What Is An X Is Almost Always A Cheap Gotcha

This applies to the words wokeness and women

Since the release of Matt Walsh’s famous—or infamous—movie “What Is a Woman?” one hasn’t been able to discuss trans issues for five minutes without being asked what a woman is. It is often claimed that those who think that the label women includes transgender women are unable to provide adequate definitions of the term. And, in a similar way, people on the left will often ask people on the right to define the term woke, before gleefully cackling if the person can’t adequately defend it. Both Trump and Vivek have weighed in on the alleged difficulty of defining the word woke—with Vivek defining it, and Trump explaining that he does not like the term because of its nebulousness. It seems that both those on the left and the right agree that when the other side can’t define some term that they frequently use, that is evidence that their position is incoherent.

But I don’t buy it. And I don’t buy it even though I think both terms can be satisfactorily defined.

Take the example of the term knowledge. What does it mean? The answer: no one knows. For a while, philosophers said that knowledge was justified true belief until Edmund Gettier famously showed that we can have justified true belief without knowledge (Edit: this may not be true—see MDH’s comment). For example, if a person sees a broken clock, but the clock just coincidentally identifies the right time, even though they’re justified in trusting the clock and their belief is true, it seems they don’t know what time it is—they got the right time by accident. Similarly, if you are justified in thinking that you’ll get a particular job, and you have two coins in your pocket, if it turns out that someone else will get the job who also has two coins in their pocket, it does not seem like you know the candidate who will get the job has two coins in their pocket, even though you’re justified in believing it and it happens to be true. You don’t have knowledge in this case because it’s just a lucky coincidence. We can have knowledge without having a precise definition of it, just as we can talk about wokeness or women without having a precise definition of either term.

When one uses a term, they very often won’t have an exact definition of it. They’ll be able to use it in a sentence, they’ll be able to give examples of it, but they won’t be able to give an exact definition of it. It is notoriously difficult to define soup, for example, in a way that includes all soups but does not include obvious non-soups like cereal. But it seems that, in a similar way, left-wing people who can’t adequately define women can use the word woman in a sentence and give examples of women. Analogously, right-wing people can use the term woke in a sentence and give examples of it. Even if they can’t precisely define their terms, it’s not hard to know roughly what they mean.

If one disputes the left-wing conception of what a woman is or the right-wing conception of what wokeness is, they can argue against the conception they oppose. Left-wing people can argue that things labeled woke are often vital examples of progress and the attempt to quell them does more harm than good, and right-wing people can argue that the left-wing expansion of the term women produces harmful effects. But it’s intellectually lazy to claim that the real objection is that there’s no definition of the term.

The requirement that the other side defines their term is the ultimate gotcha. It seems like such a simple request: just tell me what you mean by your terms. But it often turns out to be rather difficult, and for this reason, the questioner can look victorious, like they’ve stumped the other person. But this isn’t because of any special feature of the terms woke or women, it’s a general feature of lots of terms.

Unfortunately, because of the non-obviousness of this point, not well-known outside the philosophy of language, the endless request to define terms has become a weapon in the culture war. The next time one requests that another defines one of those terms, the correct response should be to ask the questioner to define knowledge. The near impossibility of such a task explains why it should not be the litmus test required to use a term.