 Let's say you go to a restaurant and order a hamburger. The hamburger probably doesn't come by itself. You probably have a choice to make. What kind of side item do you want? Do you want fries or a salad? Now, you know what choice you're probably supposed to make? One of your friends might tell you that you should get the salad because it contains more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. Notice the stated reason there is that the salad contains more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. You probably acknowledge that. That's probably not something you're gonna take issue with. The source of the disagreement is gonna be with the rejection of another claim that is not stated in the argument. That is the warrant. So a counter argument to the first argument would be that you should choose the fries because they taste better. That's probably the one that you're hearing in the back of your head. So the disagreement isn't over whether the salad or the fries taste better. And it isn't over whether the salad or the fries contain more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. One argument values health over taste. The other argument values taste over health. So if you make a claim about what somebody should do, you're telling them to adopt the policy. And if you support that claim by referencing evidence, by pointing to facts, you might be skipping a few steps. And this is a very common problem with first year composition papers. Someone will say that people should do this or the government should do this. And the reason they give will be a statement of fact. And they'll support that statement of fact with great peer reviewed sources, but they assume that stating those facts necessarily proves the claim that somebody should do something. And in order to understand what is missing, it helps to go back a couple of thousand years to ancient Greece and Rome where philosophers and rhetoricians, lawyers, people who had to figure out how to decide the sorts of things that we now consider as a matter of course, they looked at the different types of claims that could be made and divided them up into several categories based on the type of thing that claim argued and the type of reasons that would be necessary to prove that claim. And the term for these different types of claims is stasis. It's usually anglicized as stasis. This comes from the Greek for placement or setting or stature, but also faction or group. It could mean the sort of point at which the disagreement lies. If we're not in the same place, then we're not gonna be able to have a very interactive argument. In some of the earliest writing, there was only four types of stasis over the centuries. There have been as many as 12 or 13 identified, but for our purposes, I'm just gonna focus on five. Those are fact, definition, value, cause and policy. Now facts we've talked about already. A fact, in order to be a fact, something must be verifiable. It's something that other people can see, can check your facts, needs to be falsifiable. In other words, can you prove that it's not true? Can you prove that this thing does not exist? You can't make a vague statement or a platitude and say that this is a fact. You can make generalizations, but these need to be from representative samples. So if we're talking about how to deal with climate change, I can show you data of average global temperatures for every year for the last century and show you that over the past 10 years, we've had more record highs than in any other point. But those are just numbers. What to do with those numbers is a different question. Then we have to be sure we're using the same terms. We have to be sure we have the same concepts to apply to those. And that is the stasis of definition. So it might need to make clear that there's a distinction between climate change and weather. Weather changes day to day, even hour to hour, but climate is something that's more permanent and more global. Once we agree on our terms, then we have to agree on values. Is a rise in climate temperature such a bad thing? If you don't think it is, then I have to convince you that that is a bad thing. And not only that it's a bad thing, but it's so bad that we need to take measures. We need to make sacrifices of other things that we do value in order to slow it or prevent it. I also need to point out that climate is something that has a traceable cause. In other words, it's traceable to the emission of carbons by human industry. And if we're going to change it in the long run, I have to show that there is a plan that if we take certain actions, it will eventually cause this effect. If I can't prove that anything we can do will actually improve things, then it doesn't really matter what the facts are and what we want to happen. So once I find a cause and then I point out how certain actions will have certain consequences, then we have to decide on what to do about it. And that is the stasis of policy. Now there are different kind of policy arguments I can make. Well, the laws need to change or I can say we should only support businesses that use green energy policies or individually we should take these steps ourselves. But anytime we say somebody should do something, that is a policy claim. And we can't just support a policy claim with another policy claim. I can't say you should do this thing because you should do it. That would be a circular argument. That's why it helps to be able to put these different types of stasis together in a structure and use this to figure out how to structure our arguments. I can't make a policy claim and only support it with reference to facts unless we already agree on definitions on questions of cause and effect and questions of value. And these aren't simple issues. To try to make a policy claim when we don't agree on cause and effect or on value or on definition would be like trying to build this pyramid with one or more of the middle blocks missing. So back to our example. If I want to argue that you should eat the salad instead of the fries with your hamburger, I might start with the facts. This is a fact premise when I say that salads contain more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. It's