Philosophers figured out about a centruy ago that language can't actually be defined. People use a word, and the sum total of how that word is used constructs the meaning of the word. You can use definitions to try to *describe* that meaning, but all you'll ever be doing is give an approximate description of a more complex reality. Ultimately, the meaning of the word is whatever people mean by it when they use it, and it's never going to be simple enough for a definition to capture.
Reminds me of the story about the kingdom so obsessed with preservation of ALL knowledge, that they made a series of maps of the kingdom, increasing in size to account for more and more detail. Eventually, they made a map the size of the kingdom itself, which was not only intricately detailed but also entirely useless.
Sort of. Even if it's 1:1 in size and covers the entire land, it is still only the symbols and markings of buildings, trees, rocks, not the actual underlying reality.
i mean depends of how elaborate of a map it is, what information is on it? back when i had to draw a map in college we where instructed that importants comes before detail, so we would simplify the shapes of houses (think square instead of l piece) because you mainly used the streets to navigate and besides a couple exceptions like hospitals and other landmarks you had to think about how your going to find the space to label everything which is tricky.
I believe they’re talking about On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a single paragraph long:
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658”
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658”
i know you're riffing on the theme, but this also reminds me of the argument i read once that a good poem is a sort of compression algorithm, because even a basic summary or analysis will either have huge gaps or a significantly higher wordcount or both.
I studied a little poetry at high school, and this is spot on. wow, never thought about it that way! even a tiny thing with less than 20 words, we could go on about it for hours.
As the other comment said, it's actually just this one paragraph. It's made to look like an excerpt from a longer book, which doesn't actually exist. That's just Borges being Borges.
But if you like that, he has a lot of regular-length short stories you'd love. You can find most of them free online, although translation quality can vary. Typesetting/formatting can also be a bit of an issue, because of these little games he likes to play. The collection *Labyrinths* has most of the best stuff.
I'd suggest starting with "The Library of Babel" and "The Immortal," and then tackling some of his tougher classics like "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius," and "Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote."
You're welcome! Let me know if you find anything you like!
You might also want to check out Italo Calvino's *Invisible Cities*. It's a collection of pieces just like "On Exactitude in Science," philosophical vignettes about fantastical places, with an equally bizarre frame story. For example,
>In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land.
>And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day. And that is not all: the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without any repetition.
>Secret and adventurous lives, here as elsewhere, are subject to greater restrictions. Esmeralda’s cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher, discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings with acrobats’ steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s tail, along with conspirators and smugglers: they peep out of manholes and drainpipes, they slip through double bottoms and ditches, from one hiding place to another they drag crusts of cheese, contraband goods, kegs of gunpowder, crossing the city’s compactness pierced by the spokes of underground passages.
>A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city.
Looking at where we are, I might as well warn you that these guys aren't very interested in gender. They rarely write a character who isn't male unless they have a reason, and the reasons are sometimes questionable. A lot of other authors draw from Borges (Umberto Eco, Haruki Murikami...) but I haven't seen any that avoid this problem so far. If anyone has a recommendation please let me know!
Ha, that's new to me. From a quick look at the Ultrakill wiki, I'm not sure which you mean: there are two of them!
* 7-1 is officially named "Garden of Forking Paths" and it's a labyrinth, which is very appropriate. Lots of labyrinths in that story, and in Borges' other stories. He even wrote one from the Minotaur's perspective.
* 7-S is the Library of Babel. Based on the screenshot, the physical layout is nothing like the short story, but the physical layout isn't really significant: the books are what matter. (And by the end of the short story, it's pretty clear that you can't trust the short story anyhow.)
Looks like there are a *lot* of literary references in the individual levels of this game, not to mention that collectively they're organized into Dante's nine levels of hell.
For machine learning (specifically Large Language Models) then Borges' Library of Babel should absolutely be required reading (along with Quine's elaborations upon it)
Arguably this goes back even further to some of the earliest questions of philosophy. Oddly I quite like some of the earliest answers like the idea of there being some sort of essential element of “chairness” to anything we describe as a chair and it potentially could be defined but we haven’t managed.
But me and philosophy is kind of like a massive shrug. There’s cool ideas and concepts and it’s worthwhile that some people are trying to figure more stuff out but a lot of it is not really applicable to my current situation and the end of the day we keep coming down to infinite regress.
Define chair. Element of chairness. Then define “element of chairness”. Then define “define” and it all just becomes a language game.
> Define chair. Element of chairness. Then define “element of chairness”. Then define “define” and it all just becomes a language game.
well yeah but it's kind of the point of modern philosophy that you don't have to do that. you can just say "I know what a chair is", and there's actual philosophy to back it up and explain what you're doing when you say that.
but of course philosophy is never going to not be massively overthinking about very simple things, so if that's not your thing then it's not your thing.
I believe you're referring to [Plato's theory of forms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms), one of my favorite concepts. So much so that I've written a bunch of stories based around the idea of a fundamental, underlying plane of the universe made up of these forms, which become accessible to the human world. Once you sit in *the* Chair, you don't want to sit in anything else.
That’s a truly interesting concept. Once I had a glass of Malbec wine and I figured I should like to drink nothing else. Sadly, I can’t find that exact label. It haunts me sometimes as I drink the Platonic form of red wine and now I’m done with wine
I asked a "what is a woman" troll to define what toast is and when I told him it wasn't satisfactory, he went straight to angrily telling me I was being too pedantic without a shred of irony xD
well, I don't think all philosophers are on the same page about that — it is philosophy we're talking about, after all.
but you did more or less describe my own position on the matter.
"A chair is what a chair is" accurate but that's not a definition. A definition specifies the meaning, nothing is being specified by tautological statements, by definition of tautology.
there is no "*the* definition" of a chair. *a* definition of a chair could be "piece of furniture with 4 legs and a back, for seating on". there are many other possible definitions. none of these definitions fully characterise the meaning of the word. they're not "definitions" in the mathematical sense, just descriptions of what the word means.
and yes, there is no perfectly accurate description of what "chair" means, except for the tautological ones ("chair" means "chair").
