I couldn't agree more! I spent most of my time studying philosophy in trying to unpick the precise meaning of every word. No one else seemed to recognise the scale of the problem, nor the fundamental impact it has in being able to talk meaningfully about
anything.
There I was, deconstructing language into cross-referenced spiders' webs and Venn diagrams of implied and inferred meaning, whilst other philosophy students were getting A grades for showing simple reading comprehension and parroting facile bullet points. It drove me nuts!
So I salute you for recognising this too! If everyone were as aware of the problems of language and meaning, SO MANY arguments could be avoided, and everyone could spend their time considering the fundamental issues.
Yet (as I have frustratingly discovered) humans are far less concerned with cold logical precision than they are with the vague emotional associations that words have.
The same words can be understood quite differently if they are read in an email, as opposed to face-to-face, when body language and intonation can be perceived. The Sophists in society (politicians, advertisers, con-men, etc.) exploit this with the art of rhetoric.
What are the formal definitions of the words "immigrant" and "ex-patriot"...? They mean the same thing. But their vernacular usage strongly attributes "negative" connotations to immigrant, but not the ex-patriot.
What is the distinction between Muslim and Moslem? Do you know for sure that the distinctions that
you make are the same as those made by other people?
Have you ever been asked, "
How much pain are you feeling on a scale of 1 to 10"? How can any concrete meaning be derived from that? How accurate is your definition of the word "pain"? How could you ever know that your experience of pain is
anything like someone else's experience? What about "love"?
What about when people say, "
You've got to be true to yourself." Logically, it's impossible to do anything that isn't "true to yourself" (if the phrase means anything at all). You are you; you do what you do! So, is this statement
completely devoid of meaning? If so, why do people say it? If not, what is the intended meaning? And (more importantly) what is the process by which you intuit an association between specific words and meanings?
You want to write yet another dictionary... which will take its place alongside thousands of the others? It's a noble venture, but I don't think it will result in the "definitive" clarity that we crave.
One concern with relying on a single, authoritative source of language is that it inhibits free thought. No dictionary, no matter how comprehensive, could define every word, nor fully explain every possible thought. In Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four the dystopian government was trying to control thought by reducing vocabulary in a way that reinforces the ideals of the regime.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Instead, it might be worth inventing new unambiguous words, and then explicitly defining them on your own terms. That way you can use them without anyone inadvertently mis-interpreting them according to any other dictionary or vernacular usage.
Of course, once you've created a word, it's "in the wild". Does the word "meme" really mean what its creator intended...?
No matter how hard you try, you really can't pin down precision on language, except by coming to an ad-hoc agreement of terms... And even then, lawyers make millions about the gaps and ambiguity in what people thought was "watertight".
But that misses the point. Why the "best of three", and not "best of five"? If we could analyse every modern standard English dictionary published, we wouldn't reach a consensus. Instead, we'd have some kind of statistical analysis of the
probability of meaning (as recorded by people with limited experience, who may be incorrect).
Dictionaries are not what define language; usage is. Dictionaries merely
record the way that words are typically used -- they're a secondary source, not a primary one. And they're based on what is considered (by random subjective persons) to be the standard form of the language.
Word meanings are imprecise. It's just how language works. The vast majority of the time, for society to function, we don't need to be accurate. If all you need to do is trade, pidgin may suffice. Pidgin languages can become so comprehensive, effective, and useful that they develop into creoles, sufficiently sophisticated to become the stable first-language of a people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patois
It's only when talking about complex, abstract, or academically specific fields in which standard language starts to let us down. This is why "terms of art" are created.
The word "weight" means something subtly different to the layperson than to a physicist. In everyday usage, the meaning is more-or-less interchangeable with mass (or at least mathematically proportional). But scientists don't always deal with the everyday.
The word "unlawful" means the same as "illegal" to a lay-person, but not to a lawyer (depending on jurisdiction). A standard dictionary won't even
mention the distinction between such terms.
Yep! Me too! But it's a much more difficult task than first meets the eye.
You might find this wiki entry interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_language
