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Question This seem like an odd question and perhaps misplaced on this site but I am interested none the less. I was thinking about the definition of a car. You see, I've brought this up in conversation before and people are usually arrogantly dismissive of it, and say something like “it has 4 wheels and an engine!”; then I inform them that they've just described cars, forklifts, tractors, some planes etc... Then they realize that any true definition would require much more eloquence. But this is where I am stuck, as any definition I can think of does not omit other non-car vehicles or does not include the myriad of car forms. The fact that what is a car is obvious to the observer is testimony to the fact that there is a working definition of it, and if we fail to find one then, to me at least, it suggests that there is some uniquely car trait that we have yet to quantify. I suppose the broader question this raises is are definitions meaningful anyway?

Accepted:
May 9, 2006

Comments

Most historians of philosophy agree that definitional questions were introduced as the special province of philosophy by Socrates, who asked them about virtue-terms, and thus invariably exposed the ignorance of his interlocutors. Socrates is also sometimes said to have committed "the Socratic fallacy," which is (roughly) the claim that unless you have knowledge of the definition, you can't know anything else about the thing to be defined, including that any instance of it really is an instance. Some very prominent scholars continue to think that Socrates believed in this kind of epistemological priority of definition, which your car example shows well would be a fallacy (if indeed Socrates held such a view, though I have argued in my published work that he did not).

Anyway, of course you can know that a certain Chevy Impala is a car, even if you don't know how to define "car." So definitional knowledge is plainly not epistemologically prior to our ability to know instances.

I am not going to try to help you to define "car" (hate to disappoint!), but want to raise a couple of issues that do pertain to your question. One such issue is whether there really is such a thing as "Car-ness" or the "uniquely car trait" you mention. Some philosophers (called nominalists) deny that there are such things as "essences"--such as the car-ness of cars, or the humanity of human beings (or, for that matter, the Nick-Smith-ness of me!). Others (called essentialists) think that at least some of the things in the world do have essences, but most essentialists would limit essences to things that naturally occur in the world ("natural kinds") and are more wary when it comes to artifacts (things made by human beings, mostly), such as cars. So it is possible that it would turn out that "car" cannot be absolutely defined, so as to include all and only instances (all past, present, and future ones) of cars. That would make the search for a definition, in this case, futile.

But if we grant that at least some things have essences, then the search for definitions can be useful as a mode of inquiry--a kind of research project. As the Socratic dialogues often show (have a look at Plato's Euthyphro, for one excellent example of this), such a search can not only reveal to us the inadequacy of our present understandings, it can also allow us, as we learn from our mistakes, do do better and better jobs of providing the relevant sort of analysis. I am not so sure this will be all that useful for "car" (though I can imagine the problem arising in a legal circumstance, where "cars" are required to pass certain emissions standards that are more exacting than those applying to other sorts of vehicles, and some manufacturer decides to by-pass the legislation by producing something very car-like, but which they argue is not really a car, and so should not be held to the same emissions standards as those that apply to cars.

But when it comes to ethical terms, such as those Socrates was most interested in, it seems that the search for adequate definitions really is helpful--because in ethics (and unlike most car-identification cases), it can sometimes be very difficult to judge whether something really is an example of "goodness" or "rightness," and if we could provide better and better definitions (or, as some would say, analyses) of such terms, we would be better and better able to make judgments in the tough cases.