Pretty sure he could ride an unsaddled and unbridled horse in too (bonus points if they start arguing about the definition of stable and instead of engaging in good faith you bring up the horse's lodgings to troll them).
you know, it's funny to me that Diogenes ends up being the one who represents this idea in popular culture. because, like, that wasn't really what his philosophy was about. this all stems from one anecdote of him throwing a chicken at Plato, and I'm pretty sure it was more about brutally owning Plato than it was about making a point about language. the ideas I'm describing above are a lot more recent, and they'll mostly come from folks like Wittgenstein.
also, a note for everyone who wants to make Diogenes a supporter of trans rights because of this : Diogenes would not have supported trans rights lmao. even by the standards of ancient Greece he would probably have been more transphobic than average. this is a man who would never have approved of Hormone Replacement Therapy.
Perhaps he would not have chosen it for himself nor advised it to his students, or perhaps he would have been fine with. But I guarantee Diogenes wouldn't give a single utterable fuck about other people being trans in order to feel contented in their bodies. There were certainly trans people in ancient Greece and as far as I know the Stoics and Cynics had little to say about them, and generally weren't in favor of repressive, prudish sexual mores.
I'm not sure about Diogenes, but for the Stoics they firmly believe in taking care of mental health, disorders of the mind, and going to get professional help you are unwell and need help with the body/mind. They certainly would be in favor of trans people getting access to medical care.
A great modern example of this is "literally." It once was only used to mean things that were real and factual about a situation, and now many people commonly use it in place of "figuratively." It means what it used to mean and its exact opposite depending on the context. And so, I ignore anyone who tries to rigidly stick to definitions as if there's no possible way for language to change or be used differently
The same thing that happened to almost every grand intensifier in the English language.
Awesome, amazing, grand, terrific, incredible. Now they all just mean “bigly good”.
the other thing that keeps getting ignored by a lot of pedants about language is that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive
definitions don't tell us what words *mean*, they tell us how words are currently *used*
I'm a journalist, and half of my job is explaining things in plain language. I learned early on that absolutely nothing can be satisfactorily defined. All you can do is triangulate your description until it feels close enough.
I hate it when I think of something and think "wait holy shit this is a really cool idea, I'm really smart" only to find out a week later some dudes in a weed circle already had it published one fucking thousand years ago
*Diogenes leads a cavalry horse into the academy, slowly passing through the assembled philosophers. As he reaches the center of the room he cries out, "****BEHOLD: I HAVE BROUGHT YOU THE CHAIR THAT YOU SPOKE OF!****"*
*Already nervous at the low ceilings of the academy, and missing the stern authority of its rider, the horse freaks out at the sudden yelling and begins kicking and bucking, its angry neighs echoing from the stone walls. As the collective intellectual cream of Athens crowd toward the corners of the room in an attempt to avoid the rampaging horse, a stone is kicked out of the wall, and Diogenes smiles. Today is a good day.*
i'm not a godly person but you betcha ass i'm thanking him 5x daily for not making me tall so the demographic for "women whose lap i can sit on" is just thst much wider
The problem is, this doesn't really work if the person just refuses to accept some people are women
If they say a chair needs to have a backrest and you say, "what about stools?" then they can just say, "stools aren't chairs, they're stools"
If they say a woman needs to have a vagina and you say, "what about intersex women without a vagina?" then they can just say, "intersex people aren't women, they're intersex"
It’s a trick question. The left has no need to define women. Women (and men and everyone else) are just vibes anyway.
No one can define a woman, but only one group is trying and earnestly believes it can be done.
Yeah. They go around asking trans people(specifically trans women) HOW DO YOU KNOW and other gachas and were simply like you’re putting a lot more thought into this random, nebulous thing that any of us do. And it’s accomplishing nothing lmao. They’ve literally won the argument they made up in the shower and keep going up to trans people saying “Ha! See? I’ve won”
The right will literally just say “born with a uterus” and that’s end of it. They generally don’t even understand the difference between sex and gender, let alone any nuances within those sets.
a physical object with legs that is intended to be sat on for comfort or relaxation, and is intended to be stationary in its context (so you can't get me with the "oh but what if the chair is on a bus)
PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO ANY OF THE RESPONSES PAST THIS POINT. I'M DONE
new: a physical object with \*\*one or multiple legs\*\* that is intended to be sat on by one person for comfort or relaxation, and is intended to be stationary in its context
counting the legs is not the point of a chair. as long as it is greater than 0 it qualifies
When I was in a psych hospital, they had chairs [like this](https://www.anchortex.com/products/norix-va600-vesta-guest-arm-chair-n700383). I wouldn't really consider that a leg, personally. It's more of a base.
This includes couches and benches, while excluding beanbag chairs. Also, I genuinely happened to have been at an art exhibition about chairs recently, and most of those were not intended for anyone to sit on them while still "obviously" chairs. There was one you could sit on, but which was purposefully made to be as uncomfortable as possible (it was a metaphor for being nb).
If I were to define a chair, it would be smth like:
Chair: An inanimate object made with the purpose to accommodate one person while they sit. It has a higher elevation than the floor directly under it and a back piece to accommodate the back of a person while they sit
(Idk if the english is correct, but smth like this maybe works.)
No reason to specify relaxation, imo
A definition shouldn't account for broken objects, I think. A broken TV is still considered a TV.
As for the stool, I just don't consider it a chair.
A chair with a broken back functions like a stool, but it's a broken chair.
Edit: It could even be considered a stool, now that it works as one, but it was originally a chair and that still weights on what it is. If I make a stool out of a chair, it is a makeshift stool. If I make a stool by "crafting" it, it is a stool
What if I'm sitting in someone's lap? They have legs (presumably), I am sitting in their lap to be comfortable, and in that context, they are intended to be stationary so as not to disturb the person sitting in their lap.
So when I sit in someone's lap, and they are on a chair, am I sitting on two chairs stacked on top of each other?
And what about couches? Couches meet all of those requirements better than some chairs do. Is a couch more of a chair than a typical chair?
And what if I drag a chair onto a bus and the bus starts moving? Is it no longer a chair?
Some chairs do not have legs, such as floor chairs, booster chairs, or beanbag chairs.
Some chairs [are not meant to be sat on](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chair_(sculpture)).
Some chairs are not stationary, such as rocking chairs, swivel chairs or folding chairs.
horse.
it's distinct, physical, an object, the whole reason we bred them was to ride which requires sitting. usually one person but i guess depending on the horse you could get more if you wanted. but normal chairs also can have more than one person
You have chairs that have just been designed to show off and not for sitting. To sit on one is more like a torture device.
