To even begin to try to articulate something implies an interconnected web of existing things. My mouth moves, vocal chords vibrate, interact with CO2 molecules to produce sound...My hand reaches for a pen, or for the keyboard, and begins to pump out linguistically structured concepts in recognizable little symbolic bundles. The neurons firing in my brain both consider and formulate and reject and select and finalize what I am trying to express while simultaneously instructing muscle tissue to react in a fashion that produces the intentional activity necessary to turn my intended meaning into something tangible or physical.

Say, under some draconian and masachistic philosophical stricture, I was required to justify the use of every concept or thing before I could begin to make use of it: if i had to prove that everything existed before I could rely on the 'fact' that it does.

I might be flummoxed for a while. Eventually I might turn to the dictionary. Thats usually where I look if I dont know WHAT something is. Woe to me, were I to do so. I could only ever become a lexicographic mad hatter, always crawling and falling down the definitional rabbit hole of the next term whose existence I need to justify. Because all definitions point to other terms (things, concepts) and so implicitly rely upon their existence to explain that of the defined term.

A dictionary is no place to look for existential solace. It is a maddeningly exponentially growing existential wormhole.

The standard of 'proof' for existence cannot be a reified bonafide definition in a Websters or Stedmans style dictionary.

So what is an appropriate standard? If not the dictionary, then what common-sense, consensus-based picture of reality can be relied upon as a justified existential claim?

I cant seem to think of many. To be sure, dictionaries are calcification; fossilization of consensus from some previous point in time. Consensus reality is consantly negotiated moment by moment; but systematic and authoritative statements about the state of consensus reality at any given moment are few. Scriptures are one. Medical Journals are another. Collections of Jurisprudence. But there is always change, discovery, revision.

Perhaps the draconian stricture should be loosened, such that existential dependenies a-la-Websters must be noted but not necessarily justified; or only to a threshold of N levels of dependency.