for concepts like ‘art’, ‘intelligence’, ‘freedom’, ‘democracy’, ‘justice’, and so many more.

So, how do you make sense of all this? How do you pick a good definition? This article is all about helping you answer that question for yourself by helping you understand your own theory of definitions, which you might not realize is working underneath your beliefs. It will help you get clearer on your own views, gain insight into others’, and be better equipped to work through disagreements.

We’ve previously written about some important ways that definitions can go wrong: We argued that good definitions avoid irrelevance, unnaturalness, opinionatedness, ambiguity, and inefficiency. But this article is different. Rather than give you a list of qualities that your definitions should have or avoid, we’re going to take you through four different choices that you can make about definitions. These are choices that most people are unaware they are already making, which means people often don’t realize why they disagree when they disagree over one of these choices. The result of combining all these choices is your own personal theory of definitions.

For many (but not all) people, these choices are dependent on context. You might choose a certain way more often than not, but there are probably exceptions. There’s no guarantee that what you’d choose for one definition is what you’d choose for another. This means your theory of definitions for ‘God’ might be different from your theory of definitions for ‘justice’ or ‘love’, etc. You might find it helpful to ask yourself these questions by focusing on a specific concept that’s important to you. You can then go through them again for a different concept and see whether they change!

Choice 1: Are you a monist or a pluralist about this definition?

Monists say that there is a single best way to define the word in question.

Pluralists say there can be many different but equally good definitions.

This is not a question about whether different people actually use the word(s) you’re defining in different ways - the answer to that question is likely always going to be “Yes.” For any given word, you can probably find someone who uses it in some bizarrely idiosyncratic fashion. Instead, this question asks: Is this the kind of word that can have multiple acceptable definitions?

If you’re a traditional monotheist, you probably won’t be a pluralist about definitions of ‘God’. After all, that seems to entail that there could be multiple distinct entities or phenomena that count as ‘God’ (unlike standard conceptions of the Holy Trinity, which hold that they are not distinct entities). That hardly seems like standard monotheism. 

But when it comes to social phenomena or categories that humans impose on reality, which aren’t intended to pick out some mind-independent feature of the universe, it’s common to find people who choose the pluralist view. Pluralism can be easily found (but is debated) with respect to definitions of concepts like ‘art’, ‘intelligence’, ‘gender’, ‘race’, and more. For instance, if you could imagine yourself saying something like “For me, art has to evoke emotions or make you think. If something doesn’t do that then I just don’t think it’s art. But I understand that you’re more concerned with the technical ability involved. We seem to just have different definitions in mind, based on the different things we value, but that’s okay - we can both be right.” Then you’re a pluralist about the word ‘art’.

How this works in practice: Imagine you’re having a disagreement and you discover that you and your interlocutor are working with different definitions. If you’re a monist, you’ll think that at least one of you must have made a mistake or that it’s important to settle on just one definition. Being a pluralist means you have the option of thinking that both of you have tenable definitions and the appearance of disagreement may just be an illusion caused by conflating your two different definitions.

Choice 2: Are you a descriptivist or a prescriptivist about this definition? 

What makes a person’s use of a word incorrect? That is, what makes its usage not just unhelpful, unclear, or ineffective, but actually inaccurate or mistaken?

Descriptivists say that the meaning of a word is determined by how a particular group of people (e.g., people in a community) actually use it. It only makes sense to say that a use is incorrect relative to a particular group of people's use. For example, you might think that using the word ‘generational’ to mean very good is incorrect for academic usage but since there is a group of people who use it that way (teenagers on TikTok), it’s correct for them.

Prescriptivists say that there are rules for what words mean and how they’re to be used, and these rules can be broken - even by many people deviating from them in the same way. For example, you might think that just because lots of people started using ‘literally’ to mean figuratively, doesn’t mean that’s something it now means. This is also how some people object to the use of ‘they’ as a singular pronoun.

To make this clearer, let’s think about dictionaries. What would you say is the point of a dictionary?