falsifiable. You can examine it. You can look at it under a microscope. This is something you can test independently from me. And that's a very necessary foundation for the rest of my argument, but it's only the foundation. We also need to agree on the premise that vitamins, minerals, and fiber enable the body to function properly. This is a causal claim. And when I say enable the body to function properly, I'm going to shorten that by using the term healthy. So it's a necessary step that we both agree on what the word healthy means. If you think simple carbohydrates are healthy, then that's something we need to stop and define. And then I need to get you to accept the premise that health is more important than flavor when choosing a side to go with your meal. And if we agree on all those things, then we'll probably come to the same conclusion that you should choose the salad instead of the fries. But do we agree on all of those premises? You probably agree that salad contains more vitamins, minerals, and fiber. You probably agree that vitamins, minerals, and fiber enable the body to function properly. You would probably define the word healthy as enabling the body to function properly. But you may disagree with the value judgment when it comes to choosing this particular side to go with your meal that health is more important, that it's more valuable than flavor. And that's going to lead you to a different conclusion. This is going to lead you to choose the fries instead of the salad. That's why it's very important that we look through all the different premises, at least all the premises that we can identify in order to figure out which premises we share with our audience and which premises we do not share. And once we identify the premises that we don't share, we need to know what type of stasis they are. If we agree on the facts and we agree on the definitions and we agree on the cause, we still need to agree on value. And that might be the one that I need to isolate and that's going to be the one that I'm going to spin the rest of my argument focusing on. Trying to change your value judgment and to argue that it is more important to choose the healthier meal instead of the tastier one. And only once we agree on all of those premises will you be led to the conclusion about what policy you should adopt when choosing a side to go with your meal. And these different types of stasis judgments are usually happening whether we're aware of them or not. Just like pattern recognition and other types of system one intuitive cognition, we tend to jump from the premises of the fact to conclusions about policy, about what to do about those facts without stopping to think about most of the other warrants that are necessary to connect the fact to the conclusion. That's because in many cases our system one intuitive cognition does all the processing for us. So if you see a snake in a place where you were about to reach your hand, you immediately know that the facts you see, the scales, the coiled body, these facts mean that you should take action, remove your hand from striking distance. But you didn't have to stop and think about that. By the time your system two metacognition is aware of what you've already done, all it has to do is sort of look and see that yes, I've made the right decision. In these sorts of situations, the whole decision making process, the whole pyramid is built so quickly that you're not aware of all the other steps that were involved. That's what cognition is. It's the thinking that takes place before you're consciously aware. But those facts only justify that action if we already assume the premises about definition, causation, and value. First, we define what we're seeing. You associate the scales and the long coiled body with the concept, the category of a snake. And that concept, that definition of what a snake is triggers mental models of cause and effect relationships. Some members of that category are venomous and they're all likely to bite. That means that a bite could cause pain, injury, and possibly death. Pain, injury, and death are universally recognized as unhappy outcomes. Preventing those outcomes is probably more valuable than whatever task this snake is preventing me from doing. However, if that snake is posing a danger to someone else, I may place more value on the safety of that other person than on my own safety. That's a value judgment and it's probably one that you'll have to make in a split second. But all those decisions actually take place before you come up with the policy decision about how to react to what you see. So it's the assumptions about the facts rather than the facts themselves that are the foundation on which all other types of judgment depend. So facts are the real verifiable data that exist in the world that trigger our inferences about patterns and heuristics that we use to function in the world. All these premises are inferences that we make after recognizing the facts. We connect the individual facts to familiar patterns, familiar frames about the world and how the world works. And I've talked about in another lecture how to separate facts from BS, from just vague statements that sound like fact but are actually just speculation. Claims that are unverifiable because they're so abstract. A fact has to be falsifiable. It needs to be something that other people can independently verify. If it's not verifiable, it's just conjecture, speculation. I'm supposed to just take your word for it. But we can't treat every single fact, every single instance, every single object and every single event as a unique snowflake. We have to make generalizations in order to learn from those individual events or individual objects. This is called generalization. And you know there is a fallacy called hasty generalization. This is where we start with a particular event or particular person or particular object and we then jump to a conclusion that all objects in that category or all people in that category are all the same. That's a hasty generalization but we have to make different types of generalizations. We don't want to be hasty in our generalizations but we do still have to make generalizations. So remember