Own your words, own your philosophy—this has been my conclusion after engaging in many inquiries in my philosophy practice. You might be surprised how much can shift in an inquiry when a word is defined, especially when the definition resonates deeply.
Definitions can have a significant clarifying effect, as Robert H. Ennis, a philosopher in the critical thinking movement, argues in Studies in Critical Thinking: “Definition, though often neglected, plays an important role in critical thinking by helping us make our positions, inquiries, and reasoning clear.” In essence, defining words is a way to define your philosophy.
I never impose definitions in my practice; I midwife them. I often ask my inquiry partners to define a word they frequently use, especially around an issue with a sense of stuckness. Most people are not clear on the meaning of the words they use, and defining them, even seemingly apparent ones, can quickly lead to their “aporic edge,” aka the edge of knowingness.
I will recommend a philosophical practice that will help define your philosophy, but first, understanding basic types of definitions will be helpful.
Types of Definition
“A statement of the meaning of a term.”
The above statement is how Wikipedia defines the word definition. There are different kinds of definitions, and I like to carve them by content and origin. A distinction regarding the content of definitions is between intensional and extensional definitions. The former places a word within a superordinate category and provides differentiating characteristics, while the latter enumerates examples. An illustration from Encyclopedia Britannica using the word "ship": an intentional definition is "vehicle for conveyance on water," and an extensional definition is "cargo ships, passenger ships, battleships, and sailing ships."
Regarding the origin of definitions, one distinction is between lexical and stipulative definitions. The former comes from a dictionary and the latter from people who assign new meanings to words. Stipulative definitions can be instrumentalized for personal gain, social manipulation, and winning arguments over co-discovering the truth, as Patrick J. Hurley explains in A Concise Introduction to Logic:
Stipulative definitions are misused in verbal disputes when one person covertly uses a word in a peculiar way and then proceeds to assume that everyone else uses that word in the same way. Under these circumstances that person is said to be using the word 'stipulatively.' In such cases the assumption that the other person use the word in the same way is rarely justified.
There are other definitions in the critical thinking literature: precising, persuasive, enumerative, ostensive (“definition by pointing”), etc. Knowing these types of definitions are not needed for owning your words, but one type must be known: based definitions. While lexical definitions come from a dictionary, and stipulative definitions come from others, based definitions have a different origin: Source.
Based definitions come from Source and will be the source of your philosophy.
Based Definitions
"Based" is a slang term used in the 1980s to mean being on crack cocaine. The rapper Lil B - the BasedGod - repurposed the word to mean something positive and life-affirming, as he described in Complex:
Based means being yourself. Not being scared of what people think about you. Not being afraid to do what you wanna do. Being positive. When I was younger, based was a negative term that meant like dopehead, or basehead. People used to make fun of me. They was like, "You're based." They'd use it as a negative. And what I did was turn that negative into a positive. I started embracing it like, "Yeah, I'm based." I made it mine. I embedded it in my head. Based is positive.
It was repurposed again by those on the dissident right as a catchall to refer to not being “woke.” The term has since morphed to mean something edgy, heterodox, and irreverent to mainstream opinions. In other words, being based now means pushing back against those using stipulative definitions, usually from legacy media, government agencies, and those who position themselves as moral authorities.
I will honor the previous uses of the word, but will be using it closer to the etymology of the word “base”: "bottom of anything considered as its support, foundation, pedestal," or its military usage: "secure ground from which operations proceed.” To own your words is to have them based on foundations with secure grounds.
These secure grounds are Source. This elusive phrase often refers to something immanent, ever-present, and deep within. Ria Baeck, the initiator of an intersubjective “we space” practice called Collective Presencing, describes it as something that “points to the depths, to something deep inside.” Rick Rubin, the American record producer, understands it as “the organizing principle of everything,” with our bodies being the antennas that connect to it.
