Are Definitions flawed?

All that a definition is an agreed-upon meaning for a certain word or a value ascribed to a certain state.

Very true – definitions only work within a context. My favorite example is chasing a squirrel around a tree – the critter will always stay on the opposite side, facing you, so even though you’ve gone around the tree, can you say you’ve gone around the squirrel, since it has faced you the whole time?

Pretty sure that applies to “words” as well as “definitions”

@JeanPaulSartre
A famous example you may have heard of before is when is a hay stack/bail a hay stack/bail? If I take out one piece of straw it’s still a stack/bail when does it stop being a stack/bail if I carried on taking pieces out? If you don’t like that don’t complain I just said it’s famous not good.
Even when it comes down to points that are measurable it still goes into Platonism.

As long as people agree to the definition of a word, that definition is handy because it saves time explaining why something is something else, etc.

But definitions are not the same from one person to another, and our world experiences can also taint or modify definitions of regularly benign items.

It’s the same with assumptions.

Very true, I enjoy most anything that messes with our definitions, not because I’m a deconstructionist or anything, but I think it’s important to see how relative and interdependent our definitions really are.

@dynamicduo
Also sorry for seeming like I’m trying to be meaningful, the next questions is on about bum jokes promise.

@Myndecho, I’m not grading you, don’t worry about what I think :) Hey, the T-shirt you’re wearing in your avatar is Batman, just like my avatar is also Batman! How awesome is that?

@dynamicduo
How can you see it that well? My last name is also Bateman minus the e :D Gee willikers Dynamic to the Bat mobiel.

There is a linguistic school of thought (who’s chief proponent I can’t remember) that hypothesizes that the mind comes equipped with a semantic template of sorts; in other words that the definitions are there in rough form, and are just looking for phenomena to apply them to.

I don’t subscribe to this, but it is a serious academic theory.

@Myndecho – there’s a trick to see the whole photo you uploaded. You copy the path to the small avatar and paste it into the address bar. Then remove the “_thumb” that is added before ”.jpg”, and press enter. You should see the bigger picture that was originally uploaded. But you won’t for mine, because I resized my avatar in Photoshop before uploading it :D

The quality of a definition is proportional to the amount of understanding that it conveys about a particular label.

There’s really no such thing as a perfect definition because it’s all relative.

They’re fluid and mostly based on contexts of the words in peoples’ minds; perceptions. Both can be right and wrong at the same time. Terrorism is probably the hardest word to define that I’ve ever come across. Civilization is another one. Violence, too.

@dynamicduo
Pats down hair I hope I look ok in the photo, I’m always quite self conscious.

@Myndecho – I would think you knew how you looked in the photo, since you took it in front of a mirror.

You might find this interesting: the concepts of Sense and Reference coined by Gottlob Frege, the ide of intersubjectivity and I can probably look up other intersting related terms I’ve read about at school in my language philosophy course :)

@Vincentt
Thanks that was very interesting.