our white swan premise. If I assume that all swans are white because all the swans I've ever seen are white, then I'm making a generalization. And for a long time this generalization was made on a representative sample of evidence. Given what people in the Americas and Europe and Asia and Africa knew, that was a pretty good generalization. It explained all of the available evidence. So as you travel around the world, all the swans we see in North America are large, waterfowl with long necks and white plumage. So we can make the generalization that swans are large waterfowl with long necks and white plumage. We can go down to South America and see the same thing. All the swans there are large waterfowl with long necks and white plumage. Go to Africa, same thing. Europe, same thing. Asia, same thing. Large waterfowl, long necks, white plumage. It's only when we get down to Australia that our generalization is thrown into question. There the swans are large waterfowl and they have long necks, but they don't have white plumage. They're black. So each individual swan I see in all of those continents is a fact in itself, the color of its feathers is a fact. But I make a generalization to try to explain the facts that I've seen and use that generalization to predict that the next swan I see will also have white feathers. However, discovering that swans can be black requires me to rethink not only our grasp of the facts, but also how we define our concept of swan. Do we need to revise our generalization of the swan from a species of waterfowl with long neck and white plumage? Or do we need to create a new definition for a new bird? Is the black swan a different species? Do we put these two types of birds into two separate categories and then give them each their own definition? Or do we revise the definition to include black and white swans? Knowing what the facts are is only the first step in deciding what inferences to make about those facts or what conclusions they can support. So we need to generalize in order to learn from experience. In order to know what to do with the individual facts we discover. That means putting these individual facts into larger categories. But we don't want to overgeneralize because then we'll assume we know more than we actually do. The purpose of a category isn't to contain everything. It's to keep some things together but separate them from other things. And that's metaphorically how definitions work. The word definition comes from the classical Latin word, defineri, which means to end or to terminate. That's the same root word is in the word finite or infinite. The F-I-N in the middle means the border, the limitation. And we have to put borders around our terms so that we can limit what we mean. If a word means too many things, take for example the word thing. If I ask you to go in the other room and get that thing for me because I want to do this thing with it, I'm not giving you enough information to know what it is I'm trying to describe. Whatever the fact in the other room that I'm referring to, I haven't connected it with a specific enough concept for you to be able to follow through with what I want. So if I describe a recent cultural phenomenon, say this is a thing now, or if I say that I have a thing about those kinds of things, I'm not really explaining myself very well. You have to make a lot more inferences about what I'm trying to say. And if the listener or the reader has to make too many inferences, that listener or reader is more liable to misinterpret what it is that you actually intend to say. There are too many things in the world. So we need to define things as narrowly as we can. So when we establish definition, we're establishing criteria for categories that we can use to separate things in the world. So with our white swan example, if we want to be able to distinguish a swan from other types of animals, we can start by defining it as a bird. We separate birds from other animals based on criteria like they lay eggs and they have feathers rather than fur or scales. Within the category of birds, there are aquatic birds and non-aquatic birds. Being aquatic, they share characteristics like the habitat they share with beavers and alligators, but they share characteristics like having feathers and laying eggs with other birds. So if we define a swan as being an aquatic bird, we separate them from other animals like fish and beavers as well as non-aquatic birds like eagles and parrots. But most of the time we encounter a swan, we encounter it with other aquatic birds like ducks. So how do we specify a definition of a swan that will help us distinguish it from a duck? Well, we could add to the definition, the criteria of having a long neck. With each criterion, we add to the definition, we get a smaller group of facts that fit into that category, and that's a good thing. Specific definitions help us distinguish objects in the real world. Defining a swan as a large aquatic bird with a long neck allows us to quickly and easily distinguish it from beavers, ostriches, parrots, ducks, but what about flamingos? They're also large aquatic birds with long necks. Well, there's the difference in color. So we can add the criterion of white plumage. Now we have a definition that's pretty good at defining, separating swans from other animals, but there's that problem with the black swan. Our definitions have to be revised from time to time to keep them accurate. Our experience in the world and our communication with other people leads us to have these operational definitions that we used to determine how to categorize the individual facts that we come into contact with. When we directly experience something in the world, we perceive it. The things that we perceive are called percepts, but as soon as we perceive something, we quickly cycle through our preexisting concepts for the ones that match the percept. So notice the difference between a percept and a concept. If you see a German Shepherd, you recognize it as a dog and as a pet. It's a pet, but it's not a cat. It's a canine, but it's not a wolf. We share these categories with most other people, but we don't always share exactly the same definitions. Definitions establish