Definitions

Abstract

MORE bathers have heard of the jelly fish, even seen it, than could depict its shifting outlines, translucent as the sea in which they merge and blur, or grasp the slipperiness of its floating substance. Gunboat diplomacy is equally familiar and no less amorphous. Its scope and nature are not easily discerned: they resist the simplicity of a single, a priori definition. Instead the subject must be enveloped and, step by step, isolated from its fluid and shadowy environment. This process of definition by elimination is necessarily arbitrary. In the absence of any consensus of received opinion doubt and disagreement are not merely permissible but justified. It is the need to fix a starting-point, not its self-evident validity, that demands precision, even pedantry, at the outset of an inevitably speculative venture across the horizons of the future. The more categorical the statements that follow, the more they will need, but for the avoidance of tedious repetition, will not receive, the perpetual qualification: ‘for the purposes of this inquiry’.

‘When I use a word’ Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’

Carroll¹