Comment by byearthithatius
10 months ago
For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.
10 months ago
For a micro-moment before giving in it was a chair, then it broke. Now its no longer a chair. Its a broken chair.
That's not one, but two particularities that aren't latent to the chair itself: me (the sitter), and time.
Do you really have a personal ontology that requires you to ask the tense and person acting on a thing to know what that thing is? I suspect you don't; most people don't, because it would imply that the chair wouldn't be a chair if nobody sat on it.
A stump isn't a chair until someone decides to sit on it, at that point it becomes chair _to_ that person. Chair is only capable of acting as "chair" object if constraints are met in regards to sitter.
This is very complicated, because it now implies:
1. I can intend to sit on a chair but fail, in which case it isn't a chair (and I didn't intend to sit on it?)
2. I can intend to have my dog sit on my chair, but my dog isn't a person and so my chair isn't a chair.
This is-use distinction you're making is fine; most people have an intuition that things "act" as a thing in relation to how they're used. But to take it a step forwards and claim that a thing isn't its nature until a person sublimates their intent towards it is very unintuitive!
(In my mind, the answer is a lot simpler: a stump isn't a chair, but it's in the family network of things that are sittable, just like chairs and horses. Or to borrow Wittgenstein, a stump bears a family resemblance to a chair.)
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What if it breaks in a way which renders it no longer a chair for you but not others?
This seems to imply that what is or is not a chair is a subjective or conditional.
A broken chair is by definition a chair. You just said it!