criteria for distinguishing between things. We may share many criteria, but we may also be carrying around criteria that are not shared. One person might perceive a fully grown German Shepherd and match that percept to the concept of a cute and friendly puppy. Another person might see the exact same dog, the exact same facts, and match those percepts to the concept of a threatening attack dog. In these cases, the concept has more to do with the inference about the dog than the dog itself does. And because our concepts differ, we can look at the same perceptual information, the same facts, and choose different terms to describe them. Those terms carry with them concepts and assumptions that frame the facts. For example, during Hurricane Katrina, when New Orleans was flooded, people were trapped for days with no food or drinkable water. People often had to forage for themselves and take food and water and other necessities from abandoned stores. At the same time, some people were breaking into stores that sell electronics, jewelry, and other high priced, non-survival products. This is usually described as looting, but it's less clear how to define the act of taking something that doesn't belong to you in a survival situation. Is that still looting? Is it finding? Is it foraging? Is it stealing? Is it appropriating? When the police do what they call it commandeering. These two photos were both posted within a few hours of each other during the flooding that followed Hurricane Katrina. In both photos, people are taking food from abandoned grocery stores. The captions for the photos are slightly but conspicuously different. The guy in the top photo is described as, quote, looting a grocery store, end quote. The people in the bottom photo were described as, quote, finding bread and soda from a local grocery store, end quote. These photos were taken by different photographers and published by different media outlets, so it's not like the same person is using one word for one person and a different word for others doing the same thing. But the contrast in the descriptions quickly became the subject of debate since the man described as looting was black and the people described as finding were white. Now, when the photographers were asked about the captions they chose, the guy who chose the word looting said that he saw the person go into the shop and take the goods and that's why he wrote looting in the caption. So we have an implicit definition of what looting is. It's going into a shop and taking the goods according to the person who chose the word. Whereas the photographer who chose the word finding recognized that there was an issue in how he would describe what was going on. So he discussed it with his editor about what word they should use. Should they call it looting? And because the photographer didn't actually witness the two people in the image, in the act of looting, then he couldn't say they were looting. Well, what is the act of looting? Well, this photographer said that I believed in my opinion that they did simply find them and not looted them in the definition of the word. These people were not ducking into a store and busting down windows to get electronics. So this is how he distinguishes between looting and finding. Looting would be ducking into a store and busting down windows to get the electronics. Whereas these people weren't taking electronics, they weren't busting down windows. They were just taking things that were floating out of a flooded store. This is what he seems to be calling the definition of the word looting. Well, when we have a question about definition, frequently our first source is to go to the dictionary. And in this class I always recommend that you go to the Oxford English Dictionary because you get more than just descriptions of definitions. You also get the etymology where the word comes from but also how the word's been used over decades and if not centuries. And in the case of looting, this is the same word that was once used to describe like pirate loot. To loot, the verb meant to plunder or to sack a city or a building. And then to carry something off that you got from that attack. And the verb loot was derived from the noun loot, which describe goods, especially articles of considerable value taken from an enemy, a captured city, et cetera, in a time of war or in a wider sense, something taken by force or with violence. So we have three different definitions of the same word. The criteria that both photographers seem to use as to whether or not to choose the word loot seem to include going into the store and taking something. Whereas the guy on top actually went into the store, the couple at the bottom actually took things as they floated out of the store. The second photographer who chose not to use the word looting also added the criteria about what was taken. And his description of electronics as the objects of looting matches the Oxford English Dictionary reference to loot as something of considerable value. Whereas the food would not be of monetary value so much as immediate survival value. But notice how both of these definitions are considerably less violent. They just include walking into an abandoned store not taking something by violence, not taking something from an enemy, which is a defining criterion of loot in the dictionary. So the words we use to describe facts in reality are shaped by concepts and conceptual frames that are themselves shaped by our personal experiences, assumptions, and prejudices. These concepts lead us to choose particular words when describing perceived facts. And those words shape the way that other people conceive of what we describe. So if we imagine being downstream of this communication process. In other words, this photographer sees someone taking something from a store. He describes that as looting in his article. The photographer might have been using the definition of looting as going into a shop and taking something. Even though he was unopposed, he was not using violence and he wasn't taking something of high monetary value. Then he writes that word and having no other sorts of information, a woman who reads the caption may have the second definition of looting, the one