On the descriptivist view, the point of a dictionary is to record patterns of usage. If people in a linguistic community use a word in a certain way, then the job of the people writing the dictionary is to notice that usage and describe it accurately. The dictionary could be wrong, but the linguistic community can’t.

On the prescriptivist view, there are rules about what words mean and these rules are ironclad. Dictionaries simply record those rules. So the point of a dictionary is to be a kind of catalogue of prescriptions (prescribing how one ought to use words), rather than descriptions (of how people happen to now use words). If a linguistic community deviates from the usage prescribed in the dictionary, then the community is wrong, not the dictionary.

Even though prescriptivists agree that there are rules for how to correctly use words, different individual prescriptivists can have different views about where the rules come from. For example, the rules could be determined by some authority like the state, the church, an academic institution, or a style guide, or they could be determined by the reality that the words are attempting to describe.

Let’s consider a practical illustration of this choice.

There are prominent people like Deepak Chopra and Jordan Peterson who use definitions of ‘God’ that are so idiosyncratic that they leave many people baffled as to what they really believe, how to argue with them, or if they really disagree with atheists at all. Chopra appears to define ‘God’ as something like "consciousness". Peterson appears to define ‘God’ as something like a foundational or intrinsic value. But atheists can and do believe in those things - so could Chopra and Peterson be 'atheists' by a more standard definition of that word?

If you’re a descriptivist about the word ‘God’, you might think: 

1. “Chopra claims a certain definition of God is common in his linguistic communities - that means the word 'God' is sometimes used that way by those people. If that’s true, then that’s fair enough, and that’s just one of the things that ‘God’ can mean (even if it’s counter-intuitive to me). I’ll have to factor that in when I’m thinking about his claims, remembering that when he says 'God' he means something different than I normally would expect that word to mean.”

2. “Peterson’s definition is more unusual. It’s not a definition used by any linguistic community I’m aware of, and might be unique to just him. That would mean that his use is incorrect to everyone (except perhaps himself). But I’m open to the possibility that, if his audience emulates his usage, then his definition could become one of the things ‘God’ can mean in that linguistic community.”

But if you’re a prescriptivist, you might think: “That’s simply not what ‘God’ means and they’re using the word incorrectly.” (Or you might think that they’re onto something and that’s how we should all be prescribed to use the word).

There’s an increasingly popular version of this kind of prescriptivism called 'conceptual engineering'. It claims that our concepts should be critically assessed to see whether they can be improved and deliberately revised to better serve our purposes. Those purposes could be pragmatic, epistemic (truth-seeking), ethical, or political.

For example, when the radical climate activist Andreas Malm argues that terrorism always involves violence, he isn’t claiming that’s how we currently define ‘terrorism’ (that would struggle to make sense of the notion of ‘cyber terrorism’); instead, he is claiming that we would make better moral judgments and have a less tyrannical society if we revised the concept of terrorism so that it was not applied to people who engaged in non-violent actions.

Choice 3: Are you a realist or an anti-realist?

Realists say there is a mind-independent, objective phenomenon that the definition aims to pick out.

Anti-realists say the definition doesn’t pick out anything that exists in a mind-independent, objective way.

Most people would agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That is to say, whether something (like a painting or a person) is beautiful is not a mind-independent objective fact about the universe; it’s a subjective judgment that requires a mind. You might think that Brutalist architecture is beautiful. Plenty of other people disagree. But those who believe ‘beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ would say that neither you nor the people who disagree with you are objectively right or wrong. That’s because they are anti-realists about beauty.

If you’re disagreeing with someone about a definition, the source of your disagreement might be that one of you is a realist about the thing you’re defining, while the other is an anti-realist. That’s often what’s going on when people disagree over whether something is ‘socially constructed’. For example, some people (realists) think that gender is a mind-independent, objective fact about human biology, while others (anti-realists) think that it is a subjective, mind-dependent phenomenon about a person’s psychology or the way that others view them.

On the other hand, it’s far more common to be a realist about the things we observe in the physical sciences. Things like rocks, trees, planets, bridges, and so on. Realists would say that these things have a mind-independent existence that our definitions attempt to capture.

