Linguistic Epistemology: Clarity and Application

Poiesis

I. Introduction

The problem that troubles many philosophers today is the problem of clarity—specifically, the clarity of words. What do I mean by this? I mean clarity regarding the meaning of any word, whether that meaning is composed of more fundamental elements or is itself fundamental. Often, even after constructing a thematically unified and logically coherent argument, one finds that debate shifts to whether the words used convey the intended meaning. In such cases, discussion moves away from the argument itself to the nature of the terms that compose it. This can introduce ambiguity and, ultimately, lead to the failure of the argument's conclusion.

This situation is, in part, surprising—if not tragic—for the intellect. After all, meaning is among the most immediate things to the mind. When we lose sight of what is immediate, our mediated thought also falters, threatening the very rationality that defines us as human. This paper is written in response to such an error, but this purpose should not be confused with an attempt to replace language or its use—nor could anything ever do so. Rather, it seeks to provide a way to reflect on and clarify our concept of language and its basic units—words.

II. The Nature of Language

Perhaps the best place to begin is by considering what language is and how it relates to philosophical problems. Language can be understood as a system of symbols used to represent concepts shared between two or more individuals. For instance, take the word "fire." Viewed in isolation, it's merely a sequence of letters. But as part of a language, it functions as a symbol that refers to a concept commonly understood by English speakers.

Different definitions of language may emphasize various features, but they all presuppose this basic characteristic: that words must represent the same concepts for different individuals. Without this shared understanding, communication would be impossible—and without communication, there is no language in any meaningful sense.

For example, if I said "That man is on fire" to someone who speaks only French, and we shared no common understanding of those words, my sentence would fail to communicate anything—just as their saying "Cet homme est en feu" would mean nothing to me. Likewise, even if we both speak English, but the sentence "That man is on fire" evokes different concepts in our minds, then communication still fails. In effect, it would be as if two different sentences were involved: one spoken, another heard. But communication requires that the concept I intend is the same one you receive.

Now this characterization has major implications for many philosophical problems already, since any meaning associated with the word if it isn't conventional, fails to be what the word means. For example,

1. Eliminative Materialism: Terms like "belief," "desire," and "pain" don't refer to real entities, but are myths of a "Folk Psychology"

2. Reductivism: Terms like "Red", "Pain" or "Sweetness", are just the neural structures or patterns of the brain.

3. Functionalism: "Pain" isn't a private sensation but simply whatever functional role it plays in a cognitive system (input → aversive behavior).

All these examples associate an arbitrary meaning with the term, which isn't backed by its conventional usage. Now, since it's not conventional/common, it's not part of the word, and hence non-sense.

III. Fundamental and Non-fundamental terms

Before I define and discuss the distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental terms, I want to first introduce the problem that makes such a distinction necessary: Suppose every word required the use of other words in order to express its meaning. In that case, no word could express any meaning, since each word would rely on others that are themselves undefined (or in need of expression). It would be like a miser going to a village of misers to borrow money. Each person he turns to is just as lacking in money as he is. Expecting one of them to provide what none of them possesses is pure fantasy. In the same way, expecting a word to gain meaning from other equally undefined words is futile.

Such being the case, it is necessary that at least some words express there meaning without the need to point towards anything else or require other words. It is these words/terms which we will call fundamental, and those terms that depend on another, non-fundamental or complex. Now this distinction is necessary as much as useful, precisely because if one doesn't order one's terms according to which is fundamental, and which complex, one runs the risk of taking that which is itself in need of expressing as expressing the meaning of some term. Hence, making vacuous propositions which don't express anything.

Now, given this understanding, a question that might arise is how one might differentiate a fundamental term from its complex/non-fundamental counterpart. First, let us look at predication: whenever we predicate any term X of a subject Y, we necessarily choose between X or Not-X—if I predicate one, I must exclude the other. This shows that all predication has a this–not–that structure: if I predicate "this," then I leave out "that." But this cannot be done for universal terms—those meant to apply to anything and everything. For example, suppose I predicate of "Real" some arbitrary composition of terms, say "ordinary objects" or "perceivable objects." such that: "Reality is the totality of ordinary objects or the realm of perceivable things."

In doing so, I necessarily exclude whatever is not ordinary or not perceivable. Yet by conceiving those excluded items, they are a part of my thoughts—and therefore real. This demonstrates two points:

1. Fundamental terms are necessarily universal predicates in thought.

2. Fundamental terms are self-expressing—they cannot be defined by "thisnot-that" distinctions.

IV. Word Production: The Impossibility.

Due to the previous discussion, we can also say that words cannot be produced by anyone be it man, or animal. This is for two reasons as discussed here:

1. Individual Production: If you try to pin down a word's meaning using only your own private understanding, you quickly run into a problem: that private idea isn't part of the word itself. By definition, a word's meaning must be something common with any speaker of the language. If your personal notion were truly unique—if nobody else shared it—then it wouldn't count as the meaning of a word at all. Conversely, if your idea were already common knowledge, then it wouldn't be something you alone "invented" or "produced".

