Topics Language

Question I remember reading a biography of George Orwell in which Orwell and A.J. Ayer met in a hotel in France and spent an evening together (in the hotel bar, I hasten to add). The biographer (with a literary background) described them whimsically as 'two men of near-genius'. Is the concept of genius pointless? If it depends who you ask, surely it is - John Lennon, Babe Ruth, Jackson Pollock, etc. and it can't simply be a question of aesthetics when applied to Newton or Aristotle, say. I reckon there are no criteria outside of a dictionary. How does philosophy deal with such vague terms? Thanks.

Accepted:
November 5, 2006

Comments

I wanted to respond to the suggestion in your question that if a term is vague it is thereby "pointless" -- that doesn't seem right to me. For example, although the term "bald" is vague -- we can't specify the precise number of hairs a person must have (or not have) to count as bald -- the term is by no means pointless. Perhaps there are some borderline cases where we don't know whether to call someone bald or not (Jason Alexander? Bald? Or just balding?). But that doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of clear cases: Howie Mandel, bald; Suri Cruise, not. [Aside: see here if you're concerned about bald babies.] And so the term "bald" is perfectly useful in everyday speech.

[Another aside: interestingly, Wikipedia lists Jason Alexander among their famous bald people, but I'd call him a borderline case. The entire list seems suspect to me, anyhow -- why is Matthew McConaughey on the list? But philosophers are well-represented: Foucault, Whitehead, and Wollheim all make the list.]

On your specific worries about the term "genius," I'm not sure what to say. But notice that the fact that people might disagree about whom to call genius does not mean that the term is bald. After all, when two people disagree, at least one of them might be wrong.

As for philosophy's use of vague terms -- I would simply note that philosophers typically aim in their work and their writing to avoid vagueness as much as possible and to achieve as much precision as possible in the terms that we do use.