Persuasive definition

True courage

“Real courage isn’t charging into danger. Real courage is admitting you were wrong. So Sam, who apologized to the whole team on Friday, is the bravest person in this office.”

Admitting a mistake may well be admirable. But “courage” ordinarily means facing danger or fear, and calling Sam “the bravest person in the office” borrows all the admiration that ordinary meaning carries. The speaker hasn’t shown that Sam’s apology is admirable in the way bravery is; the new definition simply declares it. The words “real” and “true” are a common signal: Stevenson observed that persuasive definitions are often recognizable from them.

Stealing time

“Every minute you spend on your phone during a meeting is theft. You’re taking time the company paid for. And nobody here would defend stealing.”

“Theft” ordinarily means taking property without permission. Stretched to cover checking a phone, the word keeps its condemnation (“nobody would defend stealing”), but the reasons we condemn theft don’t obviously carry over. This is the negative direction: a disapproving word widened to take in something people ordinarily think is minor. Whether phones in meetings are a problem is a fair question; calling it theft skips it.

Handmade, as defined

A bakery’s bag says “Handmade bread.” The small print on the website reads: “By handmade, we mean every batch is supervised by a trained baker.” The loaves are mixed, shaped and baked by machine.

Here the new definition is stated openly, which makes it look honest. But “handmade” draws its appeal from the ordinary meaning (shaped by hand), and the bag relies on that meaning while the fine print quietly swaps it for a much weaker one. Pruś and Aberdein point out that a persuasive definition often passes itself off as merely making a word more precise.

• Widening a word: stretching a loaded word to cover new cases, as with “theft”.
• Narrowing a word: shrinking it to exclude cases that would otherwise count. When the narrowing comes after a counterexample, to rescue a generalization, it’s a No true Scotsman. Pruś and Aberdein give the no true Scotsman structure, which adds an evaluative adjective (“true”) to the word being defined, as an example of a purely persuasive definition.
• Changing the tone instead of the meaning: Stevenson also described persuasive quasi-definitions, which leave a word’s meaning alone but try to change the attitude attached to it. Pruś and Aberdein note the two are often mixed together under the one name.

Origin. The term comes from the philosopher Charles L. Stevenson’s 1938 paper in Mind. He defined a persuasive definition as “one which gives a new conceptual meaning to a familiar word without substantially changing its emotive meaning, and which is used with the conscious or unconscious purpose of changing, by this means, the direction of people’s interests.” One of his examples concerns “cultured”, in a community where the word meant widely read and acquainted with the arts. A member who valued reading and the arts only for the imaginative sensitivity they could develop insists that “the true meaning of ‘culture’” is imaginative sensitivity, so that the word’s prestige moves to what he admires.

Is it a fallacy? Not always, and the literature is divided. Pruś and Aberdein report that Stevenson himself rejected a general disparagement of persuasive definitions, while Richard Robinson called one “at best a mistake and at worst a lie” and Patrick Hurley’s textbook says it “masquerades as an honest assignment of meaning to a term”. Douglas Walton defended persuasive definitions as a legitimate part of persuasion in some settings, while urging caution whenever a redefinition departs from the audience’s existing usage. Pruś and Aberdein conclude that persuasiveness depends on how a definition is used, not on its form. This page treats it as an error when the definition is used in place of an argument.

Related errors. When the new definition already contains the conclusion, the argument can amount to Begging the question. When the speaker slides between the old sense and the new one within an argument, it’s Equivocation. And when a redefinition is used to retreat from a bold claim under pressure, it’s part of a Motte and bailey.

• The definition is openly stipulated for a limited purpose. “For this survey, an ‘active member’ means anyone who came to at least one event this year” is announced, used consistently and not borrowed to praise anyone.
• The redefinition is argued for. Proposing that a word should be used differently, and giving reasons, is legitimate. Walton’s view, as Pruś and Aberdein put it, is that a definition used in a discussion should be treated as an argument, with the burden of proof on the person offering it.
• The new meaning matches existing usage. A definition that reports how people already use the word isn’t moving anything.
• The setting allows persuasion and everyone knows it. A eulogy or a motivational speech that says “real success is the friends you make” isn’t pretending to report a dictionary meaning.

The test: if the word had no emotional charge, would the argument still work? And has the speaker given any reason for the new meaning, beyond the conclusion it produces?

The club’s definition of “active member”

A hiking club’s bylaws say: “For voting purposes, an active member is anyone who has paid dues and joined at least two hikes in the past twelve months.” A member who has paid dues but hasn’t hiked this year complains that the club is “redefining what it means to be active.”

The club did choose a meaning for “active”, and it has consequences. But the definition is openly stipulated for a limited purpose: it’s written down in advance, applied to everyone, used only to decide who votes, and not used to say that anyone is a better or worse person. Nothing is being carried in on the word’s approval.

Arguing for what should count

A library’s reading challenge counts only print books. A member writes: “I think audiobooks should count as reading for the challenge. The point of the challenge is to finish books, and listening gets people through them. Ebooks already count, so format clearly isn’t the rule.”

This proposes a new boundary for a word with positive associations, which is how a persuasive definition works. But the redefinition is argued for: the member names the purpose of the challenge and points to an existing inconsistency, and the argument can be checked and disputed on those terms. It takes on the burden of proof rather than hiding it.

Words that praise or condemn are valuable, and whoever controls where they apply controls a good deal of persuasion. Stevenson’s point was that such words have two kinds of meaning, a descriptive content and an emotive force, and the two can be pulled apart: change the content and the force often comes along. Audiences tend to react to the force of a word before checking what it now refers to.

Definitions also look neutral. Pruś and Aberdein quote Zarefsky’s observation that choosing a definition is in effect pleading a cause, “but no explicit claim is offered and no support is provided.” Because a definition seems to need no defense, a contested claim packed into one can escape the scrutiny it would get if stated openly.

• Ask for the ordinary meaning. “In the usual sense, is this courage? If not, what’s the case that it deserves the same admiration?”
• Swap in a neutral word. Replace “theft” with “using meeting time for something else” and see whether the argument still persuades.
• Ask why the new definition is better than the existing one, apart from producing this conclusion.
• Allow that the conclusion may still be right. Sam’s apology may be admirable, and phones in meetings may be a problem. The definition just didn’t show it.