Why Objective Definitions Don’t Exist
After a glance at the title of this piece you might be thinking “Of course objective definitions exist, just look at the dictionary silly!”
In fact, it’s a subjective decision that I would make in choosing which dictionary to look at. I could chose Merriam Webster or I could choose Oxford. Also, I could could choose which year’s dictionary I wanted to look at. Do I want to look at 1917 definitions or 2017 definitions?
The Oxford definitions aren’t necessarily more objective than the Merriam Webster, and the 2017 definitions won’t necessarily be more objective, they’ll only be more up to date with new words like ‘selfie’.
One thing that you should notice if you were to compare the definition or a word like “compare” is that the definitions in each individual dictionary may be slightly different, but will come to mean the same thing. They bear a Wittgensteinian family resemblance to each other. Although the definitions are different, their meanings are the same.
This is why we usually cannot say that one definition is more objective than another, we can only say that we “like” a definition more than another one- and liking something is subjective.
Now of course, someone who made a dictionary in which they attempted to undermine the purpose of it could do so easily by creating nonsensical definitions of words, maybe even defining words as their antonym just to be silly. We can dismiss this dictionary as nonsensical and FAR LESS objective than the dictionaries we currently use.
However, imagine that this person is friends with Elon Musk and he goes and establishes the first Mars colony with his family. He decides to teach this new colony of Martians the seemingly nonsensical definitions he’s composed. Over the years, the Martians have gotten used to what we think of as the antonyms of words as their words, and so the dictionary that looks very subjective on our Earth looks objective on Mars because the Martian colony has associated the word ‘Bad’ to mean something ‘Good’.
And so it is, because language was invented by individual people (subjects of reality) and not some independent body outside of human consciousness, it is impossible to eliminate the slight degree of subjectivity with definitions that we have. This doesn’t mean we should completely ignore the dictionary- it means the opposite. We must orient our word choice to a well-known, recent dictionary because that’s how we’ll best communicate with other people on this planet.