Roger Scrutton

I heard Roger Scruton getting quite an extended interview on the ‘Today’ programme this morning. He was being given time to explain, at some length, how right-wing commentators were being misrepresented and silenced. A theme of his complaint was how his views were sometimes misunderstood because people didn’t attend closely to the meaning of what he was saying.

An example he used was a comment he had once made to the effect that ‘there was no such thing as date rape’. In the interview, he explained that what he meant, in the context of the reported discussion, was that there was no such crime as date rape, that it didn’t appear in the statutes. He then went on to say that we had to distinguish between cases where someone was attacked and raped and cases where a night out had ‘gone a bit wrong’ (possibly not an exact quote, but not materially misleading).

Words only have definite meanings if we agree (at least tacitly) about what these meanings are – in effect, about how these words are used. No real conversation starts by defining terms – we can only converse if we already share a great many semantic ‘hinges’. When we depend on one of these, but find ourselves lost in ambiguity or disagreement, it is not helpful to resort to definitions. This simple enlarges the arena of contention.

What we need to do, what we actually do in ‘real’ conversations, is stop, look at each other, and wonder ‘Well, what do you mean by ….?’

It is a technique of Scruton and other traditionalist commentators (Peterson, certainly) to toss ‘definition’ bombs into a conversation in order to derail it. “Aha, but you see what I mean by an ‘atheist’ is …”.

This is a kind of semantic authoritarianism, and it is often justified as a response to ‘relativism’. This dilemma – having to choose between stipulation and incoherence – is exactly the dilemma posed by open question paradoxes.

The ‘What do you mean by… ?’ question reveals its depth here. We may ask it explicitly (the case philosophers are inclined to focus on) or we may make tacit explorations – trying, by experiment, to discover a way of talking that allows the mutual conversation to continue. The conversation we are having now is the recursive root of the whole edifice of intelligibility. When we give it up – either by authoritarian stipulation or by reducing it to tribal signalling – we consign the whole to the flames.

Scruton can only have a conversation with someone about date rape if they are both talking about the same thing. Resorting to definitions and elisions may be a fun game he can report to his mates in the pub later, but that’s not really the relevant context …