An Introduction to Critical Thinking and Creativity - always yours

22 DEFINITIONS
• The referent of a term is what the term refers to. So the terms listed in the
last paragraph refer respectively to an organization, a person, a class of animals,
and a particular shade of color. A term such as Mount Everestrefers to
a real physical thing in the world, but other terms such as truth and 13467
refer to more abstract things. The set of things a term refers to is known as
the extension of the term. So dolphins, humans, donkeys, gorillas are all
within the extension of mammals.
• The concept associated with a term is an idea that encapsulates our understanding
of the term. Although a term is made up of words, a concept is not.
Agua is a Spanish word distinct from the English word water. They have
different spelling and pronunciation, but they have the same meaning and
express the same concept.
In this book we shall take definitions to be primarily definitions of terms, although
we can loosely speak of defining a concept (that is, defining the term that
expresses the concept). We can divide definitions into three kinds according to
their purpose: stipulative, reportive, and precising.
A definition worth US$7 billion
On September 11,2001, terrorists destroyed the twin towers of the World
Trade Center in New York City by crashing two planes into them. At the
time, Larry Silverstein was holding a 99-year lease for the buildings. The
buildings were covered by insurance which would pay US$3.55 billion
for an "occurrence" of a terrorist attack. But Silverstein argued that he
should get double the amount, because there were two occurrences of
attacks, as there were two planes that hit the buildings about 15 minutes
apart. Obviously, the insurers claimed this was just one occurrence of
a coordinated attack. So here is a definition that is worth a few billion
dollars! This is a good example about the importance of definitions in
contracts and official documents. (The trial was a long and complicated
affair. In the end a jury decided that there were two occurrences, even
though Silverstein did not get the full amount he wanted.)
3.1 REPORTIVE DEFINITION
A reportive definition is also known as a lexical definition. It reports the existing
meaning of a term. Here are some examples:
• Prime number = any integer greater than 1 and divisible only by 1 and itself.
• WTO stands for "The World Trade Organization".