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Ontology

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology

Or: just try, then try your best to find ways your definition fails. You should find it challenging, to put it mildly, to create a bulletproof definition, if you’re really looking for angles to attack each definition you can think of. They’ll end up being too broad, or too narrow. Or coming up short on defining when exactly a non-chair becomes a chair, and vice-versa, or what the boundaries of a chair are (where chairness begins and ends).

And if that one is tricky…



How would I know when my definition is too broad?


Exactly. Do exactly what you’re doing now, but to your own definitions of “chair”. You get it.


Hold on. You're the one saying that a definition can be too broad & acting like that actually means something important.

So I'm asking how you define a definition as "too broad".

Because my perspective is that definitions that are in fact too broad are unimportant because no one uses them.


Useful definitions! Yes, easy.

Universal definitions? Extremely hard.


Do you know of a human culture in which a chair is defined as something else that an elevated seat with a back?




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