Where crime resides

 I have often felt the need for another kind of dictionary.

Language has its own logic. You can’t really talk about flipping a coin without talking about “heads” and “tails.” You get into nonsense — or at least something peculiar — if you arbitrarily decide to exclude one or the other. Similarly, you can’t really give directions if you make it a rule to use only “right” and exclude “left.” Those terms are part of a language game, as Wittgenstein would say.

Ideas have consequences, and those consequences are reflected in language.

Here’s an interesting example from David Hume, whose criticism of our notion of causation is a landmark of philosophy.

He observed that the common conception of law involves a system of rewards and punishments. Would you say that rewards and punishments cause lawful behavior?

Hume points out that our notions of repentance and remorse imply that crime is in mind.

Again, repentance wipes off every crime, if attended with a reformation of life and manners. How is this to be accounted for? but by asserting that actions render a person criminal merely as they are proofs of criminal principles in the mind; and when, by an alternation of these principles, they cease to be just proofs, they likewise cease to be criminal.

We might deplore the act, but we punish what is in the mind.

To me, that sounds suspicious. But then again I think that the law has been a swamp of bad thinking.

I think that a dictionary that pointed out the consequences of language would be useful.

• Source: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding; La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1966, p. 106.