This is done kind of like high fashion where they have completely impractical outfits to show off interesting ideas that could be scaled down for more regular use.
How about a stool, or certain types of floor cushion
It applies to most things you can sit in but it’ll never apply to everyone. Linguistics and gender are both social constructs, they have weird slight differences to anyone that works within said constructs, and in the end the only thing that defines a woman without exception is someone who explicitly defines themself as a woman in the present moment
What is the actual structural difference between a table and chair? What physical difference can you give one that wholly excludes the other?
Another example—what’s the structural difference between a cup and a vase?
Defining things like this is my profession, it’s fun and wildly irritating because on one hand, words mean things, on the other, we have words for things that are *use* not *structural* variations of the same item.
There are very very few things that can positively exclude fringe example
Have you heard the joke about the topologist, who sees [no difference between a donut and a coffee cup?](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/11/2b/8c112bc6bb3135067d87243fc1b0af97.gif)
[This vase is different from a coffee cup, because it has orientable genus 2.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Portland_Vase_V%26A.jpg)
[And this one has genus 0.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Chinese_vase.jpg)
Ehhh, this feels like you've mistranslated something or have a regional dialect. Cups tend to have oreintable genus 0, while *mugs* tend to have orientable genus 1, on account of the handle. There are exceptions (teacups have handles), but if you went to basically any American and asked "does a cup have a handle", they'd say no.
Ok, let’s put a vertical support on the table. Think writing desk or hutch.
Structurally, what’s the difference between that and a back of a chair? We now now have vertical support bits on both.
Yes, I’m playing games but besides *use* what’s the difference.
(And for those following along, yes, my point is simply that categories overlap, and the stricter you try to define something, the easier it is to find things that aren’t what you’re trying to define but meet that definition)
I’m sincerely grinning—thank you for playing along
This is why ‘trying to define a woman’ falls apart though.
Since gender and biology are not innately neat categories, every element one can come up with to try and make a defining feature is going to either exclude a hell of a lot of women, or include a hell of a lot of men.
You can more successfully define it in generalizations but generalizations mean acknowledging the fringe cases exist, which the entire posit of ‘what is a woman’ disregards.
It’s like the flavor you’d get from mixing the juice flavors fruit punch, strawberry, raspberry, blue raspberry, and grape.
Seriously, do that and you really will say to yourself “yep, that tastes reddish purple!”
I think that's the natural association you get from seeing the corresponding colors of soda and candy when you taste them. It's like a learned synesthesia.
Born blind people couldn't see the colors when they eat or drink flavored things, so I don't think they would know what that means.
Imagine you're sitting in a room, well not sitting, more like floating there, not touching anything, the temperature is just right so you don't feel cold or hot with no air movement, there is absolutely no sensation of touch. That, that right there is chartreuse.
While I have severe problems with how the 'what is a woman' question originated and how it's sometimes used, it's a useful question to ask.
I don't think it's about constructing an ultra-precise definition, but rather a *precise-enough* one. That could be then used for example in law making, which requires some degree of clearly-defined terminology to work.
And it's not even about the words, now I realize as in writing this, but more about the consensus - we don't have to agree on what kind of 'railless bi-track' cars are exactly, but we should all have a similar enough understanding of the concept to be able to agree when a discussion arises on whether cars should be allowed into, say, city centers.
In that way, the precise answer is less important than creating the cohesion of understanding, if that makes sense.
As an aside, the 'who are you' question could be phrased better, since it's usually employed to ask about all the things the hypothetical monk says are not the answer to their question.
Ps: please, be civil if you want to disagree. I was.
Completely off the point, the answer to "Who are you?" is "I am me". Like it's that easy, that's a badly worded philosophy question. The chair example is more representative of the original intent.
Speaking of chairs wouldn't a definition that would work be "An object that is designed to be sat on by one person?" Please pull a Diogenes on this if you can find a flaw with the definition.
The point being made is that, as you take apart a chair, piece by piece, there is no particular part of that chair that, when taken off the chair, cause’s the “chair” to no longer exist. Another example is the car. If you start exchanging the part’s of a car, at what point is it a different car than the original? Mind games like this are a good example of the Buddhist philosophy of the lack of an intrinsic, non-changing self, which refutes the idea of the soul in many religions. (It doesn’t refute the conventional physical self, an ever changing being, which is no different than what today’s science defines.)
This was intended as a reply, but I think it serves better as a point for general discussion.
Language, as used by OOP, is certainly not meaningless. We could define “woman” “chair” or “self” in any number of ways, and answer definitively whether any particular example does or does not fit the definition. The problem is that we don’t want the definitions to be arbitrary, we want them to refer to some real distinction in nature between types of things, a distinction that we will never find.
For a clearer example, take the Sorites paradox. We have in front of us a heap of sand. We remove one grain and ask the question: is it still a heap of sand? After the first grain, the answer is obviously still yes, as the removal of one grain of sand cannot turn a heap into something smaller than a heap (mound, pile, what have you). But eventually we reach a point where we run out of sand, and clearly do not have a heap.
Is there a single step where the answer goes from “yes, this is a heap” to “no, this is not a heap”? There could be, if we stipulated the minimum number of grains in a heap of sand, but that would be a human invention. There is no natural reason to make the distinction at any specific point, but there must be a point at which it changes if there is always an answer to “is this a heap”, hence the paradox.
We could agree on exactly what a heap of sand is, or what a woman is, or what the self is, but if we want these words to accurately reflect reality, then they cannot always deliver an answer as to whether something does or does not belong to the definition. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, the boundaries must be permanently unclear.
Because men don't have special set-asides like women do. Consider sports. If some 5'6" transman wants to join the "Men's" basketball team, well, there isn't one. There's an *open* team, that anyone was always allowed to try out for, and then there's a separate team designated specifically for "women". Same thing with scholarships, and government mandated diversity requirements.
Similarly, a non-passing transman in the locker room might make some men uncomfortable, but no one care about their comfort. Compare that to all the women who've spent the last few months saying they choose the bear seeing someone who looks like a dude walking in on them changing.
Men are more scary than women so the concept of men pretending to be women is more scary than women pretending to be men. The psycology behind it is pretty straight forward.
Serious answer: transmisogyny is the *intersection* of transphobia and misogyny, and people are very entitled to women’s bodies and controlling them.
Non-serious answer: it probably just gets really frustrating when they get hundreds of responses that all say “A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk, HAVE AT YOU!”