2. Group Production: Neither could a group of people create a word, since if it's common between them, then it already exists per definition.

This is another reason why all ascriptions of meaning to a word must be conventional, since if it's individual or unique to some one person, it's not a part of that word anymore. Another reason why this is interesting has to do with debates about the origination of a language, which as demonstrated cannot be the result of any individual will or a group of it, therefore must come about from natural forces.

V. Application: Ethical Discourse

Now that we have presented three different characteristics of language, without which one cannot do: That language is necessarily common between two or more subjects, that language necessarily has a fundamental and non-fundamental term structure, and that language cannot be created. With these tools, we will give a robust characterization of ethics to help center discourse. The ensuing passage will discuss meta ethics and apply its results in normative ethics.

V-A. Meta-Ethics

The two central terms in metaethics are Good and Evil, so our explanation will focus on these.

V-A-1. Moral Twins: Sense

Good

Based on our earlier account of language, the first relevant question is: How is the word "good" conventionally used? Consider the following examples:

1. This medicine is good for you.

2. Reading is good for the intellect.

3. Exercise is good for health.

In each case, something is described as good because it benefits or supports something else. From this we can infer two things: (1) that Good is relative to a kind or purpose—something is good for something—and (2) that Good contributes to the improvement or maintenance of that kind.

Bad

Bad (or Evil ) is conventionally understood as the opposite of Good, and its meaning therefore depends on what Good means. In simple terms, whatever is bad works against something good. For example:

1. Laziness is bad for you. (Because it inhibits healthy activity.)

2. Idle thoughts are bad. (Because they disrupt rational thinking.)

3. Self-mutilation is bad. (Because it causes harm to the self.)

In all these cases, the bad is understood through its opposition to something good—it either inhibits its function or undermines its existence. Therefore, we can say that evil or badness consists in a kind of opposition: a stance aimed at negating, damaging, or removing that which is good.

V-A-2. Moral Twins: Fundamental term

The second important question in this discussion is: Which term is fundamental (for Good and Evil) ? We argue that the fundamental term is Being. To see why, let us recall how we previously characterized the term Good: a thing is called Good if it serves or benefits something—if it helps to preserve or perfect it. Now, this "thing" that is benefits another could, in principle, be anything, since at this level it remains undefined. But if it could be anything, then it cannot be limited to any one specific kind of thing, for that would contradict the very openness we are assuming.

To illustrate this, consider the term animal. If animal were taken to mean only vertebrates, it could not also mean invertebrates without contradiction. The more general the term, the less specific it is—general terms must abstract from, or prescind from, particular differences. Likewise, the something that the Good is good for must be as universal and undefined as possible. But this is precisely the nature of Being, which applies to everything and is presupposed by all other predicates. Therefore, the most fundamental sense of Good—what we might call the primary or undefined Good—is nothing other than Being itself. This concludes in the old scholastic adage: "Bonum et ens sunt convertibilia" — "Good and being are convertible."

Now, this sense of Good differs from the nominal or surface-level understanding of the term, though—as previously shown—it is entailed by our conventional use of the word. To aid understanding, let us situate this deeper sense within ordinary usage.

Consider the statement: "Exercise is good for your health." Upon hearing this, one immediately understands that the value of exercise lies in its contribution to the maintenance or improvement of health. That is, exercise is called "good" because it either preserves the existing state of health or brings about a fuller realization of it—i.e., it actualizes some potential aspect of health that was previously unrealized.

In both cases, the goodness of exercise lies in its relation to being—it helps sustain or bring into being some state of health in the individual. But this preservation or actualization of being is precisely what we have earlier identified as the fundamental meaning of Good.

The same pattern applies to countless other examples: whatever we call "good" in ordinary discourse tends to be so called because it either sustains what already exists or brings into existence something valuable that did not exist before. Thus, the existential character of the Good is already implied in everyday usage and is not something alien or artificially imposed upon it.

Note on Convention: This also addresses an important question—one that may have occurred to the reader earlier and rightly deserved clarification from the beginning, though it could not be properly addressed until now. The question is this: Given the conventional nature of language, are we limited to making only conventional statements about a term? As the example of Good has shown, if a certain sense or interpretation of a term is logically entailed by its conventional use, then it is legitimate to ascribe that sense to the term. In other words, while we must begin with the conventional meaning, we are not strictly confined to it; we may draw out implications and underlying structures, as long as they are necessitated by what the conventional usage already implies.

