Define Your Terms (or, Here we Go Again)

BY CAROL TAVRIS

MANY YEARS AGO, when my husband first told me he loved me, I sat up and asked him, “What exactly do you mean by that?” Clearly, you can take critical thinking too far.

I might have been forgiven—my husband sort of did, though he teased me for years—because in the decades when I was teaching psychological science and writing a psychology textbook, a major goal was to isolate and identify the components of critical and scientific thinking. Leading the list was “define your terms.” It’s fine, for example, to ruminate about what makes people happy, but that question will not lead to answers until we have defined what we mean by “happy”. Being in a state of euphoria most of the time? Feeling pleasantly contented? Being free of serious problems or pain? People can get into misunderstandings that range from charming to disastrous if they have different implicit definitions of what they are talking about.

In a column I wrote here three years ago, I lamented President Obama’s Justice Department for citing a survey in which researchers had defined “sexual assault” not only as rape but also as any unwanted acts such as “forced kissing, fondling, and rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes.” All of these acts are unpleasant, but they are not the same in severity. The definition of assault is a “physical attack”, but it is increasingly being lumped with various forms of “inappropriate behavior” that includes the foolish, the creepy, and the stupid-but-benign. Specifics matter.