> Can you define that difference in an abstract, general way? I > mean, what is the *qualitative* difference that makes: > "cybersex is a kind of sex" > different from: > "penguin is a kind of bird"?
I believe that cybersex and phone sex are called sex in a metaphoric way. The keyboard or telephone does not appear to be a critical part of what might make cybersex and phone sex to be kinds of sex, and yet when you remove the keyboard and telephone all you are left with is "talking dirty" between two people. It seems to me that you're using words as categories, even when the word is used in a metaphorical way, and even when the groupings don't seem to be meaningful. It seems you define sex as something like "any activity that has the word sex in it". You haven't included masturbation or flirting in your lists, but I wonder what you might be arguing if they were commonly called self-sex and social-sex respectively. Your definition of sex appears to be so broad that there is little that could be said about it; and if so what is the point of such a category? If you see sex as any activity that causes arousal, then a rule like "many sex partners = high probability of STDs" is clearly defective. You would really need a sub-category for physical sex to allow this kind of rule, and then you end up with my suggestion again (modulo symbol renaming). I admit that no classification structure is going to be perfect (consider Bill Clinton :) ), but there is a point when categories become too artificial and inclusive that they start allowing problems like the one you originally described. In some applications, it is a reasonable heuristic that word = category (ConceptNet does something like this), but by choosing such a heuristic, you're not really doing logic, and you're going to get odd inferences like one you originally described when reasoning about words with multiple purposes. Including penguins as a kind of bird, on the other hand, doesn't result in a meaningless category. There are many many useful things that can be said about birds that apply to penguins as well as the more "prototypical" birds. Actually, this conversation brings to my mind Peter Gardenfors' idea of conceptual spaces. He points out that human concepts tend to form convex regions in a conceptual space. We don't invent categories for objects that are "green, red or orange but not purple, blue, yellow, white or black"; however, we do invent categories for things like "red" or "dark" because these form convex regions in mappings of perceptual similarity. While I don't have a formal conceptual space of erotic activities, your conception of sex strikes me as a rather concave and arbitrary region: it encompasses activities as diverse as phone sex and group sex, but apparently avoids talking dirty, looking at pornography, reading romance novels and masturbation. -Ben ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=108809214-a0d121 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
