...and if this leads to a conflict, asking who is right is meaningless (except insofar as everyone can reach an answer that’s valid only for himself, in terms of his own morality).
So if I live in the same society with people whose morality differs from mine, and the good-fences-make-good-neighbors solution is not an option, as it often isn’t, then who gets to decide whose morality gets imposed on the other side?
That two people mean different things by the same word doesn’t make all questions asked using that word meaningless, or even hard to answer.
If by “castle” you mean “a fortified structure”, while I mean “a fortified structure surrounded by a moat”, who will be right if we’re asked if the Chateau de Gisors is a castle? Any confusion here is purely semantic in nature. If you answer yes and I answer no, we won’t have given two answers to the same question, we’ll have given two answers to two different questions. If Psy-Kosh says that the Chateau de Gisors is a fortified structure but it is not surrounded by a moat, he’ll have answered both our questions.
Now, once this has been clarified, what would it mean to ask who gets to decide whose definition of ‘castle’ gets imposed on the other side? Do we need a kind of meta-definition of castle to somehow figure out what the one true definition is? If I could settle this issue by exercising power over you, would it change the fact that the Chateau de Gisors is not surrounded by a moat? If I killed everyone who doesn’t mean the same thing by the word ‘castle’ than I do, would the sentence “a fortified structure” become logically equivalent to the sentence “a fortified structure surrounded by a moat”?
In short, substituting the meaning of a word for the word tends to make lots of seemingly difficult problems become laughably easy to solve. Try it.
That two people mean different things by the same word doesn’t make all questions asked using that word meaningless, or even hard to answer.
If by “castle” you mean “a fortified structure”, while I mean “a fortified structure surrounded by a moat”, who will be right if we’re asked if the Chateau de Gisors is a castle? Any confusion here is purely semantic in nature. If you answer yes and I answer no, we won’t have given two answers to the same question, we’ll have given two answers to two different questions. If Psy-Kosh says that the Chateau de Gisors is a fortified structure but it is not surrounded by a moat, he’ll have answered both our questions.
Now, once this has been clarified, what would it mean to ask who gets to decide whose definition of ‘castle’ gets imposed on the other side? Do we need a kind of meta-definition of castle to somehow figure out what the one true definition is? If I could settle this issue by exercising power over you, would it change the fact that the Chateau de Gisors is not surrounded by a moat? If I killed everyone who doesn’t mean the same thing by the word ‘castle’ than I do, would the sentence “a fortified structure” become logically equivalent to the sentence “a fortified structure surrounded by a moat”?
In short, substituting the meaning of a word for the word tends to make lots of seemingly difficult problems become laughably easy to solve. Try it.