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Question It seems that one characteristic of the present Western culture is redefining anything. The unborn has now been defined as a human being who is not a person. Marriage is no longer just between a man and a woman. Homosexuality is no longer a mental disorder. With all these redefinition, it is confusing whose testimony is to be believed. My question is: is there any correct criteria for defining anything, or is it simply the case that the definition of something depends on what people thought about it?

Accepted:
January 29, 2016

Comments

I do not believe that it is a

I do not believe that it is a "characteristic of the present Western culture" that it is in the habit of _redefining_ everything, as if that were some sort of local parlour game. The re-definitions come about because many people are making the claim that their own views about such things as marriage and the unborn _are_ the right ones. The reason is that Western culture has become a less traditional culture, so there is less automatic acceptance of the concepts that in the past would have been inherited from the previous generation, and not questioned, or not as much. But our experience has become more extreme and more troubling. I am thinking of reactions to the Great War, for example. How could anyone whole-heartedly accept the wisdom of the Establishment when just one battle (the Battle of the Somme) resulted in 1,250,000 casualties? War in the past had a kind of nobility; not so scientific and "total" wars.

"Whose testimony is to be believed?" It cannot be right to say that the definition of something depends on what people think about it, though of course this is more true of social things than say of mathematics. If my friends think that they wish to marry their left shoes, nothing in the world will persuade me that their wish should be incorporated into the law. Shoes are not sentient, and they do not have any sort of social relations, much less those implied by the institution of marriage. So here is some sort of a criterion, or a bit of one, at least, for such a case. There is nothing for it but to deploy rational argument and evidence and try to establish the correct criteria by those means. The shoe is not a social being, therefore etc. etc. One need not fear arguments that claim in reply that one is being anti-shoeist or enforcing a Gramscian hegemony or something, as that is just not the case. The "correct criteria" are simply those which tell us what the marks of the thing defined are, if the thing is indeed what it is said to be. If a marriage is defined as a three-sided closed plane figure, something has pretty obviously gone wrong. But when we get to the hot-button issues (abortion, for example) things get difficult very quickly. You have to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you. It is difficult to believe for example that homosexuality meets the criteria that are required for a "medical disorder". It hardly seems to be morbid, and one can go on from there. It is not really like e.g. bipolar disorder in this regard, leaving as it does the proper conduct of everyday life undisturbed.