Getting clear on whether you (and anyone you’re debating with) believe the concept you want to define refers to something that has an objective, mind-independent existence can clarify a lot of disagreement.

Choice 4: Are you a pragmatist or an idealist?

Pragmatists say that language is, most importantly, a tool for achieving goals.

Idealists say that language is, most importantly, a tool for describing reality.

Of course, achieving goals and describing reality are closely linked. For instance, if you are trying to communicate information about the dangerous storm approaching (with the goal of getting people to evacuate), you’re going to be much more effective if your words accurately describe the nature of that storm.

This is not a choice between two mutually exclusive uses of language. Language is clearly useful for achieving goals and describing reality. Instead, this is a choice about what is more important to you. Your answer matters because sometimes you’ll have to sacrifice one for the other.

Imagine you’re talking with a friend about the question of whether machines could ever be conscious. That’s going to require defining ‘consciousness’. If your friend is a pragmatist about this concept, they might have something like the following suggestion:

There’s a problem in philosophy called ‘the problem of other minds’: it’s typically thought to be impossible to prove that anyone other than you is conscious. That means the standard definition of ‘consciousness’ is not very useful for practical questions like whether machines deserve rights. Let’s define ‘consciousness’ in terms of behavior; if machines were able to act similarly enough to humans in certain ways (like telling us they have emotions, telling us they feel pain, etc), then that’s good enough.

But, if you are an idealist about this concept, you might respond:

Sure, we can’t prove who is conscious. But there’s still a fact of the matter about whether machines truly are. We need the word ‘consciousness’ to point to that reality. If you want a term for machine behavior that imitates consciousness in convincing ways, let’s use a different word.

The pragmatist cares most about being able to use the words in helpful ways. The idealist cares most about whether the words describe reality.

From Theory to Practice

Now you have a framework for understanding your own theory of definitions. When you’re thinking about what a word means, you can ask yourself:

1. Am I a monist or a pluralist? (Do I think that there can be more than one correct definition of the word?)

2. Am I a descriptivist or a prescriptivist? (Do I think that there are rules for how this word should be used, and that any group of people breaking those rules will be using the word wrong?)

3. Am I a realist or an anti-realist? (Do I think the word refers to some mind-independent feature or reality or not?)

4. Am I a pragmatist or an idealist? (Do I think it’s more important for the word to be useful or to describe reality?) 

This list covers many of the most important ways that people don’t realize they are disagreeing over definitions.

When you’re having a disagreement with someone that hinges on a definition, it can be helpful to clarify what theories of definitions you’re both working with. If you have a theory that is monist, prescriptivist, realist, and idealist, but your conversation partner has a theory that is pluralist, descriptivist, anti-realist, and pragmatic, then you have a lot of disagreement to cover! If you’re not careful, you’re also likely to completely talk past each other.

There are even cases where you might agree on the wording of a definition, but disagree on other things because you have different theories of that definition. If you’re a descriptivist anti-realist about morality and you’re talking to someone who is a realist prescriptivist about it, you might be able to agree on some kind of a definition (e.g., “morality is a system of norms governing right and wrong conduct”) and even on which cases meet that definition, but you might still disagree on things like how important being moral is, because one of you sees the concept as a social construction that only reflects parochial community practices, while the other sees it as tracking objective truths about the universe.

On top of all the applications described above, it can also just be fascinating to ask people what they think about these choices. Knowing a person’s theory of definitions for concepts that are important to them can lead you to a much deeper understanding of their views and your own - and can be a starting point for deeper dialogue. This might look like asking: 

1. Do you think there could be multiple valid definitions of this word?

2. Do you think there are rules for using this word and that people who deviate from those rules (even as a group) are using it wrong?

3. Do you think the word refers to a mind-independent feature of reality?

4. Do you think it’s more important that the word be useful or that it describes reality?

If you enjoyed reflecting on your answers to these questions, you might also enjoy our free Learn Your Philosophical Beliefs tool. It asks you to make more interesting philosophical choices, and you’ll be shown how your answers compare to members of the public and professional philosophers:

Launch the Learn Your Philosophical Beliefs tool!