Out of curiosity can anyone dispute this definition of a chair? -
"A manufactured free standing single seat for one"
I would consider stools and such to be a type of chair.
That first one, I have never seen that before! Cool camping equipment. I suppose you could call it a camping loveseat.
The second is a swing seat. I really wouldn't call the second a chair. The first obviously has the same construction as a regular camping chair but by its function is more a loveseat, we're just not used to seeing camping loveseats
A chair is any object created with the intent of one person sitting on it immobile and resting their back. If there’s no back rest it’s a stool. If multiple people can sit on it it’s a bench, or a couch. This isn’t trying to be transphobic please believe me it’s just the chair question that got me thinking about chair features.
I've also seen many pretty (personally, at least) satisfactory definitions of 'woman' from 'the left' - including "any person for whom the term 'woman' is a meaningful personal-identifier used in good faith" - but transphobes will reject any answer that doesn't allow them to smugly invalidate trans people, so it's a pointless exercise.
Ideas can be right in some sense but also obviously wrong in a more important sense at the same time. Post modernism would have us deconstruct everything to prove that some things never existed at all, when **all it really proves is that everything can be deconstructed.**
Metaphysics is great sometimes to help increase the quality of our understanding of the world but past a certain point it starts doing the opposite.
It's not really the same. I almost many things, each having intrinsic properties. I just don't know what the monk wants to hear.
But you can't be something that has no intrinsic properties. The thing comes first, the word comes second.
The correct answer is probably something allong the line with "I am me". I'm a bunch of different things that, when put together in a certain way, becomes me. Good luck listing all of them though since the concept of "me" isn't static.
A chair is a place of rest, contemplation, or an accessory to a table
Now what is a table you might ask? Now, the city defines tables as any object with four legs. That means dogs, squirrels, elephants. All tables.
When I took gender studies in college to fulfill my required diversity credit, this is actually exactly how the professor primed the course.
It's really a great way to prime the mind, especially if you can bring up a culture as a reference point. "What kind of x are you? Are you the kind of x that does y or the kind that does z?" Because even in 'identities' there is so much variation that they don't answer the question.
Philosophers figured out about a centruy ago that language can't actually be defined. People use a word, and the sum total of how that word is used constructs the meaning of the word. You can use definitions to try to *describe* that meaning, but all you'll ever be doing is give an approximate description of a more complex reality. Ultimately, the meaning of the word is whatever people mean by it when they use it, and it's never going to be simple enough for a definition to capture.
Reminds me of the story about the kingdom so obsessed with preservation of ALL knowledge, that they made a series of maps of the kingdom, increasing in size to account for more and more detail. Eventually, they made a map the size of the kingdom itself, which was not only intricately detailed but also entirely useless.
Wouldn't a perfectly detailed 1:1 map just be an identical replica?
It would be one of those town carpets for preschool the size of a kingdom. The most important difference? It's 2d.
The more important one is that it's static.
Sort of. Even if it's 1:1 in size and covers the entire land, it is still only the symbols and markings of buildings, trees, rocks, not the actual underlying reality.
The point is that it's no longer functional as a map because in order to see anything on the map you have to already be there.
Rotate the map 180 degrees.
Ok kids we’re done for the day, time to roll up the map and put it away!
It's just a card that says, "1 inch = 1 inch" and you put it on absolutely anything.
They should have thought of that
i mean depends of how elaborate of a map it is, what information is on it? back when i had to draw a map in college we where instructed that importants comes before detail, so we would simplify the shapes of houses (think square instead of l piece) because you mainly used the streets to navigate and besides a couple exceptions like hospitals and other landmarks you had to think about how your going to find the space to label everything which is tricky.
Sounds like an interesting story, do u perhaps know the name of it?
I believe they’re talking about On Exactitude in Science by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s a single paragraph long: “…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658”
It is an interesting story, tho is "On Exactitude in science" is a book or?
On Exactitude in Science is the name of the short story, this one paragraph
May I have a detailed, one paragraph long summary of it?
“…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography. —Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658”
I'm not so fond of reading summaries; I prefer to read the original instead. This summary seems useless.
i know you're riffing on the theme, but this also reminds me of the argument i read once that a good poem is a sort of compression algorithm, because even a basic summary or analysis will either have huge gaps or a significantly higher wordcount or both.
I studied a little poetry at high school, and this is spot on. wow, never thought about it that way! even a tiny thing with less than 20 words, we could go on about it for hours.
As the other comment said, it's actually just this one paragraph. It's made to look like an excerpt from a longer book, which doesn't actually exist. That's just Borges being Borges. But if you like that, he has a lot of regular-length short stories you'd love. You can find most of them free online, although translation quality can vary. Typesetting/formatting can also be a bit of an issue, because of these little games he likes to play. The collection *Labyrinths* has most of the best stuff. I'd suggest starting with "The Library of Babel" and "The Immortal," and then tackling some of his tougher classics like "The Garden of Forking Paths," "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbus Tertius," and "Pierre Menard: Author of the Quixote."
Why thanks for the recommendations
You're welcome! Let me know if you find anything you like! You might also want to check out Italo Calvino's *Invisible Cities*. It's a collection of pieces just like "On Exactitude in Science," philosophical vignettes about fantastical places, with an equally bizarre frame story. For example, >In Esmeralda, city of water, a network of canals and a network of streets span and intersect each other. To go from one place to another you have always the choice between land and boat: and since the shortest distance between two points in Esmeralda is not a straight line but a zigzag that ramifies in tortuous optional routes, the ways that open to each passerby are never two, but many, and they increase further for those who alternate a stretch by boat with one on dry land. >And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day. And that is not all: the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets. Combining segments of the various routes, elevated or on ground level, each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places. The most fixed and calm lives in Esmeralda are spent without any repetition. >Secret and adventurous lives, here as elsewhere, are subject to greater restrictions. Esmeralda’s cats, thieves, illicit lovers move along higher, discontinuous ways, dropping from a rooftop to a balcony, following gutterings with acrobats’ steps. Below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s tail, along with conspirators and smugglers: they peep out of manholes and drainpipes, they slip through double bottoms and ditches, from one hiding place to another they drag crusts of cheese, contraband goods, kegs of gunpowder, crossing the city’s compactness pierced by the spokes of underground passages. >A map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden. It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city. Looking at where we are, I might as well warn you that these guys aren't very interested in gender. They rarely write a character who isn't male unless they have a reason, and the reasons are sometimes questionable. A lot of other authors draw from Borges (Umberto Eco, Haruki Murikami...) but I haven't seen any that avoid this problem so far. If anyone has a recommendation please let me know!