There are various ways to connect to Source, Ria's Collective Presencing, which happens weekly at The Stoa, is one way, as are practices inspired by Otto Scharmer's "Theory U." Regardless of the practice, the usual steps are settling into the here and now, quieting the mind, and sensing into the body. Rich insights then emerge, with a knowing urge that wants you to express the insight with speech, movement, or some form of art.
However, connecting with Source requires a certain kind of space.
Resonant Spaces
To own your philosophy, you must liberate yourself from dispirited definitions lazily adopted or ones stipulated by those with selfish agendas. Lexical definitions often are uninspired and muddled, and stipulative ones are fear-based, as you could be socially reprimanded if you do not use them. Based definitions, however, resonate deeply.
Hartmut Rosa, a German sociologist and political scientist, describes four qualities of resonance:
Affection. It calls you in some way.
Self-efficacy. You are moved to answer the call.
Transformation. The calling and answering led to a transformation.
Uncontrollability. Nobody can control the resonant process.
Hartmut describes the resonant process as having an elusiveness, similar to how Rubin describes Source: “It may be helpful to think of Source as a cloud. Clouds never truly disappear. They change form. They turn into rain and become part of the ocean, and then evaporate and return to being clouds.” When something comes from Source, it will call you, move you, and transform you, often subtly. It will always be elusive, like a cloud, forever changing form.
The resonance process always starts with affection, something inwardly reached, and conscious inward reaching is what those in the emerging "sensefullness movement," such as embodiment practitioners, somatic psychotherapists, and intersubjective meditators, are teaching. Grasping at Source through mental abstractions through the mind alone is a fool's errand. The wiser approach is being deeply attuned to the body's inner workings, allowing the “bodymind” to be an antenna for Source.
This deep attuning requires a space that affords leisure, not leisure in the colloquial sense, akin to pleasant relaxation, but in the philosophical sense, as Catholic philosopher Josef Pieper uses the term. Leisure, according to Pieper, is “an attitude of mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to receive the reality of the world.” It fosters a timeless state, is essential for philosophical inquiry to occur, and, as Pieper argues, is the basis of culture itself.
Hartmut argues for “resonant spaces,” spaces that invite the resonant process. Resonate spaces are what brings the state of leisure about. The Stoa is a resonant space. One regular session at The Stoa is Collective Journalling, which happens every morning and where I am writing this piece at the moment. The basis of the session: we journal together in silence, with each person engaging in philosophical inquiry about something that resonates with them in the here and now.
Connecting with Source requires resonant spaces that afford leisure, where based practices have a home.
A Based Practice
We have covered two qualities of based definitions:
They come from Source.
They require a resonant space that affords leisure.
There is a third quality:
Regular practice is needed.
When you own one word by assigning it a new definition, it will unsettle related words that are previously unexamined, which in turn will unsettle any unexamined philosophy. Owning your words is dangerous, as it can undermine your philosophy and turn your life upside down. Being senseful of your ecology of definitions while having a resonant space to practice defining and redefining words will be needed.
I will not prescribe a step-by-step practice for owning your definitions. Instead, I will invite you to create your own practice. Here are some things to consider when you do…
Any practice that affords capacity with the "felt sense," the pre-cognitive sense of an inner knowing from within the body, is recommended. The felt sense connects the body to the mind in a way that makes a bodymind whole. Eugene Gendlin's Focusing affords sophistication with the felt senses, and the related Thinking at the Edge (TAE) helps one become senseful with words and logic. Both Focusing and TAE can be repurposed for formulating based definitions.
The other consideration is how you choose the words. You can engage in the TAE approach, where you start with the felt sense and attempt to map a word and definition to it. Or, like me, you can engage in a philosophical inquiry with yourself via journalling or with friends of virtue in "dialogos." When a sense of stuckness occurs in the inquiry, you find the unexamined word ready to be owned.
