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Definition, by Richard Robinson
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The purpose of this book is to clarify the concept of definition and improve defining activities.
- Sales Rank: #16248654 in Books
- Published on: 1968
- Binding: Unknown Binding
- 207 pages
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
DEFINITELY GOOD
By DAVID BRYSON
Robinson's 'Definition' dates from 1954. That places it after Ayer's Language Truth and Logic and Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, but before the published work of J L Austin and before the major works of the new school of moral philosophers, notably R M Hare author of The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason, who saw the terms used in moral philosophy as expressing evaluations rather than as describing objects.
This was the heyday of the Oxford school of linguistic philosophers. It may be an unfashionable view, but I see their approach as valuable and important. Ayer had argued, for instance, that one does not actually see or hear things but only receives sense-data (Russell's 'sensibilia') of them, and that pure logic should be rigorously independent of human psychology. This kind of thing could not go on, and Austin, author of Sense and Sensibilia, was the stylish leading advocate of a view that asserted that the ordinary terms of human speech were philosophically legitimate. Austin was also the author of How To Do Things With Words, and I don't deny that that much of the philosophical writing of the time was clever-clever rather than significant in playing games with verbal expressions, but its real value in stripping out solemn and unnecessary abstraction remains. Where Robinson is admirably level-headed is in ignoring the aspects of the fashion that were fashionably trivial, in refusing to toy with words and in subjecting his contemporaries to the same detached analysis that he brings to Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant and the rest of them. I had personal experience of both Ayer and Robinson, and in comparison with the frothy velocity of Ayer the slow and taciturn Robinson could seem a bit of an old cart-horse. In terms of lasting significance it all reads very differently to me now. Ayer said the truth at the end of a TV interview in which he was asked how his doctrines had stood the test of time. 'Oh, they're wrong' he said.
Robinson explores definition along two axes. One is the simple distinction between informative and stipulative definition, a stipulative definition being one that legislates its own meaning, such as that i is to mean the square root of -1. However the main structure of the book is around the three issues of when we are defining words or other symbols, when definition consists of relating the symbols to the things symbolised, and when - if ever - a definition can be said to define things directly. Robinson is fully aware that language is an unstable and changing thing, and he is rather conservative in stigmatising certain uses of the word 'definition' even 50 years ago as being bad and slipshod expression. He loosens his logical corsets a little at this point and some of his prejudices, e.g. against the word 'psychoanalysis', have nothing to say to us now and are not central to his argument anyway. It seems to me that the word 'definition' has got out of the corral these days. We talk about 'defining features' in someone's life without implying that these features distinguish the person's life from everyone else's, and I see nothing wrong with that. In fact I would have liked Robinson to deal a bit more with the issue of when a definition may be partial rather than exhaustive. Robinson would probably have viewed it as wrong to 'define' a lion as a feline, as this does not distinguish it from a tiger or a bobcat. On the other hand I'd say that putting a lion as opposed to a hyena into the category of felines can reasonably, as a matter of accepted usage, be called defining it as a feline. At worst his severity is a good fault, far better than the opposite tendency, but I feel it gets out of hand in his special use of 'names' whereby someone's surname does not qualify for the term 'name'. In general I have some difficulty with his view that it is impossible to define individuals, on the grounds that it is impossible to discover characteristics that any individual does not share with someone else. He concedes that a synthetic definition, e.g. 'Julius Caesar is the author of the Gallic Wars' is possible, but not an analytic definition. To define Julius Caesar by his parentage and the dates, times and places of his birth and death would surely do the trick, even before DNA came to our aid, although it would not have helped anyone recognise Julius Caesar when he met him.
What is really impressive about this book is its author's refusal to be impressed. He is in no way polemical, but his concentration rarely or never lapses, and there are a couple of memorable sideswipes at Ayer and at Kant's notorious use of '7 + 5 = 12' as a specimen of a synthetic proposition, Robinson regarding it as a mere abbreviation. I think he describes the work somewhere near the start as being for the general reader. I won't actually quarrel with that, so lucid is the reasoning and its exposition, although he ought to have given a translation for the bit of medical Latin that he pillories at one point. This purports to be a definition of (I think) motor neurones, which it seeks to define by their colour, texture and proximity to one another. He was fully up to speed with the work of his contemporaries, and when he says that 'good' describes next to nothing he was clearly on the wavelength of Hare and co before they published a word. One of his examples has always left me uneasy, namely Aristotle's supposed 'definition' of what is translated as 'happiness'. Robinson accepts the standard translation 'happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue', but says briskly that this only purports to be a definition and is actually talking about the way to achieve happiness, not about happiness itself. I'm sure he's probably right, but I can never get it out of my head that the alleged 'activity' (energeia) is a seeming coinage, and that 'eudaimonia' usually means acceptability to the gods. There are perfectly good Greek words for 'happiness' and 'activity' if he had wanted to talk about those, and I sometimes wonder (although I wouldn't dare suggest to the learned) whether this passage is not about being true to our proper selves - something like 'well-being is the spirit's life in action according to its proper talent'. This would make it a genuine definition, just not the usual one.
