From Essence to Meaning - another discussion with my son 

Kili and I were arguing over whether this is a toboggan:

                             

We both agree that this is a toboggan:

                               

A toboggan in my dialect of English is a hat for winter. The first recorded use of the word toboggan for a hat, as I read, was in 1929. Here is what I found:

The word “toboggan” comes from the Micmac word for sled: topaĝan. As this tribal word was adopted into French-Canadian vocabulary, its modern-day spelling transformed. With these changes came other variations in meaning and application, some of which vary dramatically from region to region. Once a word predominantly centered in the northeast, topaĝan in the form of “toboggan” can now be heard around the world in its use for describing winter sleds.

Toboggans generally refer to long sleds used for recreational purposes in the winter. This definition accurately reflects the word topaĝan’s Micmac origin. However, as time progressed, the last century saw enough shifts in the English language to affect even the usage of a new word like toboggan. As those who ride toboggans must dress up warmly against the winter weather, resulting in the wearing of knit caps and other accessories, the word “toboggan” came to mean more than just a sled.

Today, should you travel different regions of North America, it is likely that you will find pockets where commonly used words have a completely different and uncommon use. For example, the word “toboggan”. Although unmistakably to describe the long and heavy sled used for recreation in the winter, “toboggan” has come to mean “knit cap” in other parts of the continent. This trend can be explained as a kind of metonymy that developed as knit caps were commonly worn while riding toboggans. However, the use of “toboggan” as a sled remains the most popular choice for North America. (dictionary.kiwi.com)

 

     How would one define its essential features? Is the material accidental and essential? Is whether it rolls up at the end accidental or essential?

     I asked ChapGPT to define toboggan (as a hat, not a sled). Here is the result:

 

To define the essential features of a toboggan (as a hat, not a sled), we must distinguish between what makes it essentially a toboggan and what is accidental to a particular toboggan. These are the features without which it would not be recognized as a toboggan hat:

·        A knitted or fabric winter cap – The material can vary, but the concept entails a head covering designed for warmth in cold weather.

·        Close-fitting – It is not a broad-brimmed hat or loose-fitting headwear; it is meant to hug the head snugly.

·        Usually extends over the ears (or can be pulled down to cover them) – This is a functional aspect that distinguishes it from purely decorative hats.

·        Soft and flexible – Unlike structured hats (e.g., fedoras, cowboy hats), the toboggan is made of pliable material that conforms to the shape of the head.

 

This confirms my own understanding.

Now the accidental features, the contingent features that vary and are not definitional – again, from ChatGPT:

·        Material – Wool, cotton, acrylic, or synthetic blends all qualify. A hat made of metal or hard plastic would no longer be a toboggan.

·        Presence of a cuff – Some toboggans have a folded brim, but this is optional.

·        Pom-pom or no pom-pom – While some versions feature a decorative pom-pom, its presence or absence does not define the hat.

·        Rolled-up or slouchy fit – A toboggan may be worn rolled up to sit above the ears or left long to cover more of the head and ears.

·        Color or pattern – A bright red, striped, or plain black toboggan is still a toboggan.

 

Thus, a philosophically Aristotelian definition might be:

 

A soft, close-fitting, knitted or fabric winter hat, designed for warmth, typically covering or capable of covering the ears.

 

We can say: that definition identifies the concept expressed in my dialect by the word toboggan. Kili was still not convinced – is he just mistaken? Say his English teacher corrected even his attempt to call his hat a toboggan, saying a toboggan is a sled, not a hat, and my dialect has incorporated an incorrect use of the word toboggan into its linguistic habits. Would he be right?

. . .

 

  Now why for Heidegger or Wittgenstein would this definition – which let's assume clearly draws borders around the concept (it doesn’t; there are fuzzy borders) – not express its meaning or even its 'logical' meaning? Clearly, even though we assume an Aristotelian essential definition draws clear conceptual borders, Heidegger and Wittgenstein would each challenge whether such a definition truly captures the meaning of toboggan in any deep sense.

     For Wittgenstein (especially in the Philosophical Investigations), meaning is not given by definitions with necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by how a word is used in life. The word toboggan does not have its meaning in some abstract logical structure – the proposition – but in the way it functions in different contexts. If someone from another dialect or region does not know the word toboggan as a winter hat (perhaps they only know it as a sled), no list of essential features would make them "see" what it means. As with my son. They would have to observe how it is used in a particular form of life. Since we live in Germany and I am the only source of native language use in my son’s life, that is difficult for him to do. For Wittgenstein anyway, meaning is not captured by borders but rather by family resemblance across many uses - which Kili does not really have access to. (If he lived in the USA he would notice that some people might call a looser-knit beanie a toboggan, while others might reserve it for a particular style. There is no fixed essence governing its use, only overlapping and shifting conventions based on analogical thinking. Logical meaning in Wittgenstein’s later view is thus not an internal essence but presupposes practice. Kili's practice is based on his personal experience and the idiosyncratic parts of his personality.) 

