Define Your Terms (or, Here we Go Again)

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. The unwillingness to ask accusers what, precisely, they mean when they say they have been assaulted or abused—an unwillingness that may stem from squeamishness or a trusting but sometimes misguided determination to “believe the victim”—makes it impossible for others to judge the event or participants fairly. Today, as society bubbles in the internet’s cauldron of rage against those accused of sexual harassment and the vague grab-bag “misconduct,” the failure to draw distinctions and define terms is ever more apparent, and this is especially problematic when legal, ethical, professional, and scientific consequences follow. 

People can get into misunderstandings that range from charming to disastrous if they have different implicit definitions of what they are talking about. 

Consider how the failure to define terms can affect survey research. Not long ago, a professional organization I belong to asked its members to take a survey to determine the extent of sexual harassment and misconduct at its meetings. It began by asking respondents to indicate whether we had ever been sexually harassed in the common meanings of the term: being threatened professionally if we did not comply with a sexual overture, being offered promotions or perks if we consented to sex, being pursued long after we said “no” clearly, feeling uncomfortable about unwanted touches, comments, invitations, and so forth. So far, so good. But then the survey moved into greyer areas: It asked us to indicate whether we had ever witnessed or “been told about first hand” a situation where someone attending the event did any of a variety of acts involving someone else. That is, we were now to report rumors, gossip, and observations of behavior by others that could have been way off the mark. We were asked how often we had observed or heard about anyone who … 

• Treated someone else in a demeaning way because of their sex/gender; 
• Made offensive sexual remarks; 
• Put someone else down or was condescending to someone else because of their sex/gender; 
• Told sexual stories or jokes that were offensive to someone else; 
• Made unwelcome attempts to draw someone else into a discussion of sexual matters; 
• Made gestures or used body language of a sexual nature which embarrassed or offended someone else. 

The survey did not define demeaning, offensive, condescending, or unwelcome. There is no way it could have, because all of these are subjective descriptions. It didn’t even ask whether a person made a sexual remark that I, the respondent found offensive; it assumes we all know what “offensive” is. It did not consider generational, regional, or ethnic differences in body language, use of affectionate terms, notions about what’s funny, or norms about touching and hugging. How do I know if someone else finds a joke offensive unless that someone tells me? How do I know if sexual overtures (to someone else) are unwelcome unless the recipient tells me they were? What if what I think should be unwelcome is quite welcome to the couple I observe? What if the “sexual matters” a colleague is discussing pertain to research issues, about which many students are highly sensitive? What if I overhear a joke that embarrasses one listener but delights another? If I am offended, as I recently was, by a young woman’s vulgar, stereotyped anti-male jokes, am I allowed to report that? Finally, the survey did not ask us to mention occasions on which we or “someone we knew” had been victims of rumors, false allegations, or accusations that they said or did something that offended a student or a colleague, but which they themselves intended with benevolent motives. 

The unwillingness to ask accusers what, precisely, they mean when they say they have been assaulted or abused … makes it impossible for others to judge the event or participants fairly.

Consider too how the failure to define terms affects our everyday interactions and moral judgments. I got to thinking about this when I read one of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s ethics columns in The New York Times (9/2/18). I admire Appiah’s work immensely, which is why his response to this woman’s query gave me pause. She wrote: 

Recently, some people I know shared a number of posts about the importance of warning other women about abusive and violent men … I was sexually assaulted by an acquaintance at a party five years ago … I have not seen the man since [but friends of mine are in regular contact with him]. If I believed they were in any danger, I’d have taken action right away to make sure they were sufficiently warned … Setting aside my own unease, do I have an ethical obligation to warn my friends about this man, or to otherwise disclose what happened? 

Appiah did not ask her—or if he did, he doesn’t tell us—what she means by having been “sexually assaulted.” It sounds like rape or attempted rape, because an assault is a physical attack, but they were at a party. What kind of party—dinner, fraternity, club, other? How old were they? Where at the party did the assault occur? Did he drag her into a bedroom and force himself on her, as Christine Blasey Ford alleged Brett Kavanaugh did to her? Did he drug her? Does she remember what happened or had she blacked out? Did she feel assaulted not because he raped her but because he behaved obnoxiously—say, by groping her at the drinks bar in the kitchen, pressing her against a wall and kissing her in a way that felt disgusting and intrusive, or propositioning her in a way that surprised and shocked her? Surely Appiah’s assessment, and ours, depends on knowing what the “assault” consisted of. 

Yet, lacking this information, Appiah nonetheless freely offered advice. Her unease, he replied, means she might be underestimating the risks here: “You’re admitting that you’re not sure how safe it is to be around him,” he wrote. True, but what is wrong about being unsure before you start telling your friends about a man’s behavior five years ago, a man you haven’t seen or spoken to since? Maybe he learned something in those five years. Maybe her uncertainty about what to tell her friends reflects her own uncertainty about what happened and a private suspicion that she should leave it alone; after all, she admitted she does not believe that her friends are “in any danger.” If they are not, telling them her story descends from being a useful warning to gossip. 

When nuances are swept aside in the single-minded pursuit of justice, the failure to define our terms and the tendency to combine minnows and sharks in the same net are the inevitable results.

Appiah interpreted his questioner’s uncertainty in only one way: that it confirms the man’s potential dangerousness. Even if she’s right that the man poses no danger to her friends, Appiah continued, she should tell them: “He did something awful.” He did? Awful? How does Appiah know? What exactly did he do? “You were right to care about whether they are associating with someone they might choose to avoid if they knew what you knew,” Appiah concluded. “To withhold the information is to not live up to the demands of friendship.” 

That may well be true, and the women’s-whisper-warning network often serves an important role. Yet the ethicist does not consider what is to me a competing ethical demand: Do not spread rumors or slime a person’s reputation without very good reason. Absent that reason, a man suddenly finds friendships closed to him, without explanation or a chance for him to present his own version of the event or what he might have learned since. 

When nuances are swept aside in the single-minded pursuit of justice, the failure to define our terms and the tendency to combine minnows and sharks in the same net are the inevitable results. Today, many of the allegations of sexual misconduct that we hear fall into a catch-all category in which we, the observers, are expected to agree that the behavior in question was reprehensible and worthy of punishment—punishment that includes gossip, ghosting, shaming, and shunning. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t.