Bad: Since we have already shown that Good is identical with Being, and that what is bad (or evil) is opposed to Good, it follows that Evil is the opposite of Being—that is, Evil is Non-Being, or more precisely, the privation of a Good that ought to be present.

V-A-3. Moral Twins: Origination

The third question proper to our discourse is: What is the nature of origination and from what Good originates? To answer this, let us provisionally discuss two terms, which are essential "Difference", and "Relation".

Difference

The concept of difference can be approached in two fundamental ways, both of which serve to distinguish one entity from another. These two types of difference are:

1. Primary (or Subjective) Difference, and

2. Secondary (or Qualitative) Difference.

Let us explicate them in turn.

1. Primary Difference

Imagine walking through a marketplace and encountering a man with two horses. These horses are so perfectly alike in appearance and behavior that no descriptive feature—no quality or predicate—can distinguish one from the other. Every observable trait you ascribe to one horse is equally true of the other.

In such a case, if you wanted to refer to one of the horses, you would have to do so using purely referential terms, such as this, that, or the horse's name. You could not rely on descriptive content to make the distinction.

This type of distinction—where two entities are differentiated only by virtue of their being distinct subjects, not through any qualities or predicates—is what we call Primary or Subjective difference. The difference here lies in the bare identity of the subjects themselves.

Suppose the horses are named Gerald and Hans:

1. Gerald is a white-skinned horse with a golden mane.

2. Hans is a white-skinned horse with a golden mane.

Despite being named differently, there is no qualitative difference between them. The descriptions are identical. Therefore, the only way to distinguish them is by direct reference to the subject—"Gerald" versus "Hans." No predicate, no matter how detailed, would enable us to differentiate the horses. What separates them is not what they are like, but that they are not the same.

This is the essence of primary difference: a difference between entities that cannot be explained through predication or description, but only through the irreducible thisness (haecceity) of each subject.

2. Secondary Difference

Now imagine that, on the other side of the same man, there are two dogs. One has white fur, and the other has brown fur. Here, if you wanted to identify one of the dogs, you could simply say, "I want the dog with the brown fur."

In this case, the dogs are distinguishable by their qualities. We do not need to refer to them directly as this or that or by their names. Instead, we can pick them out based on predicates—in this case, their fur color.

This kind of difference—where entities are distinguished by the attributes or properties they possess—is called Secondary or Qualitative difference.

Suppose the dogs are named Arnold and Austin:

1. Arnold is a white-furred dog.

2. Austin is a brown-furred dog.

Here, the distinction arises from the predicates in the propositions: "whitefurred" and "brown-furred." These qualities differentiate the subjects. However, it is crucial to note that this difference lies in the qualities, not in the subjects themselves. The predicates differ, and through them, we infer that the subjects must be distinct.

But consider this carefully: even mutually exclusive properties—like white and brown—do not in themselves prove that the properties belong to different subjects. It is logically contradictory to ascribe both properties to the same subject at the same time in the same respect, but that contradiction only arises once we assume that both predicates are applied to one subject. That is, even where contradiction is at stake, the recognition of distinctness ultimately rests on knowing the subject to which the predicates are being ascribed. Thus, the difference in properties implies a difference in subject only when we already know, or are committed to, the idea that they belong to distinct subjects. From this, we have determined two things:

1. It is in subjects that difference primarily exists.

2. Therefore, identity or same-ness can only exist in predicates.

Relation: The Synthesis of Difference and Identity

To discuss this, let us provisionally define relation (of which origination is one example): a relation is a property that holds between two or more terms or entities, and cannot be meaningfully attributed to either entity in isolation.

From this, we can see that every relation necessarily involves two components:

1. Two distinct entities between which the relation holds—that is, a difference.

2. One shared property that connects them—that is, an identity.

Since we have already shown that difference exists primarily in subjects, and sameness or identity is expressed in predicates, it follows that a relation consists in different subjects sharing a common predicate.

And this must be so. For if a relation truly exists between two things, then neither can be fully understood within the context of that relation without reference to the other. Yet anything that is other than a given thing can, in principle, be understood without it. The only thing I cannot understand without X—is X itself. Therefore, the only way two things can be intelligibly connected through a relation is by sharing one and the same property, even while remaining different subjects.

Let us illustrate this structure with an example from what we already discussed on the production of language.

Relation: Language

Suppose Peter is talking with Daniel. They are speaking in English. Peter recounts recent experiences; Daniel listens, nods, and replies. What makes this interaction possible?

The answer lies in a shared knowledge of the English language. Both Peter and Daniel understand the same associations between symbols (words) and concepts. This shared understanding is what enables communication. But note: the knowledge itself is not private to Peter or to Daniel, nor is it the sum of two separate knowledges. Rather, it is a shared property—something that exists in there both.

