The meaning of ‘is’

When pressed in court about his affair with Monica Lewinsky, former President Bill Clinton used evasive tactics and dodged as many questions as he could. Unfortunately for him, he got a bit carried away, and, when asked a direct question about his affair, Clinton answered famously:

“It depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.”

As absurd as it was at the time, Clinton brings up an interesting philosophical point. Like money, language is not an absolute: it only has meaning in relation to human beings. In other words, words only have meaning because we, the human population, choose to give them meaning.

The best way to illustrate this is to use the example of a children’s book, Frindle. In this story, the main character realizes that he can make words mean whatever he wants them to. He then decides to call a pen a “frindle” from then on, and he enlists others to do the same. Eventually the new word spreads all over the world, and it eventually becomes listed in the dictionary.

This puts the concepts of “connotation” and “denotation” in a new light. By convention, a word’s denotation is the word’s literary definition, and its connotation is its implied or slang meaning. But this is only because our dictionaries are not flexible and they are slow to adapt when the connotation of a word changes. However, this becomes somewhat give-and-take since we rely on our dictionaries to clarify the meaning of a word for us.

This is also an argument for an international auxiliary constructed language. Since many languages, especially English, have become dominated by connotative slang, idioms, and other misleading aspects, the language barrier is often more potent than we think. However, a language like Zamenhof’s Esperanto would be just as prone to slang and idioms as any other language, which greatly defeats its purpose. But logical languages, such as Lojban, are structured in such a way that idioms and slang are almost impossible, which is another reason I believe Lojban is a good candidate for an international language.

This also relates to an argument I brought up in my very first post on this blog (all the way at the bottom of the page), in which I viciously attacked many aspects of a paper by the philosopher George E. Moore. Moore states at one point that he is not going to define the terms he is using because they are "common sense." However, this is a completely unjustified assumption, since the meanings of words change all the time, and when writing a philosophical paper it is important to be precise. 

But what does all this mean for poor old Bill Clinton? Absolutely nothing. In any court, a certain level of common sense is assumed, and I doubt the Supreme Court would tolerate Clinton’s semantic nitpicking.

Tomorrow: Law and order, part 5