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Hile

Circular definitions are considered deficient or inadequate because they do not provide new or useful information to the audience. Such definitions either require the audience to already know the meaning of the key term or use the term being defined within its own definition. Good definitions avoid circularity by explaining the concept without relying on the defined term itself or terms the audience may not already understand. Writers should take care to construct definitions that illuminate the term for the reader rather than simply repeating or circularly referring back to the term.

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Masood Ur Rehman
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84 views1 page

Hile

Circular definitions are considered deficient or inadequate because they do not provide new or useful information to the audience. Such definitions either require the audience to already know the meaning of the key term or use the term being defined within its own definition. Good definitions avoid circularity by explaining the concept without relying on the defined term itself or terms the audience may not already understand. Writers should take care to construct definitions that illuminate the term for the reader rather than simply repeating or circularly referring back to the term.

Uploaded by

Masood Ur Rehman
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Pragmatic

From a pragmatic point of view, circular definitions may be characterized in terms of new, useful or helpful information:
A definition is deficient if the audience must either already know the meaning of the key term, or if the term to be
defined is used in the definition itself. Such definitions lead to a need for additional information that motivated
someone to look at the definition in the first place and, thus, violate the principle of providing new or useful
information.[1] Here are some examples:

Suppose we define "oak" as a tree which has catkins and grows from an acorn, and then define "acorn" as the nut
produced by an oak tree. To someone who does not know which trees are oaks, nor which nuts are acorns, the
definition is inadequate.

If someone wants to know what a cellular phone is, telling them that it is a "phone that is cellular" will not be especially
illuminating. Much more helpful would be to explain the concept of a cell in the context of telecommunications, or at
least to make some reference to portability.

Similarly, defining dialectical materialism as "materialism that involves dialectic" is unhelpful.

Consequently, when constructing systems of definitions, authors should use good practices that avoid producing
viciously circular definitions. In many learner's dictionaries, circular definitions are greatly reduced by writing definitions
using only the words in a constrained defining vocabulary.

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