Hello Noah!

Right back from the early ancient Greek philosophers, people have wondered about questions like yours. What things are due to the nature of the world? What things are due to decisions by people? It's a good sort of question.

For example, it seems to be a law of nature that heavy things drop to the ground when you let go of them (nothing we can do about that!). But it is due to a rule we've made up that people in your country drive on the right (or the left, whichever it is). People could decide to change the driving rule -- as people in Sweden did some years ago.

So: it doesn't matter what people choose or want or decide: heavy things fall. It does matter what people choose or want or decide to do when it comes to the rule about driving. Other cases are less obvious. What makes stealing wrong? Is it like the heavy-things-fall case, i.e. is stealing wrong whatever people think? Or is it more like the driving-on-the-right case, so that stealing is counted as wrong because people have just decided on that rule? (There's a philosophical question for you!)

What about your case? Well, it seems that the use of the sound "book" (rather than "livre" or "jegyzetfüzet") to pick out books is more like the driving-on-the-right case. Different communities drive on different sides of the road: different communities use different words for the same thing. It's a matter of "convention" either case. There's no "right" side to drive, it's just that people round here have the practice of driving on the right. There's no "right" word for books, other than what people round here conventionally call them. But who knows what accidents of history made communities use a sound like "book" for books? We can't trace things back far enough really to know. (You can probably think of cases of nicknames or private words among your friends which seemed to get started and stick around: often it is a bit mysterious how things get started!)

I hope that helps!

If setting the meaning of words always required sticking within the circle of language, we'd be stuck. At some point, someone said "Let's call this day 'Monday'." (This is fictional history, but something like this happened.) It's a bit like my parents saying "Let's call this child 'Allen'."

In general, to get words to stick to things, we need some way of getting outside the circle of words, and pointing, indicating, stipulating, etc. are ways of doing that.

That a question begins from making false or impossible presuppositions does not keep us from understanding the question or responding to it with the correct (i.e., true) answer. After all, we know that I am alive today, yet we can reasonably assert things like "Had I been hit by a car while crossing the street yesterday, then I might well not have been alive today." We know what would count as evidence for this assertion (for example, facts about my anatomy, the speed of cars on the street, etc.). The fact that I was not, in fact, hit by a car while crossing the street yesterday does not prevent us from having justified beliefs about what would have happened, had I been hit by a car.

Of course, it was *possible* for me to have been hit by a car. But it wasn't possible for Fermat's Last Theorem (a certain theorem about numbers that has recently been proved) to have been false. Long before this theorem was proved, mathematicians widely believed it to be true, since no one had ever found a counterexample to it, despite having checked (by computer) millions upon millions of numbers to see if it held of them. Accordingly, we can reasonably say that had someone discovered a counterexample to Fermat's last theorem, then mathematicians would have been astonished. Now of course, such a discovery is (we now know) impossible. Nevertheless, that doesn't keep us from having good evidence that had such a discovery been made in the years before Fermat's Last Theorem had been proved, mathematicians would have been very surprised.

The examples that I have just given do not concern morality. Your example does. But the point I am making is that the fact that "the premise of the question is false/impossible" does not prevent us from having justified beliefs about what would have been the case, had that premise been true. In this respect, the case of morality is no different from the case of mathematics.

Good question. I have qualms about your claim that in societies lacking linguists and dictionaries, language is nothing more than our uses of words and our reactions to those uses by others. However, I think we can leave those qualms aside and assume this is correct. Even so, the aforementioned uses and reactions would not be possible unless the words and more complex expressions of which they're composed themselves possessed semantic value. Lacking that, utterances and inscriptions would perhaps have "expressive" value as some birdsong does, but it wouldn't mean anything beyond that. Let me illustrate this. Suppose I remark on the fact that you finally show up to a meeting on time by saying, "You're on time!" Here I've expressed surprise or delighted about your unexpected punctuality, but that pragmatic effect, which is not part of the literal meaning is my words, is only possible because of that literal meaning. If I had remarked on the redness of the carpet or the height of the clouds, that wouldn't have conveyed a suggestion about your punctuality. The upshot, then, seems to be that "use" is only possible in the context of established meaning, and that is semantics.

Both 'tri' and 'drei' mean "3", and both 'angle' and 'eck' mean, well, "angle", so on that basis, one can argue that your English and German words "mean the same". They also surely refer to the same geometrical objects, so on that basis they also "mean the same". On the other hand, it's not at all clear that any two expressions, even in the same language, "mean the same". There are usually subtle differences between them. Take for instance 'lawyer' and 'attorney'. Probably most native English speakers use these words as more or less synonymous, though they have clearly different etymologies and once had somewhat different shades of meaning that have largely, if not entirely, been lost. Their "distribution" in the language also differs: There are times one says 'lawyer' and times one says 'attorney', even though one would be hard put to explain why. But those differences might be enough to indicate a difference in meaning.

Getting back to 'triangle' and 'Dreieck', however, there's another way in which they do not mean the same: They are from different languages, hence stand in very different logical and semantic relations to other words of their respective languages. Insofar as these relations are considered to be part of their meaning, their meanings differ.

Words like 'express', 'concept', and 'meaning' are used by philosophers in ways that are closely related to, but distinct from, their ordinary uses, and each philosopher means something slightly different by them.

I guess that different philosophers adopt somewhat different usages here (it's one of those cases where you have to glean from someone's writings their preferred usage). It will be interesting to see what colleagues say. But speaking for myself, I think I use the word in two different ways.

