“Other people know what this means” is not an explanation either. It has been used throughout philosophical and scientific history to fake-explain lots of stuff, from the Platonic Ideal definition of a human to ethnonationalism, but you don’t get any knowledge from that either. It relies on people’s tendency to feel too dumb to vocalize uncertainty about “obvious” unspoken assumptions.
So please, can you explain “private property”? Without simply rephrasing it (“ownership”, “possession”, etc.) or referring to an authority (“the courts will mediate and the outcome of that mediation depends”, or other ways to dodge explaining something? I have given an example of how to do it.
An explanation of a concept is a rephrasing of it in different terms. Your standards for explaining something are impossible to meet. Your example is just a very long rephrasing, but it still relies on further concepts you assume your audience understands.
Even if that were true, that wouldn’t mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The “simply” in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as “beating up” without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.
The only requirement for an explanation to work is that it take something its target audience does not understand, and make them understand it (correctly). For that specific target audience, the explanation is therefore simpler than the explained concept.
However:
This is not a universal standard; an explanation that works for one person may not work for another
This is not absolute; there is no specific level of “simplicity” that needs to be reached in order for an explanation to “count”; it only needs to do the job of explaining.
In the case at hand, the explanation should for a general audience who has not studied economics, but it cannot work for everyone - there is always an audience in mind. It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term “private property”. I think “competitive markets” is on shakier territory there.
You refer to a “term-free” explanation. What is the definition of a “term”, and how would an explanation every be free of them?
Here’s how I’d explain capitalism to a ten-year-old:
Capitalism is a system where goods are produced by groups of people deciding independently what to make according to what price they think they can get for those goods. Those individual groups need to own things in order to produce goods, which themselves need to be paid for. Since a new or small group might not have enough money, capitalist systems have a mechanism where groups can ask people to give them money for a project and in return promise to pay those people a little bit of the money they hope to make doing the project.
Capitalism is different from the most common system that came before it, where this mechanism did not exist. It is different from some other systems, where instead of individual groups owning the means of producing goods (like a factory), a country as a whole might own such things. Since a whole country has a lot of resources, it doesn’t really need to buy a factory - instead it can organise the building of a factory without money changing hands. In this system, the country as a whole decides what needs to be produced, rather than the individual groups. Since countries have different priorities than smaller groups, this results in different things being produced different quantities between these systems.
Okay, that explanation is better, but you’re still leaving some genuinely complex terms dangling there. Ownership still isn’t explained beyond the declaration that is is necessary to make stuff. Price and Money have no introduction at all.
I skipped money and price in my explanation, so here:
People that owned stuff they didn’t use had a problem where the stuff would decay and rot and they would no longer have as much stuff. So they were willing to give others stuff that rots in exchange for stuff that doesn’t rot, and ideally that didn’t take up much space. Gold and silver proved to be ideal; inherently useful as a plate or goblet that lasts forever and doesn’t poison you, compact, and easy to store forever.
Because the owners that own most are ones that were ruthless in getting more, owners very reliably wanted gold and silver. People that made stuff were willing to take gold and silver instead of the stuff an owner had because they knew other owners would be willing to give them stuff in return that the owner that gives them stuff doesn’t have.
A downside of gold and silver is that they can be mistaken for other metals owners didn’t want as much, so owners started giving people gold or food to check if the gold and silver were pure, and to stamp a promise that it’s pure and how much it is into it. A convenient way to make this stamp fraud-resistant is to make it as big as the lump of gold or silver, to make the lump flat, thin and a certain width, and to stamp both sides. This is called a coin. This way it was very hard to remove any gold or silver from the coin without it showing as the pattern of the stamp being broken.
At this point, the gold and silver were pretty useless in their own right - you can’t eat off a coin - but people still expected owners to want them because those owners would probably expect other owners to want them. They were wanted because people expected others to want them. Coins and this commonly held expectation of their worth was called a currency.
This went wrong as often as you might expect - owners convincing certifiers to lie (debasing te currency), people finding lots of gold causing people to be able to get less stuff for the gold they have than they expected when they accepted the gold (inflation), and more - but in the end the expectation came back because the owners that owned the most kept being the ones that wanted to own the most.
Eventually, owners had so much stuff that it became a hassle to carry all their gold and silver around, so they started writing notes promising to give whoever held the note gold, and offering those notes to people instead. These notes are called ‘money’. The more gold owners had, the more reliable it was that they could make good on that promise, so when states came along their notes became the most reliable.
States started threatening to beat people up if they did things or give things without publicly announcing what amount of money they would be willing to do that for and always doing it if someone offers them that money (except in state-outlined exceptions). This announced amount is called the price of the thing.
Then they said they didn’t want to give people gold for money anymore because the promise to get something for a price was reliable enough instead. This is called “fiat currency”. Then they started printing money whenever they felt like it.
It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term “private property”.
There is a difference between understanding the term “computers” and understanding computers. I can explain the former but not the latter. Most people understand the term “private property”, but their understanding of private property is barely functional.
