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like that kind of argument. The contrary of a thing isn’t the contrary; oh, dear me, no! It’s the thing itself, but as it truly is. Ask any die-hard what conservatism is; he’ll tell you it’s true socialism. And the brewer’s trade papers; they’re full of articles about the beauty of true temperance. Ordinary temperance is just gross refusal to drink; but true temperance, true temperance is something much more refined. True temperance is a bottle of claret with each meal and three double whiskies after dinner …

“What’s in a name?” Anthony went on. “The answer is, practically everything, if the name’s a good one. Freedom’s a marvellous name. That’s why you’re anxious to make use of it. You think that, if you call imprisonment true freedom, people will be attracted to the prison. And the worst of it is you’re quite right.”

(Extract from Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza, quoted by Charles N Stevenson, Ethics and Language New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944       pp 214 -215.)

The most common marker of a persuasive definition is the presence of the qualifying adjective ‘true’, ‘real’, or ‘genuine’. The most infamous users of persuasive definitions are Anglican clergy, in their homilies and sermons. ‘True love is not [insert here your own favourite example of what is clearly a case of love]: on the contrary it is [insert here your own favourite example of what is clearly something that is not a case of love, but which the priest in question is keen to promote].’ Thus we get nonsense like ‘True courage is not risking your life in a battle in which the odds favour the enemy; it is being prepared to go to gaol for your belief in peace.’

Persuasive definitions are not by any means restricted to essentially contested concepts. On the contrary, they are often words which have a pretty much agreed denotation, if not connotation also. The purpose of a persuasive definition is to get you to apply the word (with its high degree of evaluative meaning)to something to which it does not in fact apply; in other words to get you to misuse the word. The intention is transference of the evaluative component of the word’s meaning to the thing to which it has been (deliberately incorrectly) applied. People get away with persuasive definitions because the use of the auxiliary ‘true’, ‘real’, ‘truly genuine’ or whatever gives what follows an illusory profundity, and who wants to be caught out not recognising something profound?

The moral? Don’t use persuasive definitions (unless you are a somewhat vulgar polemicist, which I am sure you are not!) and expose them for what they are when others use them.

3. Paradigms – and Paradigms

In ordinary linguistic usage it is perfectly clear what a paradigm case of something is: it is a patently clear unambiguous example of something. The whooping cough is a paradigm case of a disease; it is an uncontroversial case that appears incontestable. On the other hand alcoholism is not. Some would argue that alcoholism, while it is conducive to the onset of various forms off organic deterioration, and it is a condition for which there may well be physiological, possibly genetic markers of a predisposition to alcoholism, is not itself a disease. Such critics tend to take the same line with all so-called addictions. They are not diseases but moral faults, the moral fault being weakness of will. And the way to deal with weakness of will is not wit本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。