The ordinary language philosopher Raiziel Abelson divides schools of thought about what a definition is into three groups1: essentialism, prescriptivism, and linguistic theories. Roughly an essentialist will be looking for the essence of a word, a prescriptivist will look for semantic rules which define a word, and a linguist theorist would look at how a word is used. In this post, I will focus on the prototypical essentialist, Plato.
Let’s consider one of Plato’s presumptive earlier dialogues, Meno, which starts off with Meno asking Socrates if virtue can be taught, and Socrates responds by saying that he cannot say whether virtue can be taught or not because he doesn’t know what it is. He then continues to state that he has never known anyone who does know what it is.
The is the beginning of the elenchus, and soon Meno proposes several types of virtue (courage, temperance, wisdom, magnanimity), to which Socrates agrees are indeed virtues, but then asks what do they all have in common:
And now, in your turn, you are to fulfill your promise, and tell me what virtue is in the universal; and do not make a singular into a plural, as the facetious say of those who break a thing, but deliver virtue to me whole and sound, and not broken into a number of pieces: I have given you the pattern.
Plato — Meno: Translated by Benjamin Jowett
Here we get to the heart of what Plato’s type of essentialist definition is and isn’t. It’s not a list of examples of something. Rather, it’s finding what examples of a given word all have in common. In other words, what is the word’s specific essence? (Suffice it to say, in the Meno for the word virtue, this is never answered, and the dialogue ends in aporia.)
Now, let’s apply this in consideration of a definition of health.
We may well give a list of examples which we all agree are examples of good health—the winner of the New York City Marathon, a child playing outside all day with ease, a Navy Seal at the peak of their career— but what do they all have in common? In other words, what is the essence of their health? A lack of disease? A vigorous spirit? Mental fortitude?
What if the winner of the New York City Marathon has a microscopic, pre-symptomatic ovarian tumor? Is she healthy? How about if the child has only one leg? Is he still healthy? How about if the Navy Seal has optimally treated depression?
Suffice it to say, using examples to define health is going to be problematic in searching for the essence of what health is, at least in a Platonic sense. But perhaps we need to look for another essentialist’s approach to definition, and who else would be better than Aristotle?
- Raiziel Abelson, “Defintions,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967), 314-324.