The advert read “Leather backed, fully reclining comfort chair. Five Year guarantee.” The price seemed reasonable going by the picture and description. After paying for one, people received a leather backed, fully reclining chair that was rather smaller than they thought it would be, one which could fit in the palm of your hand. Ideal for a dolls house.
A chair provides an excellent example of how you can picture one in your head, but I can guarantee the one you will be thinking of will be quite different to that in the minds of others. A typical chair may have four legs, but a chair is still a chair irrespective of the number of legs it has. Some have arm rests and a back whilst some do not. A chair can still be considered to be a chair even when it is not something you can sit on. How do you definitively distinguish a chair from a stool or decide when it is no longer a chair? If you have a set of pieces cut to length and begin to screw them together, at what point does it become a chair. When does it end being so when you smash it into tiny pieces?
Cakes are taxed, biscuits are not. A cake goes hard, a biscuit goes soft and that is how they can be distinguished for tax purposes. If chairs are taxed and stools not, then perhaps we can market what resembles a chair as a stool. We call upon someone that has the authority to make individual distinctions. So much of life relies on human interpretation. Objects can be difficult to precisely define.
You can show someone to be wrong whatever answer they give to a question. Hold three cigarettes in your hand and ask them, “Are there two cigarettes in my hand?” If they say yes, there are two then they can disagree saying that there are three. If they say no then you can argue that there are two cigarettes, which is a true statement. Unless one specifies with better precision “Is the number of cigarettes equal to two?” (No less than, no more than) then you can invite some argument. Some people will reply, when asked the same question, “Cigarettes are bad for you”, and the debate will continue at a complete and frustrating tangent.
People will dismiss what you have to say. They will attempt to nullify your argument. Brush you aside. It doesn’t matter if there is any merit in what you put forward. They don’t take on board what you suggest nor provide justified counter arguments. They will quickly class what you are saying as being nihilistic, absolutism, solipsism or equal to some theorem or another. Our ideas are pigeonholed and ignored. For a start many would not be too sure what these terms really mean. Secondly it is a way of saying that your idea has already been examined and can be discounted. There are plenty of ploys used to sabotage a debate. We twist words and utilise various fallacies to complicate things. With mindless mind games abound, it can take a long time to break down linguistic devices to get somewhere.
Words can have different meanings in different contexts: ambiguity. Where there is more than one meaning of a word, don’t be surprised when someone takes another meaning to what you implied to trash what you are saying. Our central point to our argument is often ignored by shifting the focus onto an element of what we said. I was involved in a discussion about what responsibilities we have towards our neighbours. It is an ethical debate. However, the discussion never got onto ethics it simply focused on what a neighbour is. Are they those living next door, in the same street, or on adjacent farm miles away? If you said to someone that you saw your neighbour on a train, they would understand that you meant someone living near you. The questioner was asking about the level of care we feel we may have towards our neighbours, not what a neighbour is. Their interest lay in possible obligations we may have regarding people living close by. You were hoping for some insight into ethics, but instead you get caught up in a battle of defining things that are not essential to your query.
In a crowd of spectators cheering their team on, there are a small bunch that are ready for a fight. They are more interested in fighting one another than watching the game. So too in the field of philosophy we have many that are more interested in a verbal fight than wishing to explore a subject. They use the most sophisticated language to make them appear above everyone else. Rather than throwing violent punches, they play games to show off and demean people.
Some philosophy is inane senseless trite. Does a branch falling in a forest make a sound - if there is no one there to hear it? A soundwave is vibrations - often from percussion so nothing clever nor noteworthy in that question. The branch will hit something causing vibrations. Someone listening, a passive observer, does not affect the creation of those vibrations.
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