Philosophers and slippery politicians are famous for using the phrase “it depends on what you mean by …”.
It is often important to be clear, so I usually start with the basic but very useful tools, dictionaries. I use both the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam-Webster, frequently.
One problem, is that normal usage is often confused and less precise than needed for some purposes and this is reflected in the dictionary because they are supposed to represent a distillation of common usage in speech and print.
The solution I adopt in this and other work is to try to untangle the confusion and then adopt my own definition for the purposes of this workbook while staying as close as possible to the dictionary while retaining clarity or, rather, developing clarity through the work.
This is similar to the scientific practice of taking common terms like “energy”, “work” and “momentum” and making them precise enough to do very accurate calculations. You can’t tell a physicist that you have no energy today, because they will say that you just have to multiply your mass by the square of the speed of light and you’ll see that you have much more energy than that released by any atomic bomb. (The concept of “joke” almost includes this, but not quite.)
However, if you are going to fine-tune a definition for specific areas of study, you need to make sure it fits well with the other concepts you are using, in a coherent theory.
There are further limitations to dictionary definitions when it comes to understanding how words and phrases are used by others, outside of such carefully controlled contexts. I will cover some of these in the other tools in this section.
Test installation
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