Argumentum ad dictionarium
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Revision as of 11:24, 5 September 2012
“”It depends on what the meaning of the words 'is' is.
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| —Bill Clinton - possibly the most egregious example.[1] |
Argumentum ad dictionarium is the act of pulling out a dictionary to support your assertions. More broadly speaking it can refer to any argument about definitions, semantics, or what label to apply to a person or idea. It forms an informal fallacy combining attributes of a red herring argument and, frequently, special pleading. About90% of arguments on the internet tend to boil down to this.
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But the dictionary said!
| “ | Dictionary editors are historians of usage, not legislators of language. | ” |
Because teachers will have inevitably told everyone, at some point in their lives, to look up what words mean in the dictionary, they seem to have taken on a quasi-mythical status as arbitrators in arguments. We're not talking about someone merely using a word that doesn't mean what they think it means, like Vizzini in The Princess Bride,[3] this is about using a definition, or claimed definition, to actually prove a point.
However, this is fallacious because a dictionary doesn't actually prove anything. If someone is using a "wrong" word, all they're really doing is using a word in a way that few other people also use. There are good reasons to avoid this, of course, as good and clear communications requires Person A to know what "flibbertygibbit" means when they say it and for Person B to think of (within experimental error) the exact same thing when they hear it. If the two disagree, then the two just disagree on the definition of "flibbertygibbit", and nothing else.
A quick and dirty thought experiment
Consider the following (intentionally absurd) thought experiment to show how dictionaries don't really prove or change anything in reality. Suppose Alice and Bob are sat down having coffee. After a quick chat over stock prices, they descend into an argument. Alice, annoyed with Bob, decides to play a hilarious prank. Leaving the room she immediately runs to the dictionary on the book shelf. Finding the word "coffee", she scribbles out "beverage made by percolation, infusion, or decoction from the roasted and ground seeds of a coffee plant"[4] and replaces it with "a slimy sticky mixture of solid material with a liquid and especially water; especially : soft wet earth". Not content that the joke has been played to its full potential, she leaves and runs to the head of Merriam-Webster, then the OED and then finally to Wiktionary itself - and by the powers of magic changes every definition of "coffee" in every dictionary on the planet. Alice then returns the argument and Bob takes another drink.
So, what does Bob taste? A "beverage made by percolation, infusion, or decoction from the roasted and ground seeds of a coffee plant" or some "slimy sticky mixture of solid material with water"?
The answer is obviously "beverage from roasted seeds of the coffee plant" and not muddy water, but every argumentum ad dictionarium suggests that somehow the change in definition can somehow affect the reality. It's only because that this example is absurdly literal enough to show it clearly. More subtle examples can mask the fallacy.
Examples
Sound
An old philosophical problem reads "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?". While this has multiple interpretations, including a more general "does something really exist if we're not around to experience it?", it's most often taken as a bizarre nonsense argument about the definition of "sound". If Alice says "it does make a sound because sound is waves created by the impact" and Bob says "it doesn't make a sound because sound is only 'sound' when it's processed by ears" both would be right, in a way, but both would most likely interpret it as a disagreement and argue over this definition of "sound" until Alice got annoyed and tried to metaphysically poison Bob's coffee again. The actual facts, that a tree falls, the energy dissipates into the air, the ground shakes, and shockwaves travel outwards, are the same in both cases. Hence, the supposed disagreement, and the apparent dichotomy and paradox of the original question, are illusions.
Even the more general philosophical idea of whether something exists if we don't directly observe it happening does almost the exact same thing with the word "exists". Finding a tree lying in a forest, surrounded by disturbed leaves and broken branches, we can make some reasonable inferences about how it got there, and the fact that it really is lying there can't be readily disputed. Whether or not the event "actually happened" relies not on clever philosophy, but on linguistic trickery over the definition of "actually happened".
Atheism
Is atheism a belief that God does not exist or a lack of a belief that God does not exist? This one actually popped up on RationalWiki in a very literal way,[5] but is a reflection of countless other internet arguments. Whatever the "definition", it will not change peoples beliefs and attitudes. Changing the definition of "atheist" to "one who believes in God" isn't going to fill the pews in church. Most commonly, atheism is defined as either of those ideas, and the concepts of strong atheism and weak atheism were developed to accommodate it. "Defining" atheism as one or the other would, at best, leave a lot of people without a word to describe themselves.
Of course, it gets slightly more interesting when, as with the tree/sound example, the question is not answered but dissolved. A belief in no God and no belief in God are semantically identical, because presented with a hypothetical object that possesses all the qualities associated with "God" and asked the question "do you think this is a real thing?" both strong and weak atheists would answer the same way. A more useful distinction is explicit atheism and implicit atheism.
See also
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ It depends...
- ↑ Less Wrong - Disputing Definitions
- ↑ Vizzini: He Didn't fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. [1] - ↑ Let's go to Merriam-Webster's. They make good lattes!
- ↑ Atheism is the belief that God does not exist.