Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning.

• Author: Clarke, Lynn
• Position: Book Review

Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning. By Edward Schiappa. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003; pp. xvi + 207. $60.00; paper 25.00.

Several decades ago, Charles Stevenson proposed that "to choose a definition is to plead a cause" (210). More recently, David Zarefsky interpreted this to mean that, "the power to persuade is, in large measure, the power to define" (1). Important, these statements gain further significance when disputes about definition arise. The question of whether interested same-sex couples should be legally recognized in "marriage," and the range of definitional claims advanced on, between, around, and against, supporting and opposing sides, is a recent example of a complex definitional dispute. The oftenheated tone of this controversy reflects the power of definition to direct attention and persuade. Additionally, it highlights the exclusionary features and risks of definition and, therefore, the need to think seriously about the communicative practices that choosing a particular definition ought entail (Clarke). If so, Stevenson's and Zarefsky's statements about definition, advocacy, power, and persuasion suggest that definitional controversy is a problem for rhetorical philosophy. The power, features, and risks of definition underscore the moral, ethical, epistemological, and practical stakes of definitional dispute. Acknowledgment of these stakes occasions reflection, not only on the substance of our definitions, but on the grounds of definitional reference, and the ways that disputes over definition may be collectively resolved as well.

Edward Schiappa's Defining Reality: Definitions and the Politics of Meaning constitutes an important effort to take on the rhetorical, ethical, and philosophical issues of definition. Premised upon a belief that definitions are best approached pragmatically as questions of "ought" rather than "is," Defining Reality brings together several case studies of "definitional rupture" and "disputed entitlement" and offers them as warrants for embracing a "pragmatic approach to definition" (6). The potential purchase of embrace, according to Schiappa, is more productive resolution of definitional disputes (xiv).

Defining Reality is divided into three main parts, the last two of which comprise new and revised essays. In Part One, Schiappa offers the theoretical argument and working assumptions of the book in two chapters. The first introduces (denotative)...