Family A: Definition

There is a particular kind of argument that cannot be ended.

Two people disagree. Both are reasonable. Both have been at it long enough to be tired. Each has restated their position several times, more slowly on each pass, on the theory that the other one did not hear it. Neither is lying, neither is stupid, and the argument does not move, because they are not actually disagreeing about the thing they are discussing. They are disagreeing about a word inside it that neither of them has ever been asked to define, and every restatement carries the undefined word along with it.

I have watched that argument in a conference room about whether a request was urgent. I have had that argument in my own house about whether it was cold. It is the same argument, and it is unwinnable by anyone, because the only move available inside it is repetition and repetition is the one thing that cannot help.

That is the problem this family exists to solve, and the reason the creed starts here rather than somewhere more impressive.

Everything else in this book is machinery that operates on defined terms. A process that produces a consistent result is a process whose steps mean the same thing on Tuesday as they did in March. A system that holds what used to live in somebody's head holds it as words that a second person can read the way the first person meant them. A formula that decides anything is a conditional over variables, and a variable is a definition with a value in it. None of that runs on a word that has not been pinned to anything, and all of it will appear to run, which is worse, because a machine fed undefined inputs does not stop. It produces outputs nobody can evaluate.

Four isms, because definition fails in four different ways and each one needs its own answer.

A term can be missing entirely, in which case somebody supplies one privately and the decision has been made somewhere nobody is looking. It can exist but stop too shallow, bottoming out in another word that was never settled, which moves the disagreement one level down and leaves it intact. It can be available and withheld, where the writer knew the specific and wrote the general because the specific was obvious to them at the time. And it can be settled differently by different people, each consistently, each correctly by their own lights, which produces a system where the answer depends on who is answering and nobody can see that it does.

Those are four distinct defects with four distinct repairs, and running them together under define your terms is why that instruction has never helped anybody.

One warning before the family starts, because the failure mode on the other side is real and I have produced it. Definition has a cost, it is paid forever rather than once, and a definition nobody maintains is more dangerous than a term nobody defined, because people act on it without checking. Every chapter in this family is an argument for defining something, and every one of them ends by naming the point past which defining it further is waste.

The four that follow are the ones I actually use. They are in the order the work happens in: get the term to exist, get it deep enough, get it specific enough, and get everybody on the same one.