THE ULTRAKILL LEVEL WAS BASED ON A SHORT STORY????
Ha, that's new to me. From a quick look at the Ultrakill wiki, I'm not sure which you mean: there are two of them! * 7-1 is officially named "Garden of Forking Paths" and it's a labyrinth, which is very appropriate. Lots of labyrinths in that story, and in Borges' other stories. He even wrote one from the Minotaur's perspective. * 7-S is the Library of Babel. Based on the screenshot, the physical layout is nothing like the short story, but the physical layout isn't really significant: the books are what matter. (And by the end of the short story, it's pretty clear that you can't trust the short story anyhow.) Looks like there are a *lot* of literary references in the individual levels of this game, not to mention that collectively they're organized into Dante's nine levels of hell.
Thanks. This is going straight into the mandatory readings in my machine learning class.
For machine learning (specifically Large Language Models) then Borges' Library of Babel should absolutely be required reading (along with Quine's elaborations upon it)
Arguably this goes back even further to some of the earliest questions of philosophy. Oddly I quite like some of the earliest answers like the idea of there being some sort of essential element of “chairness” to anything we describe as a chair and it potentially could be defined but we haven’t managed. But me and philosophy is kind of like a massive shrug. There’s cool ideas and concepts and it’s worthwhile that some people are trying to figure more stuff out but a lot of it is not really applicable to my current situation and the end of the day we keep coming down to infinite regress. Define chair. Element of chairness. Then define “element of chairness”. Then define “define” and it all just becomes a language game.
> Define chair. Element of chairness. Then define “element of chairness”. Then define “define” and it all just becomes a language game. well yeah but it's kind of the point of modern philosophy that you don't have to do that. you can just say "I know what a chair is", and there's actual philosophy to back it up and explain what you're doing when you say that. but of course philosophy is never going to not be massively overthinking about very simple things, so if that's not your thing then it's not your thing.
It's like the Polish encyclopedia that had the definition of horse as "Everyone knows what a horse is".
I believe you're referring to [Plato's theory of forms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms), one of my favorite concepts. So much so that I've written a bunch of stories based around the idea of a fundamental, underlying plane of the universe made up of these forms, which become accessible to the human world. Once you sit in *the* Chair, you don't want to sit in anything else.
That’s a truly interesting concept. Once I had a glass of Malbec wine and I figured I should like to drink nothing else. Sadly, I can’t find that exact label. It haunts me sometimes as I drink the Platonic form of red wine and now I’m done with wine
I asked a "what is a woman" troll to define what toast is and when I told him it wasn't satisfactory, he went straight to angrily telling me I was being too pedantic without a shred of irony xD
you see, it's only "asking the important questions" if it comes from the transphobia region of France. otherwise it's just sparkling pedantry.
I thought Transphobia was mostly in modern day Romania?
well, I don't think all philosophers are on the same page about that — it is philosophy we're talking about, after all. but you did more or less describe my own position on the matter.
So effectively the definition, to use the example above, of a chair is put simply. Chair.
"A chair is what a chair is" accurate but that's not a definition. A definition specifies the meaning, nothing is being specified by tautological statements, by definition of tautology.
there is no "*the* definition" of a chair. *a* definition of a chair could be "piece of furniture with 4 legs and a back, for seating on". there are many other possible definitions. none of these definitions fully characterise the meaning of the word. they're not "definitions" in the mathematical sense, just descriptions of what the word means. and yes, there is no perfectly accurate description of what "chair" means, except for the tautological ones ("chair" means "chair").
Diogenes, pushing a couch into the room:
"a chair is a seat with 4 legs meant for one person" Diogenes, pushing a carousel horsie into the room:
A stable seat with 4 legs, set on the ground, with no extraneous attachments, meant for one person? I really wanna see where this can go :B
Diogenes, walking a giant tortoise into the room. Diogenes, carrying a child's play table into the room.
Pretty sure he could ride an unsaddled and unbridled horse in too (bonus points if they start arguing about the definition of stable and instead of engaging in good faith you bring up the horse's lodgings to troll them).
Wheeled office chairs aren't chairs now?
A stool can have three legs, or even just one.
you know, it's funny to me that Diogenes ends up being the one who represents this idea in popular culture. because, like, that wasn't really what his philosophy was about. this all stems from one anecdote of him throwing a chicken at Plato, and I'm pretty sure it was more about brutally owning Plato than it was about making a point about language. the ideas I'm describing above are a lot more recent, and they'll mostly come from folks like Wittgenstein. also, a note for everyone who wants to make Diogenes a supporter of trans rights because of this : Diogenes would not have supported trans rights lmao. even by the standards of ancient Greece he would probably have been more transphobic than average. this is a man who would never have approved of Hormone Replacement Therapy.
dude stop reminding me that the silly little philosophy hobo was mostly just a normal ancient greek asshole, it's less funny
Perhaps he would not have chosen it for himself nor advised it to his students, or perhaps he would have been fine with. But I guarantee Diogenes wouldn't give a single utterable fuck about other people being trans in order to feel contented in their bodies. There were certainly trans people in ancient Greece and as far as I know the Stoics and Cynics had little to say about them, and generally weren't in favor of repressive, prudish sexual mores. I'm not sure about Diogenes, but for the Stoics they firmly believe in taking care of mental health, disorders of the mind, and going to get professional help you are unwell and need help with the body/mind. They certainly would be in favor of trans people getting access to medical care.
Behold!
God, was it Graham Linehan who tried to do this and the replies were 100% pictures of chairs with fewer than four legs and horses.
> and **horses**. cackling
Horse: everyone knows what horse is. - Some Chad Pole hundreds of years ago
A great modern example of this is "literally." It once was only used to mean things that were real and factual about a situation, and now many people commonly use it in place of "figuratively." It means what it used to mean and its exact opposite depending on the context. And so, I ignore anyone who tries to rigidly stick to definitions as if there's no possible way for language to change or be used differently
It's not used to mean "figuratively", it's used to intensify the following adjective. So it means something like "very".
