§ 9 The problem with being, definitions and properties
How do we distinguish and differentiate?1
And what do we get when we do so?
How do we isolate concepts from the continuity of existence (the idea that the world/universe is a single unified structure)?
How do we then get them to work with other concepts based on the work each concept performs with the help of the properties it is ascribed (or indeed which lie unnoticed and implicit within it)?
How exactly does a distinction work?
Let’s start there. A distinction is made when this is differentiated from that. A simple way to imagine this is to take a pencil and draw a single line on a blank piece of paper.2
By that act alone you have created a thing.
That thing is given semantic value. There is the value of the thing differentiated from its background and distinguished as a thing, in our case a simple line in pencil, and there is the value of that which it is not. The rest of the piece of paper and the room you are in and so forth.
As such, to make a thing, a whole, whole, you necessarily make at the very least two things: that which it is and that which it is not.
The semantic value is conceived to be and do something, (at the very least appear as different), and is given a name. It need not at first be much more than “that thingy over there, what is that?”
The function that the value acquires is a property of the thing distinguished. “What, that grey thing, waving about on the paper?”
A concept (the conception of that which is differentiated by a subject, a ‘me’) can never exist by itself; it always exists within a network of other concepts that are used to represent, or refer to the values or properties of the thing distinguished and conceived.
Concepts live in the network of the modes of expression available to us: gesture and conduct, image and composition, word, sentence and narrative, number operator and calculation.
The salient values a thing conceived has will form its definition. With salient values, I mean those values considered most useful to the conceiver for whatever purpose it plays in any epxression, indeed in any game of giving and asking for reasons.
Definitions tend to come in the S(ubject) = p(redicate) format (stone is ….; a wall is a …, a house is a….).
All S = p definitions are of the form Concept1 = Concept2.
Concept2 cannot be understood for its value unless it is itself defined using further concepts.
In this way, concepts form a grand tautological framework in which everything interacts with everything else, or can in principle do so, much like our conception of the universe itself as a thing containing all, and much like our dictionaries, which are the archived equivalent of a conceptual universe, whereby each person’s personal vocabulary can be seen as a world.
But the S = p format for definitions has its restrictions. What is being?
The concept ‘being’, is applied to a situational configuration of things that can be recognised as something. Think of the line and the piece of paper as a drawing.
As everything is unstable to a degree (everything is subject to the metabolism of exchange: panta rhei), a stable being can only be maintained by a doing, whilst a doing undoes an unstable being.
All things, even stones, have to do something to maintain themselves as what they are. As such, it might help to exchange the S = p format into an S does p format.
Unfortunately, ’does‘ doesn’t have its own symbol in logic; ironically that lack is circumvented by using various forms of symbols for being, such as P(x) for P is the property of x, and Ǝ for ‘there exists’, and = for is identical to or is equal to.
Even so, as Aristotle put it, we would do well to learn to understand what things are in terms of what they do; we need to think of Jane as someone who Janes; our nouns do better in analysis when treated as verbs.3
So, instead of thinking of things as being part of ‘kingdoms’, ‘fields’, and ‘areas’, instead of thinking of being as a static there exists, we need to think of being in terms of activity as there develops itelf, or there maintains itself, or more simply there does.
To ask what something is, we do better to ask what it does.
We do this by asking simple questions such as: ‘What does it do for it to be what it is?’ and ‘How does it do it?’ or ‘How does it behave?’ ‘What does Jane do to make herself recognisable as Jane?’
A thing is what it does, and for a thing to do what it does, we shall assume it is made up of working parts, interacting with the working parts of other things.
A definition cannot capture all that something is or does.
A fully elaborated concept might have a near-infinite number of properties, some belonging to its definition, others to the situation the concept helps qualify.
As such, definitions are asymmetrical; one side of the equation is never equal to, or commutative with, the other in a mathematical sense; they merely pick out certain properties that are evident and useful, in short salient.
Any single entity has many properties, some that are easily objectifiable (such as the stone is red), others that are strictly subjective (the stone hurt me), but recognisable when talked about (at a certain age, you acquire sufficient experience with the potential of stones to hurt).
There are no definitions that cover an entity’s complete set of properties without becoming impossible to manage.
As such, we select that which is most important to us. In this way, all definitions come ready-subjectified. As you can imagine, selection privileges what is included in the definition over what is left out.
It is the only way to deal with the plethora of meanings available to each of us when every concept can be elaborated ad infinitum.
The moment certain values are privileged over others is the moment when values are arranged perspectively, that is, from a specific point of view.
That point of view can be led by purpose, such as in the definition: ‘a chair is a construction made for sitting in’, thereby forcing to the background any other uses that might be made of a chair, such as taming lions.
The point of view can also be led by considerations regarding material constitution, form or structure, such as ‘wood is a material that can be shaped in many different ways, has great tensile properties and comes from trees’, or indeed efficient cause: ‘a chair is an object made by a carpenter’.
These values can be easily objectified without paying too high a price, whilst their use value is no less; that use value is a semantic or ontological one and derives from a proper analytical understanding of wood, which can then be harnessed for any possible use or purpose.
In assigning something a property, such as in the sentence, ‘the stone is hard and brittle’, we assign it a semantic value. That semantic value gives us an image of the stone and its behavioural properties. Those properties tell us how it behaves under certain specified circumstances, though these are often left implicit and familiar to those working with stone.
Those who have not worked with stone will be told about these properties and begin to understand their meaning when they start working with them.
So, semantic values whereby a thing is assigned an ontological property useful in discourse, thus become subject to a logic that finds paths of inference or planes of consistency whereby the semantic values (the properties of a thing) allow certain inferences as legitimate and others as illegitimate.
Note that I have reverted to talking about the being of things rather than their doings. And that is because it is tiresome to alter ordinary language usage. Language, like the act of conception itself, is heavily norm-driven, and those norms evolve selectively through salience.
As such, we shall, like the logicians, work around the problem of being as a doing by retranslating all doings back into beings once we understand them a little better, with the one difference that we now know that all being is best analysed as a doing.
The more important claim is that all semantic values are use values.
© jacob voorthuis, 2026. Please cite Jacob Voorthuis as the author, The Theoria Project as the title and the page address as the location. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to: Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially under the following terms: No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made.
- A slightly older version of this paragraph was first published in Jacob Voorthuis, Theoria, use, intention & design, a philosophical reckoning; Analysis & Critique: Gardening in the metaphysics of the beautiful, the true, and the good, AHT, Tu/e (2024) ↩︎
- See G. Spencer Brown, Laws of Form, (Julian Press, New York, 1972) pp 1-2. And also George Floring Calian Plato’s generation of numbers and Brouwer’s intuitionism, https://www.academia.edu/35065400/Plato_s_generation_of_numbers_and_Brouwer_ s_intuitionism, accessed 02.08.2024. and Freydberg, B. Brouwer’s Intuitionism Vis à Vis Kant’s Intuition and Imagination. Math Intelligencer 31, 28–36 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-009-9074-6. ↩︎
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. The focus on doing and seeing being in terms of doing is also the Pragmatic turn in philosophy made the main theme of the American Pragmaticists from Peirce to Brandom, but visible in also Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations. ↩︎