Comment by yellowapple

I find this very amusing. In philosophy of science some 20+ years ago I had a wonderful prof who went through 3(?) periods of thought. He laid out this argument, followed by the arguments seen below in this thread in various ways, in a systematic way where he convinced you that one way of thinking was correct, you took the midterm, then the next day he would lead with "everything you know is wrong, here's why.". It was beautiful.

He noted that this evolution of thought continued on until people generally argued that concepts/definitions that let you do meaningful things (your definition of meaningful, doesn't really matter what it is), are the way to go. The punchline at the very end, which happened to be the last thing I regurgitated on my last undergraduate exam, was him saying something along the lines of "Science, it beats hanging out in malls."

All this to say that if we read a little philosophy of science, that was done a long time ago (way before the class I took), things would make more sense.

I have definitely broken chairs upon sitting in them, which someone else could have sat in just fine. So it's unclear why something particular to me would change the chair-ness of an object.

Similarly, I've sat in some very uncomfortable chairs. In fact, I'd say the average chair is not a particularly comfortable one.

> Sure there is: a chair is anything upon which I can comfortably sit without breaking it.

« It is often said that a disproportionate obsession with purely academic or abstract matters indicates a retreat from the problems of real life. However, most of the people engaged in such matters say that this attitude is based on three things: ignorance, stupidity, and nothing else.

Philosophers, for example, argue that they are very much concerned with the problems posed by real life.

Like, for instance, “what do we mean by real?”, and “how can we reach an empirical definition of life?”, and so on.

One definition of life, albeit not a particularly useful one, might run something like this: “Life is that property which a being will lose as a result of falling out of a cold and mysterious cave thirteen miles above ground level.”

This is not a useful definition, (A) because it could equally well refer to the subject’s glasses if he happens to be wearing them, and (B) because it fails to take into account the possibility that the subject might happen to fall onto, say, the back of an extremely large passing bird.

The first of these flaws is due to sloppy thinking, but the second is understandable, because the mere idea is quite clearly, utterly ludicrous. »

— Douglas Adams

So a warm and smelly compost pile is a chair? A cold metal park bench is not a chair (because it's uncomfortable)?

A beanbag is a chair? Perhaps a chair should be something on which one can comfortably sit without breaking that has a back and four legs. I suppose then a horse would be a chair.

Would a chair on the Moon (or somewhere else inaccessible to you) be a chair?

Is a mountain a chair?

My bicycle is a chair, apparently.