Categorization depends upon context. This was pretty much decided by the late
1980s (look up Fuzzy Concepts).
----- Original Message -----
From: James Ratcliff
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wednesday, July 30, 2008 4:05 PM
Subject: Re: [agi] a fuzzy reasoning problem
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 commonto
all other forms of sex.
But then, anal sex or sex with a condom donot get a female pregnant, right?
So by a similar reasoning you mayalso exclude anal sex or sex with a condom as
sex.It seems that you (perhaps subjectively) require "having physicalcontact"
as a defining characteristic of sex. But I can imaginesomeone not using that
criterion in the definition of sex.Also relevant here is Wittgenstein's idea of
"familyresemblance":sometimes you may not be able to list all the defining
properties of
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