I think we disagree about what a definition is, in natural language.
I think it’s fair to say that you and I have an internally-consistent-though-vague definition of the word “sandwich”, even though I’m sure there are astronomically many edge-case examples for which we would answer differently. And in fact this is probably true for almost literally every non-mathematical noun or verb that we both “know”, albeit to varying degrees.
Edited to add: It suddenly seems likely to me that I should be using the word “meaning” rather than “definition” here, but the rest of the post goes through fine if I make that switch.
“Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.
You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.
I wonder if we should bet about something here. It seems plausible that we would make different predictions about how much agreement there would be on what is a “chemical”, if you were to explain about the structure, manufacturing, and acquisition of a given substance.
this does still have issues, if someone is horrified by riboflavin but makes sure to have plenty of vitamin B12. I’m expecting that people who are “chemical avoidant” ordinarily implement rather surface-level pattern matching of what qualifies, but if you provide them with detailed explanations of how specific names actually arise, they might match on the explanation rather than the name. still, I expect they’ll have a high rate of weird edge cases.
I think we disagree about what a definition is, in natural language.
I think it’s fair to say that you and I have an internally-consistent-though-vague definition of the word “sandwich”, even though I’m sure there are astronomically many edge-case examples for which we would answer differently. And in fact this is probably true for almost literally every non-mathematical noun or verb that we both “know”, albeit to varying degrees.
Edited to add: It suddenly seems likely to me that I should be using the word “meaning” rather than “definition” here, but the rest of the post goes through fine if I make that switch.
“Sandwich” is still more tightly defined than their version of “chemical”, and is still a useful concept that “carves reality at the joints” even if it’s a bit fuzzy about which side of each joint it’s cutting on.
You’d have to go all the way to “bad stuff” to get a comparably bad definition.
I wonder if we should bet about something here. It seems plausible that we would make different predictions about how much agreement there would be on what is a “chemical”, if you were to explain about the structure, manufacturing, and acquisition of a given substance.
this does still have issues, if someone is horrified by riboflavin but makes sure to have plenty of vitamin B12. I’m expecting that people who are “chemical avoidant” ordinarily implement rather surface-level pattern matching of what qualifies, but if you provide them with detailed explanations of how specific names actually arise, they might match on the explanation rather than the name. still, I expect they’ll have a high rate of weird edge cases.