What is a Cat?
By Steven Jonathan Rummelsburg When I ask my classes, "What is a cat?" inevitably the answer is, "Whatever someone says it is." Not so long ago, every seventh grader knew what a cat was. Now, that certainty has evaporated into subjectivity. But after a few months of instruction in logic, a kind of mass awakening occurs: the class discovers that "truth is not consensus, but the convergence of the mind and reality." That moment is a glimpse of what our Catholic Tradition teaches about language, and of what is at stake when words lose their grounding in reality. "Cat" is not the eternally…
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