the other photographer used, which is ducking into a store and busting down windows, so doing violence to the store itself, if not to a person, and then taking something of high value, of only monetary gain rather than survival gain. And then if she uses that word to describe this man later on, let's say that this is someone who knows this person. Let's say this guy is trying to get a job somewhere and it turns out that there's a picture of him from the time when New Orleans was flooded, described as looting. And the guy who's gonna decide whether or not this guy gets a job says that, well, if he was looting, that meant that he was taking articles of considerable value from an enemy by force or with violence. And by now, we may be looking at some of the same facts, but a lot of inferences have been attached to those facts, the visual data, the visual perception that were not there in the original scenario. That is, the concept created a frame which led to a misinterpretation of what actually happened. The words we use when describing particular things bear with them the weight of conceptual frames. And remember how coherence works. We look at a particular object and we don't just see the object itself, but we look for a frame to put it in. These frames are encapsulated in definitions. And a lot of times value judgments are embedded in those definitions. Like when we describe something as natural versus unnatural. If I say that I don't wanna eat genetically modified corn because it's unnatural. I not only mean that it was engineered by human science, but I also mean that there's something wrong with it. Maybe it's unhealthy or maybe I just think it's unhealthy. But unnatural has a negative connotation. But someone could say the same thing about non-genetically engineered corn. Teosinte, the plant that corn was cultivated from looked very different and the cobs of corn, if you could even call it that, looked more like wheat because this is what it's related to. So over centuries of selective breeding, Teosinte was slowly engineered into becoming what we now think of in America as corn. What the Europeans call maize. So modern corn is equally unnatural. It just took longer to change it. Through the same sort of selective breeding, we've also bred modern domesticated cattle from the ancient orcs. Ancient cattle herders didn't genetically engineer in a lab, the modern cattle, but by picking the ones that were more docile, the ones that were easier to herd, they took something natural and made it unnatural. The same thing with domesticated dogs. In fact, some breeds of domesticated dogs have been deliberately or unintentionally bred to become cuter and smaller and more like little toys than their wolf ancestors. But this causes problems. If you have a pug, you know they have respiratory problems. They have a hard time breathing because of the shape of their face. But domesticated animals are also unnatural, but we might want to change the criteria. We might want to say, well, that's different than genetically modified because, and as we add different criteria, if we say genetically modified are a different kind of unnatural from selectively bred, we have to add more criteria. We have to be more precise about how we define something. And notice what I'm doing here is not just adding words to a written definition like a dictionary definition. What I'm doing is selectively dividing. I'm drawing borders. I'm making finite the number of facts that could fit into the categories that I'm distinguishing. If you use the word progress when advocating change in the energy industry, what you mean by progress may be different than what someone else means by progress. One person's idea of progress might be, let's build more oil refineries and let's build more oil rigs so that we can gather more oil. Another person's idea of progress might be, instead of propping up a century old industry that is largely obsolete, let's spend more money and spend more resources developing wind and solar means of energy production. People bring different definitions, different concepts of what justice is. This is the motivating conflict in the Daredevil versus Punisher comic books and now Netflix series. Both of these guys are fighting for justice. They just have very different ideas about how you do that. Other abstract terms like freedom, liberty, civilization, loyalty, opportunity, all these terms are broad enough that people can use them to mean completely different things. And we typically take those words for granted. If I use the word justice, I might presume that you mean the same thing I do. I might presume that you are hearing the same concept that I'm trying to describe, that you have the same criteria for the term that I do. But that's very rarely the case. We see this when politicians throw words out that many of their constituents would agree to, would choose the same criteria, but other people might not choose the same criteria. So the politician Rick Santorum argued extensively that same-sex marriage does not count because it doesn't fit the definition of marriage. And he would argue that the definition is something that exists out there externally as if the definition was a fact. And he would use the comparison with a napkin. He says, I can call this napkin a paper towel, but it is a napkin, and why? Because it is what it is. But he says, you can call something whatever you want, but it doesn't change the character of what it is. So he's presuming that there is something out there in nature that objectively makes a piece of paper folded in a certain way, a napkin and not a paper towel. But let's say you're the other guy in the picture with Rick Santorum there. If you ask that guy, can you bring me a paper towel? He's probably gonna know what you're talking about. If there's not a roll of paper towels around, he'll look at the dispenser with those little square objects and retrieve one of those. Whereas if you ask him for a napkin, he would retrieve the same thing. We negotiate our definitions depending on context, depending on expectation, depending on the immediate usage. So this comparison really backfires for Santorum when he tries to then use that to justify forbidding