This shows that language is not a solitary phenomenon. It is inherently relational. It presupposes:

• Two distinct subjects e.g. Peter and Daniel (difference), and • One language that they both share (identity).

This is why language cannot originate in any single individual. If language is, by its very nature, a relation between two individuals, then it cannot come to exist solely in an individual. This is also why, as said before, one cannot think of one relatum in a relation without the other—since, as in this linguistic relation, language is equally in both. If I wanted to cease thinking about either, I would have to cease thinking about both.

Even group formation does not resolve the issue. If several people "agree" to form a language, they must already share some means of understanding to coordinate that agreement—which presupposes a proto-language. Therefore, the origination of language must be attributed not to any individual or collective intention, but to some natural, non-volitional process.

Relation: Origination

Let us now provide an example of origination and then discuss its nature.

If I say that Peter is the son of Patric, then this relation exists between two different subjects, and does so in virtue of a shared characteristic present between them—namely, the biological traits that are common to both. Or, if I say some animal originated from another, it is because they share some kind or genus of traits. This is true for any example of origination, where what originates, given that it's in a relation with its originator, must in some way preexist in the originator. This is known as the Principle of Proportional Causality (PPC). From this, we can tell that whatever is good for another must contain the Good in itself, in one way or another. That is, whatever is good for everything must contain everything in its own being. It is not for nothing that the scholastics considered God to be what is supremely Good, and the cause of everything good. Since whatever is caused must preexist in its cause—and since God, classically considered, is omnipotent (able to cause anything)—everything must preexist in Him. Similarly, God is what is essentially identified with Being or Actuality, being Actus Purus, which is also what we earlier found to be fundamental to Good, and therefore to Ethical discourse as such. Therefore, it is appropriate to say that God is the ultimate Good, that which is good for everything.

V-B. Normative Ethics

We now arrive at a point where we can apply the derived principles of normative ethics to a specific case: Sexual Ethics.

Case Study: Homosexuality

To properly discuss the nature of homosexuality, we must first briefly define two key concepts: desire and the sexual faculty.

Desire

Desire is the aim toward realizing some state of affairs. Because it is directed toward an end, desire is free to aim at anything—it is not necessarily restricted to a specific object. Another essential characteristic of desire is that it is for the desiring subject. It motivates and activates some faculty or habit within the person.

For instance:

• If I am hungry and eat, I do so for the sake of satiety. • If I am tired and sleep, I do so for the sake of mental stability.

In each case, the object of desire fulfills a function related to a specific human faculty. It is for this reason; Aristotle defined the Good as "that which all things desire."

Sexual Desire

When we specify sexual desire, we mean a desire that motivates the sexual faculty in a man or woman. By "motivates," we mean that sexual desire activates or brings the sexual faculty into operation—making sexual intercourse possible. Thus, sexual desire is essentially related to the sexual faculty. Without this relation, sexual desire cannot be properly understood or given meaning.

Homosexuality

The sexual faculty, by its nature, is capable of reproduction. Therefore, its proper end or aim is reproductive. However, it is entirely possible for a person's desire to aim at something contrary to the natural end of a faculty.

This is the case with homosexual desire, which does not aim at reproduction. According to our earlier analysis, what is Bad (or Evil) is that which negates a Good. Conversely, the Good is what actualizes or fulfills a faculty's natural potency.

Hence, any desire that contradicts the reproductive aim of the sexual faculty inhibits its proper actualization, and is therefore bad for that faculty. Since the sexual faculty is part of human nature, inhibiting its proper function constitutes an evil relative to human nature.

Objections

Two objections might be raised here. Let us address them directly:

1. In-Vitro Insemination

It is true that reproduction can occur through laboratory means (e.g., in-vitro fertilization), and thus the reproductive potency of the sexual faculty might still be fulfilled.

However, this does not alter the ethical evaluation of homosexual desire in itself. The desire remains opposed to the natural orientation of the sexual faculty toward reproduction. Therefore, even if another desire (e.g., the desire to conceive a child through artificial means) is formed, the homosexual desire remains contrary to the sexual faculty's reproductive function—and so remains disordered or bad in principle.

2. Infertility

It might be argued that if someone is infertile and thus incapable of reproduction, then reproduction cannot be the measure for evaluating sexual desire.

However, this misunderstands the argument. The point is not whether reproduction is possible in fact, but whether it is the essential orientation of the sexual faculty. Even in cases of infertility, the sexual faculty is understood in light of its natural function—which is reproductive. Thus, desires that fundamentally contradict this orientation (e.g., homosexual desire) remain ethically problematic.

Conclusion

In summary, because homosexual desire does not aim at the natural end of the sexual faculty—reproduction—it constitutes a negation of the Good as defined in this ethical framework. As such, it is classified as morally bad or evil, insofar as it inhibits the proper actualization of a human faculty.

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