Exploring metalingual definition with ChatGPT

Back in the Ancient Days my teacher and later colleague, David Hays, was interested in abstract concepts, such as truth, love, beauty, and justice. Such concepts cannot be defined in physical terms. You can’t see them, taste them, hear them, touch them, or smell them. And yet for human society they are as real as sticks and stones, thunder and lightning, a horse, a sparrow, cherry blossoms, or Mt. Fuji. Hays argued that we learn abstractions through stories that exhibit them.

He called this metalingual definition, after Roman Jakobson’s metalingual function of language. The metalingual ...