The one comes to you and says:
Long have I pondered the meaning of the word "Art", and at last I've found what seems to me a satisfactory definition: "Art is that which is designed for the purpose of creating a reaction in an audience."
Just because there's a word "art" doesn't mean that it has a meaning, floating out there in the void, which you can discover by finding the right definition.
It feels that way, but it is not so.
Wondering how to define a word means you're looking at the problem the wrong way—searching for the mysterious essence of what is, in fact, a communication signal.
Now, there is a real challenge which a rationalist may legitimately attack, but the challenge is not to find a satisfactory definition of a word. The real challenge can be played as a single-player game, without speaking aloud. The challenge is figuring out which things are similar to each other—which things are clustered together—and sometimes, which things have a common cause.
If you define "eluctromugnetism" to include lightning, include compasses, exclude light, and include Mesmer's "animal magnetism" (what we now call hypnosis), then you will have some trouble asking "How does electromugnetism work?" You have lumped together things which do not belong together, and excluded others that would be needed to complete a set. (This example is historically plausible; Mesmer came before Faraday.)
We could say that electromugnetism is a wrong word, a boundary in thingspace that loops around and swerves through the clusters, a cut that fails to carve reality along its natural joints.
Figuring where to cut reality in order to carve along the joints—this is the problem worthy of a rationalist. It is what people should be trying to do, when they set out in search of the floating essence of a word.
And make no mistake: it is a scientific challenge to realize that you need a single word to describe breathing and fire. So do not think to consult the dictionary editors, for that is not their job.
What is "art"? But there is no essence of the word, floating in the void.
Perhaps you come to me with a long list of the things that you call "art" and "not art":
The Little Fugue in G Minor: Art.
A punch in the nose: Not art.
Escher's Relativity: Art.
A flower: Not art.
The Python programming language: Art.
A cross floating in urine: Not art.
Jack Vance's Tschai novels: Art.
Modern Art: Not art.
And you say to me: "It feels intuitive to me to draw this boundary, but I don't know why—can you find me an intension that matches this extension? Can you give me a simple description of this boundary?"
So I reply: "I think it has to do with admiration of craftsmanship: work going in and wonder coming out. What the included items have in common is the similar aesthetic emotions that they inspire, and the deliberate human effort that went into them with the intent of producing such an emotion."
Is this helpful, or is it just cheating at Taboo? I would argue that the list of which human emotions are or are not aesthetic is far more compact than the list of everything that is or isn't art. You might be able to see those emotions lighting up an fMRI scan—I say this by way of emphasizing that emotions are not ethereal.
But of course my definition of art is not the real point. The real point is that you could well dispute either the intension or the extension of my definition.
You could say, "Aesthetic emotion is not what these things have in common; what they have in common is an intent to inspire any complex emotion for the sake of inspiring it." That would be disputing my intension, my attempt to draw a curve through the data points. You would say, "Your equation may roughly fit those points, but it is not the true generating distribution."
Or you could dispute my extension by saying, "Some of these things do belong together—I can see what you're getting at—but the Python language shouldn't be on the list, and Modern Art should be." (This would mark you as a gullible philistine, but you could argue it.) Here, the presumption is that there is indeed an underlying curve that generates this apparent list of similar and dissimilar things—that there is a rhyme and reason, even though you haven't said yet where it comes from—but I have unwittingly lost the rhythm and included some data points from a different generator.
Long before you know what it is that electricity and magnetism have in common, you might still suspect—based on surface appearances—that "animal magnetism" does not belong on the list.
Once upon a time it was thought that the word "fish" included dolphins. Now you could play the oh-so-clever arguer, and say, "The list: {Salmon, guppies, sharks, dolphins, trout} is just a list—you can't say that a list is wrong. I can prove in set theory that this list exists. So my definition of fish, which is simply this extensional list, cannot possibly be 'wrong' as you claim."
Or you could stop playing nitwit games and admit that dolphins don't belong on the fish list.
You come up with a list of things that feel similar, and take a guess at why this is so. But when you finally discover what they really have in common, it may turn out that your guess was wrong. It may even turn out that your list was wrong.
You cannot hide behind a comforting shield of correct-by-definition. Both extensional definitions and intensional definitions can be wrong, can fail to carve reality at the joints.
Categorizing is a guessing endeavor, in which you can make mistakes; so it's wise to be able to admit, from a theoretical standpoint, that your definition-guesses can be "mistaken".
I disagree with you (kind of). The fact that the word art exists does, in fact, imply that it has a meaning...for each individual who uses it.
There are no absolute classifiers. Even if there were, we could not know them. Our knowledge is necessarily defined in terms of our own experience and the computations we have performed on this experience.
It is useful to think of the "meaning" of a term as the way in which that term relates to more primitive terms. This is not necessarily a list (e.g. Post-modernism cannot be defined in terms of a list). This might be a deduction - a history of deduction - whatever. For instance, what is a good definition for "Post-Modernism?" Perhaps we must appeal to a large body of knowledge - the point is that the result, the "meaning," must be at minimum useful to perform computations (computations above and beyond classification, btw - a reason that meaning can include non-necessary information).
So can we justifiably ask the question "what is the meaning of art?"
Sure, but my claim is that this is a massively sugared/somewhat poorly expressed question rather than an assertion of the absolute existence of the term "art" and the absolute existence of its definition. The questions we might really be asking (perhaps in parallel) are:
What is the use of a definition of art? What is a useful definition for art? Can a single definition exist (which satisfied all of our classifications)? Are our classifications wrong or strange? What is my personal definition of art? What is the context in which we are trying to define art?
The attempt to answer the question "what is the definition of X?" is often really the attempt to examine a deeper, more difficult to explain question. For instance, in the context of the example of "if no one hears a tree fall, does it make a sound" the question "what is the definition of sound?" can really be multiple questions (one or more of the questions above).
My claim is that people are not good enough at de-sugaring their own questions to actually attack them/think about them flexibly/precisely. Let me propose a simple mechanism which I think produces this phenomenon:
You have a conflict of definition (e.g. you and a friend disagree on whether Modern Art is in fact Art). On a computational level you might realize what the problem is. Perhaps you do not have a well-established context (since the definition of the term depends on context). Perhaps you have had significantly different experiences of things which "are modern art" in the sense of being culturally accepted as such. But in either case you are probably too inarticulate to explain exactly what the conflict is. Thus, you use the only tool available to you. You flail around and try to concoct a lingusitic expression of your conflict. You ask "well, what's your definition of ART then!?!"
I think that we perform this sort of operation a lot:
Well articulated intuition -> linguistic expression (loses resolution) -> poorly articulated intuition.
(another simple example of this phenomenon is an exasperated inarticulate man yelling "god, i hate women" - probably he does hate all women or claim anything general about women . He just doesn't have sufficient articulation to say "i am frustrated by my lack of success with women and do not understand them and therefore my frustration grows with each failed attempt at mating one - in addition, i experience a feeling of lack of self-worth which adds to my frustration and further confuses me." After he says "I hate women" he might actually believe he hates women since he re-translates his linguistic statement into feelings/belief.)
What are your thoughts on this phenomenon? I'd really like to know.
Do you think that a significant portion of the population harbors implicit or explicit delusions that words exist as absolutes and have definitions which also exist as absolutes? Or do you think something more complicated is going on? What, precisely, is the nature of the bias?