One major difference here seems to be categorization of objects versus categorization of actions / events.
It is very easy to differentiate animals and things by a small set of features, but with actions this is a more complicated case. sex can refer to the group of things, sexual relations, which expands to include many things including kissing and touching, or the actual act of sexual intercourse... and the sexual intercourse can be performed in many different ways. We can look at an animal like a penguin and say, this is a bird, fairly easily, some others are harder. _______________________________________ James Ratcliff - http://falazar.com Looking for something... --- On Tue, 7/29/08, YKY (Yan King Yin) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: From: YKY (Yan King Yin) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [agi] a fuzzy reasoning problem To: [email protected] Date: Tuesday, July 29, 2008, 11:59 PM On 7/30/08, Benjamin Johnston <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The relationship between cybersex and sex is of a completely different > character to the relationship between penguins and birds. 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"? You may say: cybersex and phone sex lacks property X that is common to all other forms of sex. But then, anal sex or sex with a condom do not get a female pregnant, right? So by a similar reasoning you may also exclude anal sex or sex with a condom as sex. It seems that you (perhaps subjectively) require "having physical contact" as a defining characteristic of sex. But I can imagine someone not using that criterion in the definition of sex. Also relevant here is Wittgenstein's idea of "family resemblance": sometimes you may not be able to list all the defining properties of a concept. YKY ------------------------------------------- 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/?&; Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com ------------------------------------------- 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
