No. I see that they also don't teach the history of continental philosophy in grade school. The term that you are conflating with the word "definition" is most closely related to the philosophical term "essence." Essence is the property which give things their identity -- an object without its essence loses its concrete identity. When Socrates attempts to find the essence of virtue, he does not seek to describe the things which we believe are virtuous (because complete correctness could simply be found here by enumeration), but to find the subject whose identity we are describing using the term "virtue."
Definition, however, is a descriptive, not proscriptive term. Succinctly, the definition of a term is whatever a broad consensus "agree" upon. Dictionaries serve to help identify that consensus, although they are not completely authoritative. The definition of a word may not coincide with its essence in any way -- for example, the phrase "to beg the question" has two primary definitions. The first and newer definition is equivalent to "to ask the question." The second and older definition is to assume the conclusion within the question itself. Together these definitions do not elucidate the "essence" (or "distinguishing characteristic", in Ayn Rand's primitive terminology) because they are wholly unrelated to each other. Instead, they're simply descriptions of the common modes in which English-speaking society uses the phrase "beg the question."
The best example is your definition of the word definition. The word "definition" does not have any intrinsic meaning -- only that which we place on it. Moreover, the meaning can vary between subsets of the broader population -- your use of the word definition in no way coincides with my use of the term in formal mathematics. This doesn't mean that you can't disagree with a given definition for a word, only that you're insistence that you're correct or even that your definition has some objectively superior qualification makes your use of the word the "correct" one.
Needless to say, I disagree with you on this topic. I can't make a better argument than the book from which I pulled those quotations, so I'll direct people who are interested there.
I wasn't hunting down your posts, was just continuing the thread.
And I don't think I was being arbitrary. When challenged on your point you merely pointed to the quotes you had made and told people to read the book, which to me is pure dogma.
So admittedly I got a bit snarky. Although I was also attempting to be a bit self critical, which was why I referenced that quotation.
Definition, however, is a descriptive, not proscriptive term. Succinctly, the definition of a term is whatever a broad consensus "agree" upon. Dictionaries serve to help identify that consensus, although they are not completely authoritative. The definition of a word may not coincide with its essence in any way -- for example, the phrase "to beg the question" has two primary definitions. The first and newer definition is equivalent to "to ask the question." The second and older definition is to assume the conclusion within the question itself. Together these definitions do not elucidate the "essence" (or "distinguishing characteristic", in Ayn Rand's primitive terminology) because they are wholly unrelated to each other. Instead, they're simply descriptions of the common modes in which English-speaking society uses the phrase "beg the question."
The best example is your definition of the word definition. The word "definition" does not have any intrinsic meaning -- only that which we place on it. Moreover, the meaning can vary between subsets of the broader population -- your use of the word definition in no way coincides with my use of the term in formal mathematics. This doesn't mean that you can't disagree with a given definition for a word, only that you're insistence that you're correct or even that your definition has some objectively superior qualification makes your use of the word the "correct" one.