I'm curious why you raise this question only with respect to the Koran--and not with respect to other sacred literatures (or perhaps you have them all in mind). I'm no expert on the Koran but I am pretty sure that, first, your question has a false dichotomy: "interpretation" is a matter of determining the meaning of a text (or of a speaker), and sometimes the meaning you settle on is what might be called a literal one, so interpretation CAN itself be literal in nature. Presumably what you have in mind then is a different contrast--between metaphorical or symbolical interpretation v literal interpretation. But even there I would imagine (said without claim of expertise) that the Koran is filled with much symbolic/metaphorical language, not least because ordinary (non-sacred) speech is itself filled with such; it's rather hard to imagine a text in which every single sentence is possessed (or meant to possess) only literal meaning. THAT said, perhaps your question is actually a little different, something on...

One of my biggest pet peeves, it drives me crazy! I don't know how feasible it is to develop new expressions etc., but we might consider this: when speaking to philosophers we can use the original latin term for the fallacy, petitio principi, and when speaking to the general public, use the term the way it's widely used. (When in Rome, speak as the Romans ....) This is painful to do for most philosophers, I imagine, but just slightly less painful than using the term properly and then either being widely misunderstood or taken by others to sound either arrogant or like an idiot ..... the worrisome thing is that so many who misuse the term in public discourse are educated, opinion-shapers, including journalists, politicians -- who (one would hope) might have taken some philosophy in college and should know better ..... but changing that practice (I think, sadly) is probably a losing proposition. which begs the question: how should one use the expression 'begs the question'.... :-) hope that's useful. ...

This is a first-rate question, if a little complicated, and deserves a longer (first-rate) answer. But it's Thanksgiving so I have to be brief! First your point about the dictionary is quite fascinating. I'm pretty sure Wittgenstein (and maybe Augustine) made roughly similar or closely related observations -- but partly in service of recognizing that ultimately for language/meaning to work we must connect (some) words not merely to other words but to 'reality' (or at least our perceptions thereof) -- we have some 'ostensive' definitions whereby we assign the meaning of a word by relating it directly to some object or object of perception ... (Not that that is problem-free itself, but it attempts to break the cycle of words-words definitions). Second, I'm not entirely clear on the analogy you make between the definition case and that of physical laws (and not clear whether the point I just made about ostensive definitions would apply in some analogous way to the laws). But apart from the analogy I can say...

I'm no expert here, but my recollection is that Kripke reminds us/warns us to avoid the following picture: that we somehow glance into all the many possible worlds and have the task of figuring out which items, in those worlds, are designated by our terms. That would be impossible (for more reasons than one!), not least of all for this reason: suppose there's a possible world where Fred (a dark-haired man in the actual world) is a red-haired woman (and differs in many other traits from actual Fred too). How could we possible look at that red-haired woman (etc) and say, "Oh look there's possible Fred!" The whole point of these "possible variations" on Fred would obscure the possibility of identifying Fred by any of his (her) properties in those other worlds ... Rather, Kripke says, we stipulate possible worlds: we have whatever intuitions we have re: what's possible and we get to stipulate that we are speaking of that world which varies from this world in such and such respects. So if we believe it...

Suppose we individuate concepts by "reference," so two mental states/thoughts are identical if they are about the same things, otherwise different. If (arguably) one twin's thoughts 'refer to' H2O and the other's 'refer to' XYZ, then they would count as different thoughts or concepts. What you are merely presuming is that the notion of 'concept' should be narrowly individuated (ie defined only in terms of what's 'in the head', so the two twins shoudl have the same concept). But that is the very thing that is explicitly being debated in the classic papers by Putnam, Burge, and all the rest ....! best, ap

Great question. I would think, though, that the onus would be on the skeptic raising the question to give solid reasons why communication would NOT be possible. Already on earth we find different cultures with different languages, different "habits," different ways of thinking and ethics, and in fact even different 'types of logic' apparently (or so some cultural psychologists have argued at various points). But why should that make some form of communication impossible? True, the process of translating between such languages might be more complicated than it would be if more were shared; and true, more miscommunication might well occur during the translations, due to all sorts of pragmatic reasons. But that seems very far removed from holding a strong claim such as "communication is impossible." Absent such an explicit argument, and given the kind of counterevidence different earth cultures already present, I would have to go with a "yes" answer to your question! (By the way, Donald Davidson famously...

I haven't looked at the wikipedia article, but the view it expresses is VERY old-fashioned. Since Wittgenstein's "family resemblance" concept, and especially since cognitive scientists such as Eleanor Rosch's work in the 1970s, it's far more fashionable to think of concepts (and categories) as constituted not by "necessary and sufficient conditions" but by prototypes and similarity relations, far more befitting "fuzzier" concepts -- for example the way we think about "dogs" is not to generate an "essence" of necy/sufficient conditions, but by having in mind some prototypical dog at the center and then linking it to less familiar, less central, other examples ... This is far more in keeping with your nice suggestion, that what we seek (as I'd put it) are some "characteristic" properties of the paradigmatic members of the set, recognizing that other creatures may share these properties to various degrees and still count as members of the set in question ... So unless the wikipedia article was...

Great question, though I might worry that words like "useful" are about as vague as any of those in your examples, and thus your question may suffer from the same problems! ... I like your point that "the debate itself is informative" -- assuming that's true, which seems plausible, why couldn't that be "useful" enough? We learn an awful lot about our own concepts and beliefs when we grapple over what constitutes a person, or a work of art, or fairness ... So I'm a bit curious why, after recognizing that as a value for even these vague terms, you seem to demand something significantly more. Perhaps you would like these terms to take on refined and precise meanings like those in natural science, at least paradigmatically -- but then again, these terms DO often take on such precision, at least once they're in the hands of philosophers debating the issues. Bertrand Russell has a nice bit where he observes that if scientists are entitled to develop their own terminology and refine ordinary words to make...

Interesting question. But I'm wondering what rides on the answer. And what is connected to the question. Of course, we begin by wanting to distinguish the meanings of the two relevant clauses you give ("small rodent," v. "hand-held device"). So, separately, you obviously hold that there are two meanings in play. Now in logic it may be true that, strictly speaking, the proposition "P or Q" is a distinct proposition from either of its disjuncts, and can happily count as a "single" proposition -- but we also recognize that it is compositional, composed of parts, so we can think of it as one compound proposition or as a disjunction of two simpler propositions. But these are perfectly consistent with each other, so we can happily accept both -- it is both one compound, and a disjunction of two simpler, proposition(s). No need to choose! Why not just say the same with respect to your example? In any case you can raise the same question even of the component meanings in your example - your 'rodent'...

As with all excellent questions, this one is the tip of a very large iceberg! This one nicely ties in questions of meaning and truth, of literal v. metaphorical meaning, as well as of speaker-meaning v sentence-meaning. But rather than try to answer it here, why not simply observe that there's no reason not to treat it as "true", by common sense, just because of the equivocation in meaning -- for anyone who gets the pun involved will clearly understand that this sentence is a clever way of expressing the proposition 'Davis has an instrument and narwhals have a bony protrusion', which we have no reason not to think of as true. So since the sentence in its rather ordinary use, and context, with many people, expresses a true proposition, why not treat it as true? Meanwhile people who do NOT get the pun (for whatever reason) might understand this sentence to express the proposition 'Davis has a protrusion and narwhals have a protrusion', which they would take to be straightforwardly false (assuming...