Pensive wrote:
I don't want to make people angry when they do it on the forums so I just mention something like "dictionaries are not valid in arguments guys" and continue on.
S'funny, I don't recall you ever saying this or anything similar to this on this site. And I know you've been involved in threads in which people have pulled out definitions to support their positions. I don't mean that as an attack. I honestly don't recall you ever doing this.
I get exactly what you're saying though. I prefer to derive meanings based on rational analysis rather than just rushing off to a presumed authority to see what it tells me. And let me be clear. Obviously, dictionaries are useful for words for which the meaning is not in dispute. No one argues about what "re-iterate", or "cat" means. The issue comes about when the very meaning of a word, or how that word applies to the society as a whole (in this case legally) is itself in question.
It's in those areas though, that I have seen a pretty obvious pattern. I have often been in debates where the real underlying question is one of definition and semantics. Where the use of a particular word carries weight, but the meaning of that word in the given context is in dispute. The issue of gay marriage is one. Arguments about things like liberty, equality, and freedom are others. I recall specifically a thread in which someone insisted that being reliant on the government for financial support gave freedom to the person receiving it because they were "free" from the worry of having to work. I most certainly did not agree with the use of the word, but I didn't turn to a dictionary. I walked through a philosophical process of defining what freedom meant, and how being reliant on someone else for your wellbeing, not only didn't provide one with freedom, but arguably reduced it.
The point is that there seems to be a political methodology that revolves around redefining the meaning of words, and then applying them retroactively to statements or beliefs about those words which did not initially include them. That's why I get flack for using "old" meanings. Well. When we as a society adopted the ideas of freedom and liberty, we adopted those things in the context of the meaning those words had at that time. To use those words in completely different ways, but insist that the same sense of importance be placed on them, is utter nonsense. Yet, that formulation is incredibly common in political arguments.
And it's present in the gay marriage debate. The status and importance of marriage, and the degree to which we as a society have provided benefits to those who enter into it, is predicated on a specific "old" meaning of marriage. All those benefits and status were created based on an assumed and commonly understood meaning. If you change the meaning when you use the word, then the associated things with that meaning should change as well. But what we're seeing is people insisting that it's ok to change one, but not the other.
It would be like if we passed a law saying it was ok to have cats as pets, but not alligators, and then the pro-alligator-pet lobby decided to change the definition of cat to include alligators in order to make it legal for alligators to be pets. It would not be wrong for people who think there's a reasonable reason why cats can be pets but not alligators to think that this is a pretty cheap and silly way to get around the laws. And they might suggest that we now would need to adjust our laws in order to reflect the fact that not all cats were ok to have as pets.
And they'd be right.