same-sex couples from getting married. He says when some people come out and say that marriage is something else, it can be any kind of relationship and we can call it marriage. Well, no one actually says that. But he says it doesn't make it marriage. Why? Because there are certain qualities and certain things that attach to the definition of what marriage is. But he doesn't bother to make the argument for a definition. He doesn't say this is why we should define marriage this way. He just assumes that a definition is an object in the world as if a definition was the same as a fact that it was independently verifiable. When definitions are by nature, not independently verifiable. They have to be agreed upon in order to function. And we tend to forget this. We tend to use words that our particular social group, our discourse community uses a lot as if that was an objective meaning. And when we do this, we're using what the philosopher Richard Roydy calls final vocabulary. Roydy says all human beings carry about a set of words which they employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives. These are the words in which we formulate praise of our friends and contempt of our enemies, our long-term projects, our deepest self-doubts and our highest hopes. They are the words in which we tell sometimes prospectively, looking ahead, sometimes retrospectively, looking back. The story of our lives. I shall call these words a person's final vocabulary. It is final in the sense that if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no non-circular argumentative recourse. Circular argument is when you say, this is true because it's true because it's true because it's true. You don't have any good reasons so you just keep repeating the claim as if the claim was its own reason. Those words are as far as he can go with language. Beyond them, there is only helpless passivity or a resort to force. The passivity being, well, let's agree to disagree or let's just stop talking about it. Or the resort to force trying to force someone to accept your definition without a good reason. A small part of a final vocabulary is made up of thin, flexible and ubiquitous terms such as true, good, right and beautiful. We all recognize these terms as opinions. If I say that this movie was good and this movie was bad, you don't take that as a statement of fact or even a claim about a fact. You take that as a particular question of value. It's an opinion. But as Roydy points out, there are many more terms that he says contain thicker, more rigid and more parochial and is more local terms. For example, professional standards. Well, what is a professional standard? At some jobs, professional standards includes men wearing ties. At other jobs, you wouldn't want to wear a tie. If you're working around a machine, you probably don't want to wear a tie because you don't want it to get pulled into the machine and drag you into the machine with it. Different professions are gonna have different standards but the term professional standards ignores that. Also, terms like decency. If someone says, do you have no decency in response to something you do, of course, you think you have decency but you haven't agreed on the definition of that term decency. And when Roydy uses the word parochial terms, by parochial he means local. Like your particular discourse community, the people with whom you communicate most of the time, you probably don't have to be that specific in your definition. You probably don't have to say how do you define that term because you all use the term the same way most of the time. You naturally start to mold your concepts to fit the concepts they have in mind when they use the term. But that doesn't mean that that's all the term is. This is what he calls common sense. And common sense is one of those terms that we throw around a lot when I say, well, don't you know how to do this? That's just common sense. No one ever defines all of the criteria for common sense. Among what group of people is this common? Is it among all people? Is this something everyone in the world knows? Is it just something people in my community know? Is this just something that people in my area of specialization, in my career know? But Roydy says common sense is the watchword of those who unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated. To be common sensical is to take for granted that statements formulated in that final vocabulary suffice to describe and judge the beliefs, actions, and lives of those who employ alternative final vocabularies. In other words, other people who don't share the same terms, I assume that I can judge them by my terms, whether or not they share the same criteria and their definitions. When common sense is challenged, its adherents respond at force by generalizing and making explicit the rules of the language game they are accustomed to playing. Someone might say that when I use a word like professional standards, I mean you wear a collared shirt and a tie. But that's just enunciating the concept that this person had. This isn't trying to negotiate whether or not that criterion fits in this particular situation. And if no platitude formulated in the old vocabulary suffices to meet an argumentative challenge, the need to reply produces the willingness to go beyond platitudes. And that's when we have to make arguments. That's when we realize that we have to make a claim and give a reason for a definition. We can't just presume a definition should be the one that we're familiar with. We have to say, in this case, I mean this word this way. Do you agree? If not, I want to give you reasons why you should agree or listen to your reasons about why it should mean something else. And Einstein agrees. He says common sense is nothing more than the deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind before you reach the age of 18. And prejudice here is an appropriate term as long as you don't confuse it with something like racial prejudice. We typically use the word prejudice just to mean racial prejudice or gender prejudice. But in this case, it's any pre-judgment. Common sense is pre-judgment. And if something is pre-judged, it means you haven't thought about