Words That Never Settle: A Philosophical Account of Suspended Meaning

Why have twenty-five centuries of definitions failed to settle what “justice” means? This article argues that meaning is an achievement rather than a state: a term possesses a meaning to the degree that the social process instituting it has been completed, and completion consists in the convergence of competent speakers’ dispositions of application. Three claims follow. Persistent debate that survives definitional clarification is evidence of semantic incompletion rather than of doctrinal error; interpretation cannot by itself complete a meaning, since definitions redistribute incompletion across their defining vocabulary; and some meanings are permanently suspended because their rhetorical function depends on their remaining incomplete. The account is weighed against Gallie (1956), Peirce (1878), Wittgenstein (1953), Waismann (1945), Davidson (1986), Lewis (1969), Kripke (1980), Stevenson (1938), and the literature on metalinguistic negotiation and conceptual engineering, and it yields a falsifiable prediction: definitional disputes die when the capital attached to a term drains away, without any analysis resolving them.

Keywords: Semantic Incompletion, Contested Concepts, Conceptual Engineering, Metalinguistic Negotiation, Persuasive Definition.