> Please define Emphatic for us Ken?
> Please Define Positivists as opposed to Marxist for us Ken?
> Please define logocentric for us Ken?
> Please define Freud's contribution to the mind for us Ken?
> Please define an acceptable role for science in your
philosophy Ken?
> Please define evil for us Ken?
> Please define pure world disclosure Ken?
> Please explain how forces exist that should be Ken?
The question of definitions, which is a methodological question to be sure, has got to be one of the most ill-examined phenomenon in academia today. The demand to 'define' what one is talking about is both careless and thoughtless. What exactly is expected here? In order to define something one must dominate the term. It must be possessed, controlled, and mastered. Of course when it is put in this context the request to define a concept seems pretty silly - if not downright ignorant. Who, after all, owns the 'master' language... the request itself stems from a theological / mechanical framework, where everything is set in stone and chiseled accordingly. To define a word or a concept, one *must* take an instrumental and almost barbaric attitude toward language. The very question is indicative of a kind of totalitarianism. However these questions are often asked, and demanded, of people.
One might attempt to sidestep the problem by providing, out of courtesy I suppose, a functional definition. A definition, for all intents and purposes and, given all things being equal (HA!), that is restricted to 'the paper' or 'a' thesis. Of course this requires that one kick the bottom out of any kind of conception of truth or appropriateness. The definition becomes arbitrary and exchangeable - just like workers in the factory or cans of soup on the shelf. If one wants to retain a perspective that is reflective of and on reality then this certainly isn't an intelligible alternative. Truth probably shouldn't be sacrificed because it is convenient to do so.
To go back to my initial point - about the demand to define a variable - to attempt a definition, to follow through on a logic of domination, for whatever reason, commits an act of violence against the idea in question. To define a term, outside of the context in which the concept was originally used, changes, inalterably, the meaning of its initial use. To define a concept is to contradict the sense in which the idea was used in another context. To make sense of an idea, embedded within a framework of ideas presented in a thesis, outside of the work is ridiculous. The demand of a reader to define... to control language, is equally a demand to destroy that very language.
Given the structural impossibility of definitions, that are coherent in any reasonable kind of way, it might be best to try to give a sense of the idea in the context in which it first appeared, with the acknowledgement that even this is a distortion and merely a representation, and in and of itself, something completely new. It is in this sense that an emphatic approach to language is appropriate. Language then is not, in an ideological way, reduced to a technical or bureaucratic cog, rather in a dynamic and creative way, a way in which a particular human being sees fit to express themself. And this isn't novel or innovative. For a long time now people have recognized that language is subject to interpretation. But the desire to take revenge against freedom, against creativity, against something that one does not possess, is understandable even if it is misguided.
ken, the system is wrong, the whole is false