Given the focus on arguments that are alleged to be purely semantic, it would have been helpful to have a good example of such an argument. He describes the debate over abortion as a canonical example. The idea here seems to be that the debate over whether a foetus is 'alive' is a purely semantic dispute over the definition of the word 'life'. This strikes me as simply a mistake. It's certainly very difficult to have a sensible debate about abortion (and let's definitely not have one here!), but it's not plausible to characterize the disagreement between pro- and anti-abortion folks as a mere disagreement over the meanings of words. In the case of disagreements that are truly merely semantic, it's possible for each side to either (i) come to an agreement on terminology or (ii) agree that they disagree only about terminology.
Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.
Indeed. The disagreement over abortion is, roughly, whether killing a human fetus should ever be legal. The disagreement is hard to resolve because it’s not clear which principles to apply, so that arguments pro or con can take on a semantic flavor, but there’s nothing semantic about the underlying issue. (It might be that the author harbors some feeling that all ethical questions are merely semantic; this is putting a lot of weight on a distinction which became discredited in 1951).
I mean, I think there _is_ some semantic debate, in that there are always semantic debates about what is life and what isn't on the edges (see the endless rather tedious argument about whether viruses, or, more esoterically, mitochondria, are life whenever anyone brings it up), but it's largely irrelevant to the actual question.
I actually agree, and have thought so for a long time, that the discussion about abortion is very much about the meaning of the term life.
One side is convinced that a human life starts at the conception. And if you think that, it is very simple: Abortion is taking a human life, i.e., killing a person. Then nothing else matters. We can bring up all social, economic, feminist, psychological, health, etc. arguments in the world, all in vain. We all agree that we don't go around and kill people, so if you think that life starts at the conception, there's nothing more to argue about.
So in this case, we disagree only about meaning. The only way to have fruitful discussion would be to talk about what we mean by a human life. Then I'm not sure that is possible when one side's main argument is "the Bible says so". But there's nothing inconsistent or contradictory that could be resolved between the premises "a human life starts at conception" and "taking a human life is always wrong", and the conclusion "abortion is wrong".
> We all agree that we don't go around and kill people
Well, except for the police.
(Flippant comment, but the number of people who think abortion should be illegal under all circumstances but also that the police should never face any consequences for killing someone, no matter how gratuitously, is astonishing)
I tried to keep the argument short, so I did simplify a bit, but in practice there are certainly many exceptions which I won't bring up here to not start a completely other discussion.
You're then talking about 'meaning' in a deeper sense than just the arbitrary definitions of words, so it's no longer a purely semantic dispute. (Note that the author characterizes semantic disputes as disputes over arbitrary definitions.)
I reread the relevant parts of the text again, and I don't find anything that supports that the author meant anything else with "semantics" than I do. Semantics is about "meaning", not only on a superficial level.
"Semantic arguments are particularly insidious. Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary (unless the actual argument is about language). The worst thing you can do is to have an argument in which you talk past each other because you each have a different idea about what the words mean."
It doesn't make sense to dismiss an argument as merely semantic if you are talking about something more than just arbitrary definitions. In many cases, pro- and anti-abortion people have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins. This isn't merely a disagreement about how to define a particular word. You can, if you want to, characterize it as a dispute about what it 'means' for something to be alive, but that's a much deeper issue than a mere semantic quibble. (The debate can't, for example, be resolved by introducing two new terms alive* and alive†, with both sides of the debate agreeing that a foetus is alive* but not alive†.)
But the author's point was that arguments shouldn't be dismissed as merely semantics, but that semantic questions are important and has to be resolved for it to be meaningful discussion.
Yes, the different sides have a genuine disagreement about the point at which life begins, but that is because they mean different things when they say that something is alive.
So this discussion is becomming a bit too meta, but now we are discussing meaning of the term semantics. Considering that the author himself took up the discussion about abortion as an example of something that is "purely a semantic one", I'm convinced that he meant the same thing as I do when he used the term semantic.
The article says the following. "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."
So the author does seem to be saying that the whole abortion debate is purely a debate over arbitrary definitions, not merely that it's important to clear up semantic issues before getting into the meat of the debate.
If the issue were purely semantic, it would be possible to resolve the debate simply by introducing unambigious terminology agreed on by both sides (e.g. using 'alive*' and 'alive†' rather than 'alive'). If this doesn't satisfy both sides, then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself. Informally we can say that they disagree over what it means to be alive. But philosophically it's important to be clear that this isn't just a semantic issue about the meaning of a particular word.
Another way to bring this out is to think cross-linguistically. Do we really have to have the abortion debate over again for every one of the world's ~6500 languages and their corresponding words for 'life'? I think not, because at heart the debate isn't a debate over word meaning.
> "Trained logicians should know that semantic meaning is arbitrary...Abortion is the canonical example of [a semantic] argument: once you have decided what 'life' is, there’s really not much else to discuss. It’s not a political argument, not even in theory. It’s purely a semantic one."
Which is quite much exactly what I said.
That a definition is arbitrary doesn't mean that it is unimportant. If I use one arbitrary definition, and you another one, we won't have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes this can be resolved, when the definitions themselves aren't the central issue and we can agree about at least some provisional defintions. Sometimes the definition itself is the central issue, and can't be resolved. Like when we disagree about the meaning of the term life. In this case, any provisional definitions won't help.
> then they aren't really disagreeing over the meaning of the word 'life', they're disagreeing over the nature or essence of life itself
Those two things are the the same. What is the meaning of a word other than the "nature or essense" of the thing it references?
>Those two things are the the same. What is the meaning of a word other than the "nature or essense" of the thing it references?
This is actually a vexed question in linguistics and the philosophy of language. I don’t want to get into it here, but the answer to your question is not in any way uncontroversial or obvious.
For me the idea that the root of the abortion debate is a disagreement over an arbitrary definition doesn’t compute, for the reasons I already gave. (Why not just introduce new words with commonly agreed definitions and be done with it?) But that discussion seems to be going round and round in circles.
Because introducing new words with commonly agreed definitions won't help. It would go like this:
life_prolife = life begins at the conception.
life_prochoice = life begins at week 20 of the pregnancy (as an overly simplified example for the sake of argument).
Pro life: it is wrong to kill anything that has life_prolife.
Pro choice: no, it is only wrong to kill anything that has life_prochoice. It is, at least under some circumstances, ok to kill something that has life_prolife but not life_prochoice.
So of course we haven't resolved anything (which I think is your point). Rather, we have moved the discussion to which definition is the one that is relevant to use when we discuss the sanctity of life. And that is a discussion about semantics.
Perhaps the broader issue here is that everyone loves to tell themselves they're leaving a community because they're too good for it, rather than just admitting that's it's become bad for their mental health to get involved in frequent anonymous arguments on the internet.