any supporting proof; it is no more than a solitary report about an intellectual matter, not an empirical one, and is therefore susceptible to both truth and falsehood, correctness and error. Yet these very people reproach those who, in questions of transmitted knowledge, rely upon a lone narrator whose report is accompanied by clear corroborating indicators that confer certain knowledge upon the qualified listener, claiming that a single report can never yield sure knowledge. Granted, a bare solitary report with no evidence of its veracity does not produce knowledge—but that is precisely the case with their definition: it is a solitary report for which no proof of truth exists, and in their own view no proof can even be mounted. Consequently, the definition does not provide a conception of the thing defined.
If, however, the hearer had already conceived the thing defined before this, or conceived it concurrently with or after hearing the definition—independently of the definition—and then realised that this was indeed its definition, he would know the definition to be correct; yet in that event the definition would not have furnished the conception. This is self-evident.
In short, grasping the defined object through its definition is impossible unless one is already certain of the definer’s truthfulness, and that certainty cannot be attained from the mere report itself; therefore, the defined object is not known by means of the definition.
As for anyone who says, “By ‘definition’ I mean the single term,” his statement is of no use whatsoever, for the mere utterance of an isolated noun conveys nothing to the listener. If the listener had formed a conception of the object without that word, he already possessed the conception without it; and if he has not conceived it—either before or after—he gains nothing from the solitary term.
Third aspect: had the conception of the thing defined been acquired through the definition, that conception would have been obtained before the verification of the definition’s soundness.
A further reply: Even supposing the definition did yield a conception of the object, this could occur only after establishing the definition’s soundness, for the definition is the evidence, the pathway, the revealer of the conception. It is therefore impossible to know the soundness of the identifier before knowing the soundness of what is being identified; and knowledge of the definition’s soundness is not attained until after one knows the defined object, since the definition is merely a report about that very object. Hence it is impossible to ascertain the veracity of the report before