Perhaps that’s where this conflict is coming from. The OOP asserts something about explanations of capitalism, and you want that to apply to explanations of terms or to barely functional shallow explanations.
Of course I can explain something deceptively if I do a bad enough job. That’s an ambiguity in the phrase “can explain”, I suppose. Like saying you “can run a marathon” if you can hike 42 km in four days. If you’re looking to argue in bad faith I could see how that would be an in for you.
You refer to a “term-free” explanation. What is the definition of a “term”, and how would an explanation every be free of them?
(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.
Everybody who lives in modern society understands what money is, and what prices are. You don’t need to explain those to explain capitalism.
You want the OOP to be accurate, so you want “explanation” to mean something that it doesn’t normally mean. Your attempt doesn’t even succeed by your own criteria:
What does “rot” mean?
What is “stuff”?
What is a “threat”?
What is “writing”?
and so on, ad infinitum.
(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.
An example is not an explanation. If it were though, I could “demonstrate” prices and money by taking you to a shop and showing you how buying something works. So I don’t think you have a coherent idea of what terms are allowed in explanations, and hence what an explanation actually is.
The reason, I would guess, that you are content with your explanations, is because they have got to the point where they claim something that you consider a critical feature of capitalism, namely some form of violence. If you claim: “You can’t explain X without Y” and your criterion for an adequate explanation is that the explanation contains Y, then sure, you’ve stated a tautology. But it’s just the same kind of self-congratulatory claim like, “you can’t explain communism without it sounding dystopian” and having as an (unstated) criterion for an explanation to be adequate, “‘explain’ the ‘necessary’ oppression of a communist system” (scare quotes deliberate), then complaining that every explanation offered is inadequate.
In particular, the violence you want to be in any explanation is not a definitional part of capitalism. That is, even the harshest critics of capitalism don’t say that it’s part of the definition and initial objective; if it is inseparable from capitalism, it is an emergent property. If you think an emergent property of some system is so important that it must be mentioned in any explanation of the system, you need to make a very strong argument.
There is a difference between understanding the term “computers” and understanding computers.
It sounds like you’re just talking about explanations with different levels of detail. But in those terms, the fact that you haven’t given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is adequate translates to not having given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is sufficiently detailed.
Note that emergent properties are only going to come up in more detailed explanations. An explanation of computers which omits the emergent property of how they may suffer from deadlock or thrashing is perfectly fine for most explanations. The more detail you aim to give, the more likely you need to cover such things, but it would be complete nonsense to dismiss an explanation lacking them as “not an explanation”.
“Other people know what this means” is not an explanation either. It has been used throughout philosophical and scientific history to fake-explain lots of stuff, from the Platonic Ideal definition of a human to ethnonationalism, but you don’t get any knowledge from that either. It relies on people’s tendency to feel too dumb to vocalize uncertainty about “obvious” unspoken assumptions.
So please, can you explain “private property”? Without simply rephrasing it (“ownership”, “possession”, etc.) or referring to an authority (“the courts will mediate and the outcome of that mediation depends”, or other ways to dodge explaining something? I have given an example of how to do it.
An explanation of a concept is a rephrasing of it in different terms. Your standards for explaining something are impossible to meet. Your example is just a very long rephrasing, but it still relies on further concepts you assume your audience understands.
Even if that were true, that wouldn’t mean any rephrasing is an explanation. The “simply” in my comment was load-bearing, as you would acknowledge if you were arguing in good faith. But I am quite confident in my being able to explain terms such as “beating up” without using terms. I might even be able to use my long-ass comment as a guide for how to explain private property using no terms other than ones derived from term-free explanations.
The only requirement for an explanation to work is that it take something its target audience does not understand, and make them understand it (correctly). For that specific target audience, the explanation is therefore simpler than the explained concept.
However:
In the case at hand, the explanation should for a general audience who has not studied economics, but it cannot work for everyone - there is always an audience in mind. It is perfectly acceptable to assume that, like the vast majority of educated adults, the audience will understand the term “private property”. I think “competitive markets” is on shakier territory there.
You refer to a “term-free” explanation. What is the definition of a “term”, and how would an explanation every be free of them?
Here’s how I’d explain capitalism to a ten-year-old:
Capitalism is a system where goods are produced by groups of people deciding independently what to make according to what price they think they can get for those goods. Those individual groups need to own things in order to produce goods, which themselves need to be paid for. Since a new or small group might not have enough money, capitalist systems have a mechanism where groups can ask people to give them money for a project and in return promise to pay those people a little bit of the money they hope to make doing the project.
Capitalism is different from the most common system that came before it, where this mechanism did not exist. It is different from some other systems, where instead of individual groups owning the means of producing goods (like a factory), a country as a whole might own such things. Since a whole country has a lot of resources, it doesn’t really need to buy a factory - instead it can organise the building of a factory without money changing hands. In this system, the country as a whole decides what needs to be produced, rather than the individual groups. Since countries have different priorities than smaller groups, this results in different things being produced different quantities between these systems.