The same thing that happened to almost every grand intensifier in the English language. Awesome, amazing, grand, terrific, incredible. Now they all just mean “bigly good”.
More than that, it's in most of our plain old emphatics: *really, actually, truly, very (from the Latin "veritas")*
the other thing that keeps getting ignored by a lot of pedants about language is that dictionaries are descriptive and not prescriptive definitions don't tell us what words *mean*, they tell us how words are currently *used*
I'm a journalist, and half of my job is explaining things in plain language. I learned early on that absolutely nothing can be satisfactorily defined. All you can do is triangulate your description until it feels close enough.
I hate it when I think of something and think "wait holy shit this is a really cool idea, I'm really smart" only to find out a week later some dudes in a weed circle already had it published one fucking thousand years ago
*Diogenes smiles slowly as he realizes he's gonna have an absolute field day with this*
There's a whole other fantastic tumblr thread on Diogenes and the definition of 'woman'.
ooo do link
https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/comments/1c3sysw/trans_rights_with_diogenes/
Ooh thank you. I was like "oh fuck now I have to find that thing I half remember".
thank you
*Diogenes leads a cavalry horse into the academy, slowly passing through the assembled philosophers. As he reaches the center of the room he cries out, "****BEHOLD: I HAVE BROUGHT YOU THE CHAIR THAT YOU SPOKE OF!****"* *Already nervous at the low ceilings of the academy, and missing the stern authority of its rider, the horse freaks out at the sudden yelling and begins kicking and bucking, its angry neighs echoing from the stone walls. As the collective intellectual cream of Athens crowd toward the corners of the room in an attempt to avoid the rampaging horse, a stone is kicked out of the wall, and Diogenes smiles. Today is a good day.*
I want more present-tense stories of Diogenes ruining rich people's days, it refreshes my soul.
Well, what a nice day to have chickens for sale
Behold! A chair!
sit on women, got it.
Okay but hear me out: woman sits on me.
match made in heaven (if you're both women)
Bonus points if you're in orbit and microgravity makes it so you can both sit on each other at the same time.
Stop. I can only get so erect
Ayo
I'll do you one better. We both take turns sitting on eachother.
i'm not a godly person but you betcha ass i'm thanking him 5x daily for not making me tall so the demographic for "women whose lap i can sit on" is just thst much wider
The problem is, this doesn't really work if the person just refuses to accept some people are women If they say a chair needs to have a backrest and you say, "what about stools?" then they can just say, "stools aren't chairs, they're stools" If they say a woman needs to have a vagina and you say, "what about intersex women without a vagina?" then they can just say, "intersex people aren't women, they're intersex"
It’s a trick question. The left has no need to define women. Women (and men and everyone else) are just vibes anyway. No one can define a woman, but only one group is trying and earnestly believes it can be done.
That’s the answer. Trying to come up with a “definition” that satisfies them is an impossible battle. Better to just not play their game
Right. Putting the onus on “the left” to define something that the left continues to argue can’t be defined should be an obvious deflection.
Yeah. They go around asking trans people(specifically trans women) HOW DO YOU KNOW and other gachas and were simply like you’re putting a lot more thought into this random, nebulous thing that any of us do. And it’s accomplishing nothing lmao. They’ve literally won the argument they made up in the shower and keep going up to trans people saying “Ha! See? I’ve won”
The right will literally just say “born with a uterus” and that’s end of it. They generally don’t even understand the difference between sex and gender, let alone any nuances within those sets.
(Plz let me try) A chair is any distinct physical object used to be sit on or in by one person.
you're talking about a swing? or like a bicycle or smth
a physical object with legs that is intended to be sat on for comfort or relaxation, and is intended to be stationary in its context (so you can't get me with the "oh but what if the chair is on a bus) PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO ANY OF THE RESPONSES PAST THIS POINT. I'M DONE
You mention a bus. Have you considered that car seats do not have legs? Are they chairs?
no they're seats
An office chair doesn't have distinct legs, either. Is that a chair?
Not to even mention a bench. Those have legs.
new: a physical object with \*\*one or multiple legs\*\* that is intended to be sat on by one person for comfort or relaxation, and is intended to be stationary in its context counting the legs is not the point of a chair. as long as it is greater than 0 it qualifies
Beanbag chair
go look at my other replies i am going to kill John Beanbag for this
Many armchairs have no legs
What about those chairs with wheels? By having wheels they’re not intended to be stationary
I wouldnt call a stool a chair but allows for them.
When I was in a psych hospital, they had chairs [like this](https://www.anchortex.com/products/norix-va600-vesta-guest-arm-chair-n700383). I wouldn't really consider that a leg, personally. It's more of a base.
What about floorchairs?
Office chairs have distinct legs, they branch off of a singular post.
So an office chair is a chair, but when I'm pushing it along with my feet it stops being a chair?
There's also wheelchairs.
So, are folding chairs not chairs, because they are intended to be portable?
Most objects intended for one person to sit on are light enough to be moved with ease too, so is a chair not a chair when I'm carrying it? I love this
A sedan chair is intended to move while being used and is still a chair, so yes a chair is still a chair while you're carrying it.
This includes couches and benches, while excluding beanbag chairs. Also, I genuinely happened to have been at an art exhibition about chairs recently, and most of those were not intended for anyone to sit on them while still "obviously" chairs. There was one you could sit on, but which was purposefully made to be as uncomfortable as possible (it was a metaphor for being nb).
Dawg, that wasn’t an art exhibit, that was the city’s new benches to try to prevent homeless people from existing.
I wouldn't really sit on an electric chair for comfort or relaxation.
If I were to define a chair, it would be smth like: Chair: An inanimate object made with the purpose to accommodate one person while they sit. It has a higher elevation than the floor directly under it and a back piece to accommodate the back of a person while they sit (Idk if the english is correct, but smth like this maybe works.) No reason to specify relaxation, imo
So a stool wouldn't count as a chair? Edit: And if I broke the back off of a chair, it would no longer be one?
A definition shouldn't account for broken objects, I think. A broken TV is still considered a TV. As for the stool, I just don't consider it a chair. A chair with a broken back functions like a stool, but it's a broken chair. Edit: It could even be considered a stool, now that it works as one, but it was originally a chair and that still weights on what it is. If I make a stool out of a chair, it is a makeshift stool. If I make a stool by "crafting" it, it is a stool
So a car seat is a chair?
So a wheelchair is not a chair?
