Topics Language

Question Can you define 'own' without using another word for it, (belong, possess, etc.?) (And I mean 'own' as in possess, not in 'I can do it on my own.') 'Cause I know everyone sort of knows what it means and entails and whatever. But, what does it really mean to 'own' something? And how can you even 'own' something? (I unserstand it's an abstract idea.)

Accepted:
July 11, 2006

Comments

I reply only to: "Can you define 'own' without using another word for it (belong, possess, etc.)?" Make the question more general. Can we define "X" without using other words W, Y, Z , etc.? I often/usually define an "X" by using other words, W, Y, Z. Now, if you tell me that W, Y, and Z don't help you understand the original "X," or that I have not yet succeeded in defining "X," I might try to define W, Y, and Z -- using yet other words. We must avoid a circle, that is, eventually defining "X" in terms of "X" (say, were we to define Z in terms of A and then A in terms of X). Suppose that we define words only by using other words--this looks like a hermeneutic regress. Maybe there are words that are "self-defined" and so do not need to be defined by other words. Then we escape the regress. Are there any such words? Or maybe some words get defined not by words but in some other way--by pointing to the object named by the word (an ostensive or demonstrative defintion). Then we escape the regress. Must all definition (to avoid the regress of defining words by other words) end up with self-defined words or ostension? I don't know. Ostension doesn't work anyway! And how a word could define itself is beyond me. People to read on this: Williard van Orman Quine, Noam Chomsky, Ludwig Wittgenstein, maybe even Stanley Fish. The problem is how we can absolutely disambiguate linguistc entities. But can we? (See a review of a dictionary by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., in one of his collections of essays. He shows how words are defined in the dictionary in terms of each other, circularly. So how do we ever understand anything?)

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.

Let's suppose my general points are even slightly well-taken. Marks asks (1) whether rights are natural or (more positivistically) grounded, say, in social convention, and (2) whether (or when/if) a person has the right(s) about which he speaks. But he doesn't ask what a right is or what the word "right" means. As Vonnegut would say (and has said): "And so it goes." I'd like to know what the sentence "I have a right to decide the fate of X" means -- without (re)turning to "It's mine!" Maybe we should ask: which is more basic, analytically: ownership or rights?