| I was going to title this "Saddam Hussein's WMD found" and explain that what the
US Army could not do in 2003 had been accomplished by a few bureaucrats and
politicians simply by changing the meaning of words. The previous anonymous
poster beat me to that point, so I'll just give my logician's view of
this.
In mathematics and software we can redefine a common word whenever
that's convenient. For example, in algebra, a free group is neither a band of
escaped prisoners, nor a hippie commune. In Scheme, tan is not light brown, it
is sin/cos, unless you write (define tan "light brown"), which you can do most
any time.
This works because we take a lot of care to be sure that each use
of a word corresponds to one definition. I can neither prove the Four Color
Theorem nor invalidate Appel's proof by changing the definition of Four. When I
redefine tan in Scheme, it does not change the slopes of all the lines drawn on
the screen.
USA went to war in Iraq and passed laws because of Weapons of
Mass Destruction. Would we have the same wars and the same laws if we had
understood that WMD could mean a squirt gun full of
kerosene?
— Programmer in Chief
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