RadiantDanceMachine said:
Definitions are indeed arbitrary, which is to say that they can be anything. I can assign any meaning I want to any term. Dictionaries are an effort to have *common* meaning so in every day conversation we can actually understand what one another is saying. If you notice, dictionaries often have several different definitions for words because of their usage. Standard practice in philosophy to define terms you're using which tend to have non-specific meaning or create a neologism. A definition needs to have a certain level of specificity especially if we're going to use the word in an argument. Otherwise you'll never be able to make a proper inference from it. Etymology is really not an argument. It just displays why someone made up this particular definition for this particular word. If I do not wish to use the definitions which are currently available, I do not have to. I almost always provide definitions for terms I adopt in order to preclude misunderstanding about their meaning. |
Sounds don't have meaning. There is no reason that the sounds c-a-t have to mean a four legged animals. But words are part of language, which is a system made to erect meaning. You of course could use the sounds c-a-t to refer to a beverage made from lemon juice, water, and sugar, but that would be highly counterproductive.
If you choose not to use any of the common definitions, then you run into the problem of needing to define terms every conversation you have. Sometimes it is necessary to define terms that aren't clearly defined, but if your goal is to communicate, your definition still has to have some connection to the common meaning, and in general it can't be something that only you believe the meaning to be. So, it's not arbitrary. You can't say "an atheist is a squid". I mean... you could do that, but that kind of thing would defeat the purpose of language.
In the case of "agnostic" there is a clear meaning to the word. It is fairly well defined and generally accepted by the atheist community. When theists use agnostic to mean agnostic atheist, they are inaccurate. Denying the existence of agnostic atheism is an attempt to force the view that there is definitively no god upon people who do not believe that to be the case. Theists define what atheism and agnostic mean, and then assume those positions apply to self identified atheists, without bothering to actually find out what they believe. It's a strawman argument, that he was using even after I explained the meaning of the word.
Basically, I identified myself as an agnostic atheist, explained what it meant, showed clearly how the terms are not mutally exclusive, and a second later he's like "nu-uh" there's no such thing. It irked me.