all the premises necessary in order to reach the conclusion. It's a foregone conclusion. And just like every other foregone conclusion, when you come to, when you meet resistance, when you meet someone who comes to a different conclusion, that means you need to figure out what your premises are and see which premises you do not share. So if we can't depend on common sense to lead us to matching definitions, we tend to then default to the dictionary. And that's not a bad place to start. And I recommend you start with the Oxford English Dictionary for reasons I've mentioned earlier. But you'll notice as soon as you get there that your main problem is there's too many definitions most of the time. Some of them fit the precise way you're trying to use a word, the precise concept you're trying to use, but some of them don't. So if you're using the word to mean one thing and someone else might interpret it to mean one of the other definitions, that's a problem, even though they're all found in the same dictionary. But more importantly, dictionaries follow usage. They're not authorities in themselves. You can't point to a definition and say, the dictionary says this is the definition, therefore that's it. That's all it means. You have to accept the definition that the dictionary gives you. The dictionary tries to keep up with the way language is used. It doesn't set rules that everyone else then has to follow. This has been true for as long as there were dictionaries. Some of the earliest dictionaries like the dictionary of the English language composed by the prolific writer Samuel Johnson were attempts to try to regulate things like spelling, to try to at least get people on the same page, literally, when it comes to using a word a particular way. But what he found was that by the time you add all the different ways a word is used, you find that there are too many definitions for one word, that each of those definitions has to be subdivided into other definitions. And Johnson in particular didn't take himself too seriously as any kind of word authority. In fact, he defines his job as a lexicographer, as the writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge that busies himself in tracing the original and detailing the signification of words. So not exactly an authority. When he's calling himself a harmless drudge, and he's at least saying that he's trying to be helpful, but he's not even clear if he's actually helping, but he's at least declaring that he's not harming by compiling these definitions. That means whenever we want to make an argument, we want to make a policy claim or a value claim or anything like that, we have to first agree on the meanings of the words and the way we use a word in a particular instance might be different than the way people normally use it. This is the problem that Jonah Laird confronted in his article that we read in the first case study when he had to define stress in a way that was different than the way most people thought of it. He recognizes that most people look at stress with a definition something like an unpleasant mental state with a few long-term consequences. But that idea of stress as a feeling is not an incorrect definition, but notice if he's gonna get you to understand Robert Sapolsky's research into the effects of chronic stress in the form of glucocorticoids on the immune system and on brain development, he's gotta get you to think of stress by another definition. He has to define, he has to separate out different potential meanings of the word stress and has to push aside the meaning of stress as a feeling and just focus on stress as a medical issue, as a chemistry problem. So he defines this new view of stress that our physical health is strongly linked to our emotional state. It's a molecular definition. It's one that can be quantified in terms of glucocorticoids in the blood and it's a critical risk factor predicting an even larger, an ever larger percentage of health outcomes. And more importantly, it's not an alternative. It doesn't replace another view of stress. It exists alongside the other definitions of stress such as stress as a sociological problem. He says stress can be described as a cultural condition, a byproduct of a society that leaves some people in a permanent state of unease, but it's not just that state of unease. It's also the effects that it has on the body and the effects that it has on the body may be noted in the feeling. So all three types of stress, all three definitions of stress might sometimes exist at the same time, but he's gotta separate them out so that you'll understand what Sapolsky's research is all about. Stress is a chemistry problem, not just a feeling. He further distinguishes between demand stress and control stress. When you're in control of a situation, you feel a lot of stress, but that stress goes away once you've accomplished your task whereas demand stress leaves you with more anxiety and it's more perpetual, it's more chronic. And this is the one that the Marmot study is going to show with the British civil servants employees. That study is gonna show that the demand stress leads to a much greater likelihood of death before the age of 60 than does controlled stress. But in order to understand the facts that some people are under one kind of stress and some people are under another kind of stress before we can figure out which kind of stress causes shorter life spans, we have to distinguish the two types of stress, we have to define them. And this is exactly what the Daily Mail article that tries to describe Lara's article fails to do. The Daily Mail article conflates all the definitions of stress into just one amorphous thing and the unnamed Stanford University colleague that the author cites conflates these definitions and describes stress as just a lingering feeling of tension followed by all these vague terms like fresh, like what does it mean if a person feels fresh? That's a very difficult to define concept. What is this focused calm and where does it come from that we saw in our case study leads to all kinds of problems? And that poorly defined idea of stress leads to the Alex Jones conspiracy theory appropriation of the word without actually