What Are Peoples and Nations?

Words mean what we want what we want them to mean (as Humpty Dumpty once observed), “neither more nor less.”1 This gives meaning a certain fluidity,2 since what one wants or needs from words can change. Yet words also represent ideas about reality, and are more or less useful as they capture and perpetuate useful ideas with language.3 This pushes meaning towards stability, resting on history and experience. Some tension will always remain between what words have meant, and what words might usefully come to mean, to serve new circumstances. “Truth consists in the right ordering of names in our affirmations” (as Hobbes so sensibly recognized), so that those who wish to pursue the truth will have to decide what the words that they use will mean, or find themselves eventually “entangled in words, as a bird in lime twigs; the more he struggles, the more belimed.”4