(A) First, on my lips, since it's true that

(1) Barack is tall,

I'd be on for saying

(2) Barack instantiates the property of being tall.

Now, I treat properties as worldly items (part of the furniture of the world, so to speak), while concepts are ways of thinking of properties. In Fregean jargon: properties are in the realm of reference (what we think about), concepts are in the realm of sense (constituents of the thoughts we have about what objects have which properties). So, at least when I'm on my best behaviour, I'd not be too happy to say

(3) Barack instantiates the concept tall

since the relation that Barack (the man) has to tallness (the property) is different in type from the relation that Barack has to tall (the concept I use in thinking about tallness). So, to point up the difference, I'd rather say something like

(4) Barack falls under the concept tall

or

(5) The concept tall applies to Barack.

In this usage, then, "instantiating" a property is just being an instance of something that has the property. And there isn't an issue of especially "creating" an object to instantiate a property: Barack is there anyway, as large as life!

(B) In logic, though, there's a rather different usage, where we talk of instantiating a quantifier. Given e.g. the universal quantification (∀x)Fx, we talk of instantiating this to get a particular sentence like Fa. And I suppose we could say that, in a formal proof, we do "create" the instance as we write it down.

I think you have a real point here. Standard dictionary definitions don't simply "report" usage. Both philosophical and standard dictionary definitions "explain" (as you put it) or "interpret" (as I might put it) the meanings of words. And both the authors of standard dictionaries and philosophers may be reasonably described as advancing "arguments" for their interpretations. There are, of course, different methods of argument at play in the production of philosophical and standard dictionary definitions; and philosophers and the authors of standard dictionaries interpret words in different ways, in the light of different audiences and different histories. In short, the contexts of usage with which philosophical definitions and standard dictionary definitions are concerned is generally different (though sometimes overlapping). The word, "valid," for example, is used differently and means something different in the contexts of ordinary conversation and the formal language of deductive logic. Commonly people speak of someone making a "valid point," while that usage would be incoherent in the philosophical context of deductive logic. Words like "essence," "nature," "intuition," "form," and "substance" also mean something quite different in philosophical contexts from the contexts of ordinary language. Often the difference in meaning/usage has to do with the history of theory that has built up in the philosophical community that has elaborated the meaning of certain words. The weight of that history pushes usage in directions that diverge from common usage. Note, in this regard, that even the meaning and use of the word "definition" is likely to be different in philosophical and ordinary contexts. But since philosophy has affected and continues to affect common usage (and common usage has affected and continues to affect philosophy) the usages are in many cases not entirely unrelated, and we should not expect that they will be entirely unrelated.

Thanks for your question. I agree that it's unlikely that the remark concerns the bad guy's moral duty. In lieu of a fuller description of the case, my guess about a reasonable gloss of that remark would be: it would have been in the bad guy's *interest* to kill him when he had the chance.

Note that something can be in a person's interest even if it is immoral. For instance, it's in a sadist's interest to control and torture people, given his desires; that is of course compatible with the fact that it is immoral for him to control and torture people. Philosophers like to distinguish between prudential and moral norms, where the former have to do with a person's interests, whatever they may be. So it's prudent for the sadist to torture, even if it's wrong for him to do so.

One other thing to keep in mind, I suggest, is that cases like these, even when represented in film, can be awfully complex, and good movies often bring a lot of moral ambiguity to the table. As a result, it is not always clear who the good guys and bad guys are, and even when it is, it might still seem like the good guys have their flaws and the bad guys their virtues. As a result, the situation you imagine *might* be one in which the good guy is making not just a prudential, but also a moral claim. We just don't know for sure until we think more about the details of the case.

Mitch Green

Following Kant, we might distinguish hypothetical imperatives from categorical imperatives to answer your question. Hypothetical imperatives tell us what we should do given our aims. Categorical imperatives tell us what we should do, full-stop, regardless of our aims. Moral imperatives (our moral duties) are taken to be categorical imperatives, and they can be expressed using "should": You should not murder, you should not lie, you should show compassion to others, etc. But hypothetical imperatives can also be expressed using "should". If we're talking to someone who wants to go to law school, we might say, "You should take the LSAT." If we're talking to someone who wants a good challenge, we might say, "You should read some Kant." If we're talking to someone who wants to be a model, we might say "You should get plastic surgery." If we're talking to someone who wants to commit murder quietly to avoid getting caught, we might say, "You should use poison." None of these "should" statements are reflective of moral duties.

Your case from the movie is a perfect example of a hypothetical imperative. Given the aim of the bad guy--namely, to defeat the good guy--he should have killed him earlier, while he had the chance.

Most concepts get their meaning, at least in part, from their relations to other concepts. The concept of a contract, for example, gets its meaning from its relations to other concepts such as the concept of a promise, the concept of an obligation, the concept of a free agent, and so on. Likewise, the concept of the number two, and the concept of addition, get their meanings from their relations to the concepts of other numbers and other mathematical functions. So understanding what a concept means seems to depend on understanding how it relates to certain other concepts.

We can be a competent user of a concept, using it appropriately in relation to other concepts, without being able to explain our usage to someone else -- at least not easily, and without extensive prompting. You might be able to enter into contracts, and to do mathematics, for example, without being able to explain what you are doing. In these cases, you have knowledge that you have difficulty explaining. Whether you really understand what you know is not so clear, however; it seems more like knowing how to ride a bicycle without understanding what you are doing. Understanding as opposed to knowledge, then, does seems to require an explicit awareness of the the relevant relations between concepts -- an awareness that also makes it possible to explain one's concepts to others.