Sadly, this assumes that all good arguments are legible.
I think we would both agree that there is a nonempty subset of chemicals that is dangerous for humans to eat, and that it would be very difficult to provide an exact definition of that set.
But that definition becomes useless if it isn’t legible. The Boubas don’t want chemicals in their food. If “chemical” means “harmful substance that I don’t know how to specify”, it’s useless to say that they don’t want chemicals in their food—how are they going to even deetermine that the food contains “chemicals” by their standard?
Also, the fact that they are even using the existing word “chemical” and not some phrase like “harmful chemical” implies that their definition has something to do with the characteristics of things called by the existing word, such as unfamiliar and long names. This is, of course, not a logical necessity, but people in the real world think this way, so it’s a good bet.
So don’t use the definition if it’s useless. The object level conversation is very easy to access here. Say something like “do you mean GMOs?” and then ask them why they think GMOs are harmful. If their answer is “because GMOs are chemicals” then you say “why do you think chemicals are harmful?” and then you can continue conversing about whether GMOs are harmful.
Honestly I think it’s net virtuous to track other people’s definitions and let them modify them whenever they feel a need to. Aligning on definitions is expensive and always involves talking about edge cases that are rarely important to the subject at hand. (They’re important when you’re authoring laws or doing math, which I would count as expensive situations.) I’d just focus on object level like “GMOs are not harmful” and not concern myself with whether they take this to mean GMOs are not chemicals or chemicals are not always harmful.
It’s not just the definition that’s useless. The phrase itself becomes useless, because if the only way to know what they mean is by asking “do you mean X”, the original statement about not wanting chemicals in their food fails to communicate anything useful.
Sadly, this assumes that all good arguments are legible.
I think we would both agree that there is a nonempty subset of chemicals that is dangerous for humans to eat, and that it would be very difficult to provide an exact definition of that set.
But that definition becomes useless if it isn’t legible. The Boubas don’t want chemicals in their food. If “chemical” means “harmful substance that I don’t know how to specify”, it’s useless to say that they don’t want chemicals in their food—how are they going to even deetermine that the food contains “chemicals” by their standard?
Also, the fact that they are even using the existing word “chemical” and not some phrase like “harmful chemical” implies that their definition has something to do with the characteristics of things called by the existing word, such as unfamiliar and long names. This is, of course, not a logical necessity, but people in the real world think this way, so it’s a good bet.
So don’t use the definition if it’s useless. The object level conversation is very easy to access here. Say something like “do you mean GMOs?” and then ask them why they think GMOs are harmful. If their answer is “because GMOs are chemicals” then you say “why do you think chemicals are harmful?” and then you can continue conversing about whether GMOs are harmful.
Honestly I think it’s net virtuous to track other people’s definitions and let them modify them whenever they feel a need to. Aligning on definitions is expensive and always involves talking about edge cases that are rarely important to the subject at hand. (They’re important when you’re authoring laws or doing math, which I would count as expensive situations.) I’d just focus on object level like “GMOs are not harmful” and not concern myself with whether they take this to mean GMOs are not chemicals or chemicals are not always harmful.
It’s not just the definition that’s useless. The phrase itself becomes useless, because if the only way to know what they mean is by asking “do you mean X”, the original statement about not wanting chemicals in their food fails to communicate anything useful.