getting the concept. So by the time the report of the Sapolsky stress vaccine makes it to the Infowars Prison Planet YouTube production, they completely misunderstand everything there is to know about Robert Sapolsky's research as described in Jonah Lara's article. So they take words like stress and vaccine and jab and this kind of thing and they have the word but they have the completely wrong definitions of all of these terms. And they frame those words in terms that completely reframe the entire concept when they use words like establishment media, scientific dictatorship, brain eating vaccines. These are all terms that import the concepts from the world of conspiracy theories and not the world of science. Then there are words like lobotomize, rewire, neuter, sterilize. And those could also be called outright falsehoods but they are words that are taken from scientific research, mostly very old and obsolete, scientific research that's no longer conducted but they seem to be used metaphorically here, their figurative language. And if that's the case, they're still misleading but they reveal a lot about how Alex Jones and his group define any kind of medical intervention. We saw the same thing with Jenny McCarthy's response to Brian Deere's article. She throws on around a lot of terms that are very misleading because they have too many potential meanings. And the one she seems to be using, the one in which the sentence would be true, does not actually describe what is happening in Brian Deere's article or what it describes. So if I take the word debate, there's no debate among scientists about any connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Debaters have to back up their claims by logically connecting facts to claims and the anti-vaccine crowd has not done that. So instead, they use a fuzzy definition of the word debate that seems to include post hoc fallacies and confirmation bias thrown up by anybody who just has a knee jerk opinion about a subject that they really don't understand. When she says things like calling Brian Deere dubious and saying that his evidence is just a series of allegations and that the response to it is just hoopla. Brian Deere thoroughly documents his case and it's clear from reading McCarthy's diatribe that she's completely unfamiliar with the case that Brian Deere constructs. So dubious here simply means that she doesn't believe the version of the conclusion that she's read in another Huffington Post article. She doesn't even know what his allegations are and so the word allegation here is just used to focus on Deere's conclusions and completely ignoring his evidence. She then uses words like stronger and determined to fight for the truth which implies that there is a fight going on, that there is an attack, that people are attacking the mothers of children with autism because they think they're weak and they wanna hurt them or something like that. But these vague terms import a concept that's completely alien and completely inappropriate to Brian Deere's evidence that Andrew Wakefield deliberately forged evidence in his study. The terms used in Ginny McCarthy's author bio in the Huffington Post is equally problematic. If she's completely misrepresented Brian Deere's case we can hardly call her honest. And if she dismisses all science and all evidence based on her own personal belief or you can hardly call that a humble. She's described as an influential activist in the world of healing and preventing autism. Notice how far we are from any kind of falsifiable claim. For one thing, you can't heal or prevent autism. Autism is primarily a genetic phenomenon and it's a spectrum disorder. At one end of the autism spectrum there are people with Asperger's syndrome who just have a little trouble fitting in socially. Not that significant. And then at the other end you have people that cannot functionally distinguish between other human beings and animate objects in the world. And as a child develops a child with who's somewhere on the autism spectrum is gonna shift their symptoms are gonna change. Sometimes they'll be worse, sometimes they'll be better just like every other child. And just like every other child as they mature many times their social understanding will improve significantly. So saying that there's healing or preventing autism is making a causal claim and that causal claim is not supported by any kind of criteria. But to even know what healing autism would mean or preventing autism would mean those terms not at all defined. So before we can establish any kind of conclusion we have to agree on the terms that we use. And if we're using the same words but we're not connecting the same concepts, if we're not connecting the same criteria, if we're not connecting those words to the same frames then the way we're framing the evidence is gonna be different from person to person. And we're not gonna be able to make our case about a policy judgment or a value judgment or a causal connection. So if we think of facts as being the base of the pyramid everybody has to agree before we can go any further there has to be something in reality that we're all pointing to that we're all dealing with. Once we establish what the facts are we're not gonna be able to describe those facts unless we're using the same definitions unless we define our concepts, our frames to decide which facts fit into them and which do not, which are outside the finite boundaries of our conceptual assumptions. And when you write a paper you don't necessarily have to do these things in this order. If I wanna make a claim about cause and effect if I wanna say that one thing causes another I don't have to agree with my reader about what thing is better than the other or what we should do about it. But I do have to agree on what the facts are and how we define our terms. Similarly, if I wanna say one thing is good or one thing is bad we don't have to agree on what causes what and we don't have to agree on what we should do but we also have to agree on how we define our terms and what the facts in the particular case are. And in the next lecture we'll distinguish between these three types of stasis. Stasis of causation, stasis of value and stasis of policy.