Okay, that explanation is better, but you’re still leaving some genuinely complex terms dangling there. Ownership still isn’t explained beyond the declaration that is is necessary to make stuff. Price and Money have no introduction at all.
I skipped money and price in my explanation, so here:
People that owned stuff they didn’t use had a problem where the stuff would decay and rot and they would no longer have as much stuff. So they were willing to give others stuff that rots in exchange for stuff that doesn’t rot, and ideally that didn’t take up much space. Gold and silver proved to be ideal; inherently useful as a plate or goblet that lasts forever and doesn’t poison you, compact, and easy to store forever.
Because the owners that own most are ones that were ruthless in getting more, owners very reliably wanted gold and silver. People that made stuff were willing to take gold and silver instead of the stuff an owner had because they knew other owners would be willing to give them stuff in return that the owner that gives them stuff doesn’t have.
A downside of gold and silver is that they can be mistaken for other metals owners didn’t want as much, so owners started giving people gold or food to check if the gold and silver were pure, and to stamp a promise that it’s pure and how much it is into it. A convenient way to make this stamp fraud-resistant is to make it as big as the lump of gold or silver, to make the lump flat, thin and a certain width, and to stamp both sides. This is called a coin. This way it was very hard to remove any gold or silver from the coin without it showing as the pattern of the stamp being broken.
At this point, the gold and silver were pretty useless in their own right - you can’t eat off a coin - but people still expected owners to want them because those owners would probably expect other owners to want them. They were wanted because people expected others to want them. Coins and this commonly held expectation of their worth was called a currency.
This went wrong as often as you might expect - owners convincing certifiers to lie (debasing te currency), people finding lots of gold causing people to be able to get less stuff for the gold they have than they expected when they accepted the gold (inflation), and more - but in the end the expectation came back because the owners that owned the most kept being the ones that wanted to own the most.
Eventually, owners had so much stuff that it became a hassle to carry all their gold and silver around, so they started writing notes promising to give whoever held the note gold, and offering those notes to people instead. These notes are called ‘money’. The more gold owners had, the more reliable it was that they could make good on that promise, so when states came along their notes became the most reliable.
States started threatening to beat people up if they did things or give things without publicly announcing what amount of money they would be willing to do that for and always doing it if someone offers them that money (except in state-outlined exceptions). This announced amount is called the price of the thing.
Then they said they didn’t want to give people gold for money anymore because the promise to get something for a price was reliable enough instead. This is called “fiat currency”. Then they started printing money whenever they felt like it.
There is a difference between understanding the term “computers” and understanding computers. I can explain the former but not the latter. Most people understand the term “private property”, but their understanding of private property is barely functional.
Perhaps that’s where this conflict is coming from. The OOP asserts something about explanations of capitalism, and you want that to apply to explanations of terms or to barely functional shallow explanations.
Of course I can explain something deceptively if I do a bad enough job. That’s an ambiguity in the phrase “can explain”, I suppose. Like saying you “can run a marathon” if you can hike 42 km in four days. If you’re looking to argue in bad faith I could see how that would be an in for you.
(figurative) demonstrations can be term-free explanations.
Everybody who lives in modern society understands what money is, and what prices are. You don’t need to explain those to explain capitalism.
You want the OOP to be accurate, so you want “explanation” to mean something that it doesn’t normally mean. Your attempt doesn’t even succeed by your own criteria:
and so on, ad infinitum.
An example is not an explanation. If it were though, I could “demonstrate” prices and money by taking you to a shop and showing you how buying something works. So I don’t think you have a coherent idea of what terms are allowed in explanations, and hence what an explanation actually is.
The reason, I would guess, that you are content with your explanations, is because they have got to the point where they claim something that you consider a critical feature of capitalism, namely some form of violence. If you claim: “You can’t explain X without Y” and your criterion for an adequate explanation is that the explanation contains Y, then sure, you’ve stated a tautology. But it’s just the same kind of self-congratulatory claim like, “you can’t explain communism without it sounding dystopian” and having as an (unstated) criterion for an explanation to be adequate, “‘explain’ the ‘necessary’ oppression of a communist system” (scare quotes deliberate), then complaining that every explanation offered is inadequate.
In particular, the violence you want to be in any explanation is not a definitional part of capitalism. That is, even the harshest critics of capitalism don’t say that it’s part of the definition and initial objective; if it is inseparable from capitalism, it is an emergent property. If you think an emergent property of some system is so important that it must be mentioned in any explanation of the system, you need to make a very strong argument.
It sounds like you’re just talking about explanations with different levels of detail. But in those terms, the fact that you haven’t given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is adequate translates to not having given any coherent way of determining when an explanation is sufficiently detailed.
Note that emergent properties are only going to come up in more detailed explanations. An explanation of computers which omits the emergent property of how they may suffer from deadlock or thrashing is perfectly fine for most explanations. The more detail you aim to give, the more likely you need to cover such things, but it would be complete nonsense to dismiss an explanation lacking them as “not an explanation”.