| | Jeff:
Always good to read your posts.
NH: "Where, in the course of developing from embryo to six year old child, does an organism become a human being?" I rephrase the question as follows:
Jeff's version: "Where, in the course of developing from human embryo to human six year old child, does the human organism become a human being?"
In that form, the answer is obvious. (Perhaps you view this as cheating.)
LOL Perhaps too obvious for me to understand.
Jeff, I THINK I know what you're driving at. Perhaps it's what I mention at the end of this post.
I agree with you that borderline cases, spectral issues, etc make the theory harder to apply and represent a challenge. I'll take up that challenge later.
OK
"Teaser: Humans have ONE AND ONLY ONE genuinely defining characteristic"
I'm not certain, but I suspect that to make that claim plausibly, one would have to be omniscient. (That is, if you mean one which will, for all time and in all contexts differentiate humans from all other existents.)
Knowledge is required, but not omniscience.
After all, (valid) definitions are human tools for classifying existents, not identifications of Platonic forms, and therefore the defining characteristic can validly change with the growth of knowledge. No?
In general, I agree with that.
Perhaps you mean, within the body of our current knowledge you have identified one and only one which is not shared by any other kind of thing. (That would be insightful.) LOL Please don't overthink this. It is really not that profound. Since you've been such a good sport and indulged me, I award you the $1 SOLO faux-bucks and will divulge my answer by the end of the post.
This again smacks of, forgive me I mean no insult, Platonism. Concepts, and by extension definitions, are a human method for classifying existents. Plato-monger! LOL
Generally, I don't have any quarrel with Objectivist formulation of the nature and value of concepts, Jeff. I'm actually rather fond of it.
I don't see why they should be required to allow us to pick out (one and only) one (or even a small set of ) characteristic(s) before being valid.
The nature of definitions and concepts is, of course, a fairly involved study, probably too much for either of us to tackle at the moment. Suffice it for now to say, though, that a dictionary definition is only useful if it allows us to distinguish the defined A from NOT As. For many purposes a M-W-style definition such as Michael quoted is entirely adequate. At other times it is not.
If definitions are to be useful, the characteristics can't be too vague or too numerous or the concept/definition loses value of course. But a concept can validly be defined differently for, to use a much overused phrase, different contexts. No?
That's probably a long discussion. I'm sure we mostly agree on these issues.
Nathan, you do keep the conversation lively!
Oh, stop! You've already got the SOLO buck!
OK, my answer to my TEASER:
So far as I know, the only characteristic which is truly DEFINING of humans is our genetic lineage.
Put another way, some evidence suggests that all modern humans descend from a group of about 2,000 individuals as recently as 100,000 to 200,000 years ago.
Alternate hypotheses posit some possible interbreeding between hominid lines, but this is uncertain. (Apparently, Neanderthal DNA indicates that we did not interbreed with that line, which existed in parallel with Homo sapiens until 30,000 years ago.) But the principle nevertheless applies.
What, that's it? I'm afraid so. Pretty skimpy as a defining characteristic, a tautological 'humans are those who descended from the line Homo sapiens.' That's what distinguishes us.
Not bipedalism, or primacy, or mammalhood, or brain development, or speech, or reasoning. We, as a group, have a couple of those in degrees not attained by other extant animals as a group, but that is not defining.
It could be far worse. It is an accident of nature that the bigger-brained Neanderthals did not survive--other than skeletal morphology and possibly-speciated genetic differences, we may not have been able to distinguish them, in business suits, from some modern humans.
So THAT, as I see it, is our truly defining characteristic. You were on the right track, I think, when you observed that it would be a "human embryo" growing into a "human child." Obviously human from that perspective all along the developmental line.
But when does it become a "human being," one whose life ethically demands protection under law? Lineage does not answer that question, any more than bipedalism or other dictionary definitions.
Thus my claim that words have limitations to their precision.
If any persuadable reader still has doubts as to the limitations of language, let them try to draft laws for consideration by legislatures. Considerable precision is attainable, but we lose our smugness when courts of appeal vacate laws for vagueness, as they regularly do.
Nathan Hawking
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