ShilohCat, I also appreciate your effort in keeping the discussion civil, and I'll gladly move on. But, before I do, please let me say one last thing related to "definitions" in general.
Social science has always had difficulty dealing with definitions. Your struggle with conservative or liberal goes along the same path. Terms such as these may be referred to as "emergent properties". Emergent properties are properties of the whole, and cannot be deduced from analyzing their separate parts alone.
Let me give you a few examples in which we could go back and forth forever arguing the definitions of; Love, Happiness, success, failure, life, death, democracy, freedom, culture. Because we might argue over the precise definition of these words, it doesn't mean we should remove them from our vernacular, or believe they have no real meaning at all.
Another interesting thing about emergent properties are they must be reproduced continuously in order to give them sustainability. If the process that generates them comes to an end, they cease to exist.
Life, love, happiness, failure, liberal, or conservative can be there for one moment and then cease to be there in another time. That doesn't mean they never existed in the framework of our thinking. It means they need to be continuously renewed or they die.
To avoid pitfalls when defining an emergent properties one has to measure more then one manifestation of them. This explains why you will almost always find an exception to your "definitional" desire of perfect clarity related to the terms "liberal" or "conservative". |