Obviously this is not a book for everyone. For those whom it's for it is a very fine and helpful piece of work indeed.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
DEFINITELY GOOD
By DAVID BRYSON
Robinson's `Definition' dates from 1954. That places it after Ayer's Language Truth and Logic and Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, but before the published work of J L Austin and before the major works of the new school of moral philosophers, notably R M Hare author of The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason, who saw the terms used in moral philosophy as expressing evaluations rather than as describing objects.
This was the heyday of the Oxford school of linguistic philosophers. It may be an unfashionable view, but I see their approach as valuable and important. Ayer had argued, for instance, that one does not actually see or hear things but only receives sense-data (Russell's `sensibilia') of them, and that pure logic should be rigorously independent of human psychology. This kind of thing could not go on, and Austin, author of Sense and Sensibilia, was the stylish leading advocate of a view that asserted that the ordinary terms of human speech were philosophically legitimate. Austin was also the author of How To Do Things With Words, and I don't deny that that much of the philosophical writing of the time was clever-clever rather than significant in playing games with verbal expressions, but its real value in stripping out solemn and unnecessary abstraction remains. Where Robinson is admirably level-headed is in ignoring the aspects of the fashion that were fashionably trivial, in refusing to toy with words and in subjecting his contemporaries to the same detached analysis that he brings to Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Kant and the rest of them. I had personal experience of both Ayer and Robinson, and in comparison with the frothy velocity of Ayer the slow and taciturn Robinson could seem a bit of an old cart-horse. In terms of lasting significance it all reads very differently to me now. Ayer said the truth at the end of a TV interview in which he was asked how his doctrines had stood the test of time. `Oh, they're wrong' he said.
Robinson explores definition along two axes. One is the simple distinction between informative and stipulative definition, a stipulative definition being one that legislates its own meaning, such as that i is to mean the square root of -1. However the main structure of the book is around the three issues of when we are defining words or other symbols, when definition consists of relating the symbols to the things symbolised, and when - if ever - a definition can be said to define things directly. Robinson is fully aware that language is an unstable and changing thing, and he is rather conservative in stigmatising certain uses of the word `definition' even 50 years ago as being bad and slipshod expression. He loosens his logical corsets a little at this point and some of his prejudices, e.g. against the word `psychoanalysis', have nothing to say to us now and are not central to his argument anyway. It seems to me that the word `definition' has got out of the corral these days. We talk about `defining features' in someone's life without implying that these features distinguish the person's life from everyone else's, and I see nothing wrong with that. In fact I would have liked Robinson to deal a bit more with the issue of when a definition may be partial rather than exhaustive. Robinson would probably have viewed it as wrong to `define' a lion as a feline, as this does not distinguish it from a tiger or a bobcat. On the other hand I'd say that putting a lion as opposed to a hyena into the category of felines can reasonably, as a matter of accepted usage, be called defining it as a feline. At worst his severity is a good fault, far better than the opposite tendency, but I feel it gets out of hand in his special use of `names' whereby someone's surname does not qualify for the term `name'. In general I have some difficulty with his view that it is impossible to define individuals, on the grounds that it is impossible to discover characteristics that any individual does not share with someone else. He concedes that a synthetic definition, e.g. `Julius Caesar is the author of the Gallic Wars', is possible, but not an analytic definition. To define Julius Caesar by his parentage and the dates, times and places of his birth and death would surely do the trick, even before DNA came to our aid, although it would not have helped anyone recognise Julius Caesar when he met him.
What is really impressive about this book is its author's refusal to be impressed. He is in no way polemical, but his concentration rarely or never lapses, and there are a couple of memorable sideswipes at Ayer and at Kant's notorious use of `7 + 5 = 12' as a specimen of a synthetic proposition, Robinson regarding it as a mere abbreviation. I think he describes the work somewhere near the start as being for the general reader. I won't actually quarrel with that, so lucid is the reasoning and its exposition, although he ought to have given a translation for the bit of medical Latin that he pillories at one point. This purports to be a definition of (I think) motor neurones, which it seeks to define by their colour, texture and proximity to one another. He was fully up to speed with the work of his contemporaries, and when he says that `good' describes next to nothing he was clearly on the wavelength of Hare and co before they published a word. One of his examples has always left me uneasy, namely Aristotle's supposed `definition' of what is translated as `happiness'. Robinson accepts the standard translation `happiness is an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue', but says briskly that this only purports to be a definition and is actually talking about the way to achieve happiness, not about happiness itself. I'm sure he's probably right, but I can never get it out of my head that the alleged `activity' (energeia) is a seeming coinage, and that `eudaimonia' usually means acceptability to the gods. There are perfectly good Greek words for `happiness' and `activity' if he had wanted to talk about those, and I sometimes wonder (although I wouldn't dare suggest to the learned) whether this passage is not about being true to our proper selves - something like `well-being is the spirit's life in action according to its proper talent'. This would make it a genuine definition, just not the usual one.
Obviously this is not a book for everyone. For those whom it's for it is a very fine and helpful piece of work indeed.
2 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
"definition" the confused concept
By hadi rabiei
one of the chapters of this book is about "real definition".
Robinson believed that the notion of real definition is a confusion of at least twelve activities.some of these activities are legitimate and extremely valuable activities,but we shuld not call them "real definition", and some of them are wholly bad.
real definition as search for essence is a bad activity because it has some false premises.
I wrote a reaserch about real definition in islamic logicians attitudes and addapted it whit Robinson's book.
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