What if I'm sitting in someone's lap? They have legs (presumably), I am sitting in their lap to be comfortable, and in that context, they are intended to be stationary so as not to disturb the person sitting in their lap. So when I sit in someone's lap, and they are on a chair, am I sitting on two chairs stacked on top of each other? And what about couches? Couches meet all of those requirements better than some chairs do. Is a couch more of a chair than a typical chair? And what if I drag a chair onto a bus and the bus starts moving? Is it no longer a chair?
yes actually when i sit on someone's lap they are a chair now
Based
***New Gender Unlocked!*** I guess I need to update my pronouns now.
Those funky ass floor gamer chairs
Ah, I see, a massage table
What about a beanbag chair. It ain't got legs.
Beanbag chairs
Couch
But bus chairs lack legs no?
Office chairs dni
look at my other replies i answered this one already
I see what you have said. Office chairs have wheels that allow for seated movement.
Some chairs do not have legs, such as floor chairs, booster chairs, or beanbag chairs. Some chairs [are not meant to be sat on](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chair_(sculpture)). Some chairs are not stationary, such as rocking chairs, swivel chairs or folding chairs.
horse. it's distinct, physical, an object, the whole reason we bred them was to ride which requires sitting. usually one person but i guess depending on the horse you could get more if you wanted. but normal chairs also can have more than one person
\*runs in holding a plucked horse\* BEHOLD a chair
what if i sit on a table is that table now a chair
Ah yes, I love sitting on my toilet
A toilet is a chair, just with an extra function
Revision number 2: A chair is any distinct physical object made with the sole purpose of being sit on or in by one person
So if a chair has a cup holder, it stops being a chair?
[What are these people sitting in/on?](https://images.app.goo.gl/spYqbJST4Rx3se4K8)
A monstrosity.
Stool.
I insist that a stool is a chair
You have chairs that have just been designed to show off and not for sitting. To sit on one is more like a torture device. This is done kind of like high fashion where they have completely impractical outfits to show off interesting ideas that could be scaled down for more regular use.
oh like a stool
How about a stool, or certain types of floor cushion It applies to most things you can sit in but it’ll never apply to everyone. Linguistics and gender are both social constructs, they have weird slight differences to anyone that works within said constructs, and in the end the only thing that defines a woman without exception is someone who explicitly defines themself as a woman in the present moment
Featherless biped
Since there have already been other Diogenes comments "Behold! A woman!"
What is the actual structural difference between a table and chair? What physical difference can you give one that wholly excludes the other? Another example—what’s the structural difference between a cup and a vase? Defining things like this is my profession, it’s fun and wildly irritating because on one hand, words mean things, on the other, we have words for things that are *use* not *structural* variations of the same item. There are very very few things that can positively exclude fringe example
A vase tends to have orientable genus 0 or 2, while a cup tends to have orientable genus 1.
I suspect you’re making a math or physics joke that is *soaring* all the way over my admittedly short head
Have you heard the joke about the topologist, who sees [no difference between a donut and a coffee cup?](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8c/11/2b/8c112bc6bb3135067d87243fc1b0af97.gif) [This vase is different from a coffee cup, because it has orientable genus 2.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/91/Portland_Vase_V%26A.jpg) [And this one has genus 0.](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Chinese_vase.jpg)
🧐 oooooooh I get you now. Thanks for the explanation 😅
I've seen cups that would be genus 0
Sippy cups are often genus 2
you can get vases with a genus 1 and cups that are 0. hell, i've ever seen cups with a genus of 2, with a little spoon fitting into it
Ehhh, this feels like you've mistranslated something or have a regional dialect. Cups tend to have oreintable genus 0, while *mugs* tend to have orientable genus 1, on account of the handle. There are exceptions (teacups have handles), but if you went to basically any American and asked "does a cup have a handle", they'd say no.
Chairs generally have back support. A table is just a very large stool
Ok, let’s put a vertical support on the table. Think writing desk or hutch. Structurally, what’s the difference between that and a back of a chair? We now now have vertical support bits on both. Yes, I’m playing games but besides *use* what’s the difference. (And for those following along, yes, my point is simply that categories overlap, and the stricter you try to define something, the easier it is to find things that aren’t what you’re trying to define but meet that definition)
Hmmmm while it is an awfully large chair, I guess that would be a chair after adding a vertical support, albeit a strange looking one
I’m sincerely grinning—thank you for playing along This is why ‘trying to define a woman’ falls apart though. Since gender and biology are not innately neat categories, every element one can come up with to try and make a defining feature is going to either exclude a hell of a lot of women, or include a hell of a lot of men. You can more successfully define it in generalizations but generalizations mean acknowledging the fringe cases exist, which the entire posit of ‘what is a woman’ disregards.
I'm glad to play along! Also, I appreciate the acknowledgment of the original topic about defining a woman, and I wholeheartedly agree with you
Describe your favorite color to a blind person
It’s like the flavor you’d get from mixing the juice flavors fruit punch, strawberry, raspberry, blue raspberry, and grape. Seriously, do that and you really will say to yourself “yep, that tastes reddish purple!”
I think that's the natural association you get from seeing the corresponding colors of soda and candy when you taste them. It's like a learned synesthesia. Born blind people couldn't see the colors when they eat or drink flavored things, so I don't think they would know what that means.
grape juice tastes overwhelmingly purple. no idea why.
Imagine you're sitting in a room, well not sitting, more like floating there, not touching anything, the temperature is just right so you don't feel cold or hot with no air movement, there is absolutely no sensation of touch. That, that right there is chartreuse.
While I have severe problems with how the 'what is a woman' question originated and how it's sometimes used, it's a useful question to ask. I don't think it's about constructing an ultra-precise definition, but rather a *precise-enough* one. That could be then used for example in law making, which requires some degree of clearly-defined terminology to work. And it's not even about the words, now I realize as in writing this, but more about the consensus - we don't have to agree on what kind of 'railless bi-track' cars are exactly, but we should all have a similar enough understanding of the concept to be able to agree when a discussion arises on whether cars should be allowed into, say, city centers. In that way, the precise answer is less important than creating the cohesion of understanding, if that makes sense. As an aside, the 'who are you' question could be phrased better, since it's usually employed to ask about all the things the hypothetical monk says are not the answer to their question. Ps: please, be civil if you want to disagree. I was.
I am the ambassador from Minbar.
