Alan Soble's general points about definition are well taken. However, here's a start to defining own in other terms: To own an item is to have the right, perhaps within limitations, to decide its fate. This leaves it open that ownership might be a natural relation or a socially constructed one, depending on whether the rights constitutive of ownership are natural or socially constructed. It also leaves it open in what circumstances one has such rights.

Well, there's a panel of very wise elders who meet in an oaken room in their black robes and officially confer meaning on words. At least, that's the idea you'd get the way some people talk about "correct" meanings, as they bemoan the fact that most people nowadays use the "wrong" ones. Linguists find this funny, because really words mean what people use them to mean. The linguistic-correctness freak wrongly takes the meaning-makers to be fussy usage manuals and outdated dictionaries, when the real tribunal is ordinary use. So "meat" comes to mean edible flesh rather than food in general not because of a dictionary change but because of a shift in ordinary usage. Dictionaries respond to changes in usage; they don't mandate them. How exactly does ordinary use manage to create linguistic meaning? The philosopher Paul Grice developed a very influential answer to this question. His idea is that the fundamental kind of "meaning" isn't linguistic meaning, but communicative meaning. A...

Yes and no. But seriously, now. First, a "conjunction" (an and sentence) might have a true part and a false part: "2 > 1 and 7 > 9". But the usual view of logicians is that a sentence like that is simply false despite having a true conjunct: its truth requires precisely that both conjuncts be true, which is simply not the case. Similarly for "all natural numbers are either less than or greater than 3"---it's simply false, even if there's only one exception among the infinitely many natural numbers. Second, a sentence can be ambiguous, and true on one way of understanding it, but not on another. "Bill Gates contributes generously to charities," for example, might be true if by "giving generously" we mean "giving a great deal of money" but false if we mean "giving so much as to make for a significant sacrifice on the part of the giver". I suppose that if we use this sentence without intending one of those meanings rather than the other---so that it remains ambiguous---it might...