    This does challenge Aristotle. The Aristotelian definition draws borders, but Wittgenstein would say that real-world language-use is often less rigid, more flexible. A purely logical language wouldn’t work humanly. If someone calls a fleece-lined cap a toboggan in their dialect, there is no fact of the matter that they are "wrong." The definition does not explain how we actually learn the word toboggan, which is through immersion in a way of speaking, not through formal definition. So for Wittgenstein, the Aristotelian definition can be useful, but it does not define meaning itself, which is always contextual, practical, and embedded in life.

. . .

   Heidegger, in Being and Time, would critique an essentialist definition for reducing Being to a set of properties, rather than understanding how an object shows up in lived experience (Erschlossenheit or disclosure). A toboggan is not just a thing with properties; it is something we use in particular ways that are part of our world, the particular world of the southern and midwestern USA in the 1960’s. If you were to ask, "What is a toboggan?" Heidegger would say that to truly grasp its meaning, you must look at how the toboggan is revealed in everyday human existence, what it shows itself to be. The concept toboggan means different things for different existential contexts, to take just some obvious examples:

·        For a child: a source of warmth and comfort in winter.

·        For a factory worker: a product in a manufacturing process.

·        For someone hearing the word for the first time: a puzzle with no intrinsic meaning.

Defining a toboggan in terms of properties (knitted, close-fitting, etc.) misses the more fundamental question: What does toboggan mean as part of Dasein’s world, Dasein being Heidegger’s term of art for human being as a being that is there, in a world?

. . .

So:

Aristotle: The definition sets out necessary and sufficient conditions that capture the essence of a toboggan.

 Wittgenstein: No fixed essence... toboggan means whatever it is used to mean in actual linguistic practices. The definition is a summary of use, not a boundary. For Wittgenstein, meaning lies in the practice, not in conceptual precision.

 Heidegger: The definition is too abstract; meaning depends on how toboggans appear in lived experience (e.g., as warmth, as protection, as part of seasonal rituals). For Heidegger, meaning emerges through being-in-the-world, not from abstract analysis.

    Meaning, as opposed to making a taxonomy, is lived, contextual, and dynamic rather than fixed and essential. The question is not whether a clear essential is possible or not – we have to "look and see" as Wittgenstein wrote – but what it has to do with meaning. By extension, a statement 'my son is wearing a toboggan' can be true or false only if its meaning can be understood. But outside any context it – the 'proposition' in general – has no meaning. (Think of trying to translate contextless sentences.) The notion that you can rip out an utterance from living language, from the realm of meaning, and out of it construct a proposition and compare that to "reality" as it is outside of the realm of meaning, this as the way of philosophy, as the way of seeing the world right – this seems to be the issue, the assumption that meaning and truth can be separated, that we can extract a proposition from the realm of meaning, compare it to a reality that exists outside of meaning, and thereby determine whether it is true.

     This is precisely what Wittgenstein rejects in his later philosophy. The Tractatus assumed that propositions represent reality by picturing states of affairs, as though language were a neutral mirror. But in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein exposes this view. Instead of abstracting a proposition from context, we must ask how it functions within a form of life i.e. within a practice where it already has meaning.

       "My son is wearing a toboggan." For this proposition to have meaning, it already presupposes a shared language (the word toboggan is understood in this dialect); a shared world (we recognize objects like hats, sons, and the practice of wearing them); a form of life (this is an ordinary kind of statement within the human activity of describing clothing). If we rip this proposition out of its meaningful context and try to compare it to "reality as it is in itself," we no longer have anything to compare it to (cf. Goodman). The idea that we can somehow step outside language and check whether this isolated, decontextualized statement corresponds to reality is an illusion. It leads to hopeless paradoxes.

   I think Wittgenstein’s insight was that truth is not a relation between words and some meaningless, pre-linguistic reality. It is internal to language and life. It depends on whether the statement is meaningful within a practice. Thus, instead of saying "This proposition corresponds to reality," Wittgenstein would say: "This proposition makes sense within a human practice." If it makes sense, it can be true or false in that context. If it does not make sense (e.g., saying "My son is wearing a toboggan" in a world where nobody understands toboggan as a hat), then truth and falsity are irrelevant because there is no meaning. The traditional philosophical error, which Wittgenstein and Heidegger both try to undo in different ways, is the idea that: language is an abstract system that refers to a neutral, pre-given reality; truth is a matter of correspondence between propositions and this independent reality. Thus meaning is secondary to logic, something we can set aside to "get to the facts." But there is no such pre-given, neutral reality apart from the ways we engage with it through meaning. Meaning is not separate from reality; it is how reality shows itself to us. Language is “the house of Being,” as Heidegger says. Reality is disclosed to us in this human way. Thus, the philosophical problem is not about establishing truth by correspondence, but about clarifying meaning within human life, and questioning this as to what it discloses about Being – which is what I tried to do in the first entries of this project.

    I will risk drawing this conclusion on the basis of my discussion with my son over the question of what is, and what isn’t, a toboggan. The idea that philosophy’s task is to extract propositions from life and compare them to "the world as it really is" is a misguided assumption. Reality is not "out there" in some pure, independent form waiting to be compared to propositions. Reality shows itself through the structures of meaning that emerge in human existence. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein called this the Mystical. The everyday is mystical. Thus, the issue is not whether essential definitions are possible, but whether essential definitions give us meaning in the first place or whether meaning is always already embedded in the world that is disclosed to us before we ever attempt to define it.