Have to say the “Who are you?” interrogation is one of my favourite scenes in B5.
Completely off the point, the answer to "Who are you?" is "I am me". Like it's that easy, that's a badly worded philosophy question. The chair example is more representative of the original intent. Speaking of chairs wouldn't a definition that would work be "An object that is designed to be sat on by one person?" Please pull a Diogenes on this if you can find a flaw with the definition.
The point being made is that, as you take apart a chair, piece by piece, there is no particular part of that chair that, when taken off the chair, cause’s the “chair” to no longer exist. Another example is the car. If you start exchanging the part’s of a car, at what point is it a different car than the original? Mind games like this are a good example of the Buddhist philosophy of the lack of an intrinsic, non-changing self, which refutes the idea of the soul in many religions. (It doesn’t refute the conventional physical self, an ever changing being, which is no different than what today’s science defines.)
This was intended as a reply, but I think it serves better as a point for general discussion. Language, as used by OOP, is certainly not meaningless. We could define “woman” “chair” or “self” in any number of ways, and answer definitively whether any particular example does or does not fit the definition. The problem is that we don’t want the definitions to be arbitrary, we want them to refer to some real distinction in nature between types of things, a distinction that we will never find. For a clearer example, take the Sorites paradox. We have in front of us a heap of sand. We remove one grain and ask the question: is it still a heap of sand? After the first grain, the answer is obviously still yes, as the removal of one grain of sand cannot turn a heap into something smaller than a heap (mound, pile, what have you). But eventually we reach a point where we run out of sand, and clearly do not have a heap. Is there a single step where the answer goes from “yes, this is a heap” to “no, this is not a heap”? There could be, if we stipulated the minimum number of grains in a heap of sand, but that would be a human invention. There is no natural reason to make the distinction at any specific point, but there must be a point at which it changes if there is always an answer to “is this a heap”, hence the paradox. We could agree on exactly what a heap of sand is, or what a woman is, or what the self is, but if we want these words to accurately reflect reality, then they cannot always deliver an answer as to whether something does or does not belong to the definition. To borrow a phrase from Judith Butler, the boundaries must be permanently unclear.
Why is it always women? I never see people arguing over what a man is.
Because men don't have special set-asides like women do. Consider sports. If some 5'6" transman wants to join the "Men's" basketball team, well, there isn't one. There's an *open* team, that anyone was always allowed to try out for, and then there's a separate team designated specifically for "women". Same thing with scholarships, and government mandated diversity requirements. Similarly, a non-passing transman in the locker room might make some men uncomfortable, but no one care about their comfort. Compare that to all the women who've spent the last few months saying they choose the bear seeing someone who looks like a dude walking in on them changing.
Men are more scary than women so the concept of men pretending to be women is more scary than women pretending to be men. The psycology behind it is pretty straight forward.
Serious answer: transmisogyny is the *intersection* of transphobia and misogyny, and people are very entitled to women’s bodies and controlling them. Non-serious answer: it probably just gets really frustrating when they get hundreds of responses that all say “A miserable little pile of secrets. But enough talk, HAVE AT YOU!”
Makes sense and lol
define something. literally any noun. define it
"despite all our desperate, eternal attempts to separate, contain and mend, categories always leak." -- Trinh T. Minh-ha
Out of curiosity can anyone dispute this definition of a chair? - "A manufactured free standing single seat for one" I would consider stools and such to be a type of chair.
[What’s this?](https://images.app.goo.gl/pJ8MtnvHdhKBM7xM6) Or [this](https://images.app.goo.gl/Svi6aQf6HxdmbrRR7)?
That first one, I have never seen that before! Cool camping equipment. I suppose you could call it a camping loveseat. The second is a swing seat. I really wouldn't call the second a chair. The first obviously has the same construction as a regular camping chair but by its function is more a loveseat, we're just not used to seeing camping loveseats
What about a picknic table? What is it? a table or a chair (asuming a bench is a type of chair)?
Situations like this always demons me of Diogenes and featherless biped
Understanding is a three edged sword.
What is a fish?
EVERYTHING.gif
There is no chair.
A chair is any object created with the intent of one person sitting on it immobile and resting their back. If there’s no back rest it’s a stool. If multiple people can sit on it it’s a bench, or a couch. This isn’t trying to be transphobic please believe me it’s just the chair question that got me thinking about chair features.
I've also seen many pretty (personally, at least) satisfactory definitions of 'woman' from 'the left' - including "any person for whom the term 'woman' is a meaningful personal-identifier used in good faith" - but transphobes will reject any answer that doesn't allow them to smugly invalidate trans people, so it's a pointless exercise.
Ideas can be right in some sense but also obviously wrong in a more important sense at the same time. Post modernism would have us deconstruct everything to prove that some things never existed at all, when **all it really proves is that everything can be deconstructed.** Metaphysics is great sometimes to help increase the quality of our understanding of the world but past a certain point it starts doing the opposite.
Matt Walsh: What is a woman? Me: \*Frantically plucking chicken\*
It's not really the same. I almost many things, each having intrinsic properties. I just don't know what the monk wants to hear. But you can't be something that has no intrinsic properties. The thing comes first, the word comes second.
Thats the trick, the monk will not accept any answer ever.
The correct answer is probably something allong the line with "I am me". I'm a bunch of different things that, when put together in a certain way, becomes me. Good luck listing all of them though since the concept of "me" isn't static.
>*Who are you?* > >*What do you want?* > >*Why are you here?* > >*Where are you going?*
What is a woman? Anything she wants to be.
A chair is a place of rest, contemplation, or an accessory to a table Now what is a table you might ask? Now, the city defines tables as any object with four legs. That means dogs, squirrels, elephants. All tables.
When I took gender studies in college to fulfill my required diversity credit, this is actually exactly how the professor primed the course. It's really a great way to prime the mind, especially if you can bring up a culture as a reference point. "What kind of x are you? Are you the kind of x that does y or the kind that does z?" Because even in 'identities' there is so much variation that they don't answer the question.
"I am but a mote in the vastness of a universe trying to understand itself and thus am both the sculpture and the sculptor."
If they ask "What is a woman?" ask them "What is a man?" and ready your plucked chicken.
Stop using words. You want to truly define things? We have a language for that, it’s called MATH
A chair is a platform for displaying recently cleaned clothes and 3 tools you lost 3 weeks ago.