The meaning of a word is in its use ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
The Euthyphro dilemma is a philosophical challenge that aims to draw attention to the incompatibility between God and an objective standard of morality. The dilemma asks whether (1) God commands something because it is good, or (2) something is good because God commands it to be so.
Either side has its issues. If (1) should be the case, then it would seem that God’s supposedly unlimited power – or rather limited only by the laws of logic (and some would push back against even that) – is bottlenecked by a higher, more robust standard of morality. God answers, in this model, to a moral reality that is more judicial than he is.
However, if (2) were to be the case, then the standards of moral reality are made to seem baseless, rooted in the whims and desires of a being who could, at least in theory, change his mind. Should God turn around tomorrow and command murder to be right, it would have to be so. This feels uncomfortably fragile for such high-stakes categorisation. It doesn’t seem right that the atrocities we are capable of committing against one another, the unthinkable evils of child sexual abuse and genocidal megalomania and so much more, rest on a judgement which is yielding and pliable1. I want the standards of morality to be more robust, to mean something more strict and real than that.
In much the same way, I find Wittgenstein’s quote above unpalatable. It doesn’t sit right, with me, that the meaning-making of a word can be decided, created, by its use. I want the word table to mean something, intrinsically, that makes it the case such that if everybody were to start referring
to cars as tables they would all be wrong. Categorically so.
It seems to me that this leaves language, much like the moral universe of the Euthyphro dilemma, in a fragile state. Perhaps we might doctor the use of so many words that our language becomes unrecognisable, like a linguistic ship of Theseus (ship of thesaurus).
The question, I suppose, is whether this has to be a bad thing.
Our language is constantly evolving. 75 years ago, to be ‘gay’ was to be in a particularly jolly mood. To ‘damn’ somebody was punished with a mouthful of dish soap (this is why ‘frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn’ the famous line from the 1939 classic, Gone With The Wind, was so much more sensational at the time than it is for audiences today). This is necessary – a stagnant language ends up dead – but also unavoidable and perhaps preferable. Spikes and lulls in the uses of particular words show us something of what’s in the minds of our collective consciousness; back formation2 **shows us our proclivities towards certain types of metaphor and symbolic content. It’s a living record our history and our present moment, to see the words that we choose and those that we forget.
But what of the fragility? Is it possible to feel some security in the semantics of our language, given this apparent relativity? Well, more than just being possible, the inter-relativity of our language provides the very foundation for it’s sustained meaning; much like the well-observed prisoners of the panopticon, who keep their peers, and by proxy, themselves, in check due to the shared interest of each man to marshall his neighbour, the ballast of our semantics is not found in any one word or scheme, but in the continual reaffirmation of meaning across the breadth of the English language.
Perhaps part, a large part, of the semantics of the word table is that in our minds it conjures up images of chairs and sitting. What does it mean to be
a car, if not for roads and driving and passengers and seatbelts? How are we to understand gun if not for shot and bullet and blood? No word makes sense in isolation. Everything reminds us of something else. Everything makes sense if and only if we understand it in terms of its connotations; this is how our language maintains meaning, maintains sensibility.
It is this panopticon of meaning, this shared semantics which sanctions conversation and continues to keep our language functional. Far from being a fragile edge, the relativity of our meaning guides our language forward, away from the stagnant waters of irrelevance. It seems, then, that we ought to embrace the many changes before us, amplified not least by the uncharted linguistic territory of an Internet Age.
1
The generally accepted theological riposte to the Euthyphro dilemma is to take (2) to be the case, removing any kind of constraint on God’s logical powers. However, we then must deal with the possibility of ‘God’ changing his mind. We might argue that God, being ‘whole’ and ‘unchanging’ and ‘perfect’, is not capable of changing his mind. For God to change his mind would be a replacement of parts, of some kind, a departure from who he is currently into something new. and as he is perfect in current form, he cannot change, as that would make him imperfect. This raises a whole bunch of issues with the form of a perfect God and the interaction between an unchanging being and a changing world, but it pushes back somewhat against Plato’s dilemma.
2
Back formation is the process by which an unpaired word (a word which looks as though it ought to have a non-negative counterpart but doesn’t – disgusting) is matched up with a newly created pair word. So, the word whelm used to refer to the rocking of a ship. To overwhelm, then, was to be capsized by the conditions faced by the ship. Over time, people started to use this figuratively, to refer to their work, personal stresses, financial indictments, etc.
But, overwhelm didn’t have a counterpart – it was unpaired –
until underwhelm came along, to be an initially-humorous counterpart.
Eventually, we dropped whelm from use altogether,
and overwhelm and underwhelm were left as a unique ‘pair of unpaired words’ with their common root ejected from popular vocabulary.
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