“In my opinion, it’s a task in life to train oneself to speak as clearly as possible. This isn’t achieved by paying special attention to words. but by clearly formulating theses, so formulated as to be criticizable. People who speak too much about words or concepts or definitions don’t actually bring anything forward that makes a claim to truth. So you can’t do anything against it. A definition is a pure conventional matter.

There is an attitude here, which, in my opinion, is extremely ruinous for philosophy, namely, the attitude that expects that everyone be able to define the terms they use. “What do you mean by Justice?” for example. Usually, one doesn’t know how to define it. But does that mean you don’t know what justice is? So when, for example, someone says to define man, and one gives the answer: “Man is a featherless biped” or “a biped without feathers” or the other Aristotelian definition: “Man is a rational animal”. Do we know more about man? If we didn’t first know something of man, we won’t know after the definition either.

None of the definitions help. They certainly don’t help with clarity. They only lead to a pretentious, false precision, to the impression that one is particularly precise. But it’s a sham precision, it isn’t genuine clarity. For that reason, I’m against the discussion of terms and definitions. I’m rather for plain, clear speaking.”

— via @[100001751360876:2048:Craig Weinberg]