Lastly, similar to Jill Nephew’s approach with Inqwire, you can start with a “core definiendum,” a word that often shows up at the base of people’s philosophies when you engage in Socratic inquiry with them. I asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT for examples…
Here are ten others to consider:
God
Reality
Virtue
Power
Beauty
Happiness
Enlightenment
Peace
Hope
Creativity
Once you choose a word, you can either attempt to define it on your own, using the intensional or extensional definitional format, or you can collect definitions from dictionaries and see if any philosophers you respect have defined the word before, then take the definition that resonates the most and rewrite it until it resonates even more. To reference step four of the Focusing process …
Resonance. Go back and forth between the felt sense and the [definition]. Check how they resonate with each other. See if there is a little bodily signal that lets you know there is a fit. To do it, you have to have the felt sense there again, as well as the [definition]. Let the felt sense change, if it does, and also the [definition], until they feel just right in capturing the quality of the felt sense.
When you define a word in a way that resonates, it will have a satisfying sensation, similar to putting down a puzzle piece that fits with the rest of the puzzle. It clicks. When this clicking sensation occurs, you have a based definition.
It will help to have a place to record these definitions because your ecology of definitions will be living with a protean essence.1 When you encounter new uses of the words you have owned, you might discover the new use resonates with you more, requiring more redefining.
***
Based definitions will have more aliveness than lexical ones because they are living, and you will not need to stipulate them. There is no need to demand others to use your definitions, which are constantly up for negotiation through the resonance process.
Words are up for grabs; once you own one word, you will want to own another. Soon you will know that the "spirit of the word" is far greater than the "letter of the word." A spiritual rewilding of words is needed for a new agency to be born, with each individual owning a philosophy bespoke to them.
Debate Appendix
“If you wish to converse with me, define your terms.” - Voltaire
The culture war is a war to capture your words. If you do not own your words, you do not own your philosophy. If you do not own your philosophy, you do not own your life. If you do not own your life, you do not have one.
To navigate the culture war without getting captured, owning your words will be needed, as owned words offer “psychosecurity” (PsySec), the protection of one’s mind against influence operations. The more based definitions you have, the more PsySec your philosophy will provide you.
Suppose you are in a culture war debate, and your interlocutor has become combative, using stipulative definitions. In that case, there is a simple conversational move you can do to shift the vibe toward a more philosophical space: ask them to define a word they are using.
This move will trip up most people, as most do not own their words. If they do define it, you can press them on their definition and ask them to define another word, then another. Always look for the core definiendum at their philosophy's base. I call this technique the "infinite regress defense."
This technique will put your interlocutor at their aporic edge, inviting them into a philosophical inquiry, or you will expose that they are conversing with a hidden agenda. If your interlocutor has philosophical openness, and the debate consists of a "merely verbal dispute" - a semantic dispute over the definition of a word - then you can use philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers's "method of elimination":
Locate the word at the heart of the dispute, then ban it from your vocabularies for the duration of the conversation.
Re-articulate your positions without the word.
You have a verbal dispute if there is no disagreement with the re-articulation. If there is still disagreement, you may have a factual dispute, which could require assessing the epistemic methodologies in use.
The culture war is full of stipulative definitions. The “Red Blue Translator” from AllSides will give you an idea of the definitions being stipulated in the war. You do not need to adopt these definitions if they do not resonate.
You now have a practice to own your words, a technique to defend yourself from those using stipulative definitions, and a method to invite people into a philosophical inquiry that will be mutually transformational.
Are you looking for a resonant space to own your words? If so, you can join me at Collective Journalling, happening Monday to Friday at 8:00 AM ET at The Stoa. You can sign-up via Patreon ($5 a month). We do a check-in, then journal about what matters most in silence together, and share a passage before we close—90 mins in total. You can come and go as you please throughout the session.
Tiago Forte's “Building a Second Brain” (BASB) approach is one way to record your based definitions and steward your ecology of definitions. I use Workflowy for this.Thanks for reading Less Foolish! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.