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Stool/Chair

April 4, 2008 by Anonymous, 1 year 31 weeks ago
Comment id: 28543

Without knowing what a chair is, can you know what a stool is? Does it stop being a stool and start being a chair when you have no prior knowledge of either?

I argue that unless you have a preconcieved notion of "chair", you cannot percieve the difference between "chair" and "stool". The word itself is irrelevant, so if you know of neither chair nor stool, and encounter a stool, it's a chair. If you do have knowledge of a chair, then it's obviously a different kind of chair, for a slightly more specific but very similar purpose. It's impossible to know what a stool is without comparing it to a chair, so it's impossible that one would know about stools but not about chairs. Ergo, Stool = Chair, but Chair != Stool.

Perhaps there's a more elegant way of putting it than that, but if such an eloquent form exists, I do not know of it.

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