(December 3, 2021 at 6:43 pm)vulcanlogician Wrote:(December 2, 2021 at 1:36 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote: I'm probably going to regret asking this, but are you saying that metaphysically speaking, chairs aren't evidence for the existence of chairs because physical evidence has no bearing on metaphysics?
I suppose so. A metaphysician wants to know what makes the chair a chair. It's "chairness" so to speak. You won't find "chairness" out there in nature. "Chairness" is completely conceptual... not a physical thing... hence "metaphysical."
It's the kind of thing that might irritate non-philosophy buffs. And I hope you don't regret asking. You seem interested in some philosophical matters anyway, Mister. This particular problem may or may not be your cup of tea. Plenty of philosophers don't bother themselves by thinking about ordinary objects. But I find it fascinating to ponder. Here's the Vsauce video that sparked the conversation in the first place: https://youtu.be/fXW-QjBsruE
Michael has really been getting into philosophy lately. I dig it.
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Thing is, "What is chair-ness?" isn't really all that important of a philosophical question in the grand scheme. (Compare it to "What is justice?" which seems rather important to work out as much as we can.) But if we can't get to the bottom of a simple concept like "chair"... what the fuck do we even know about things like justice, free will or the like? We live in a world of conceptualized things (in our mental life). And we talk about them as if they are things in themselves-- like chairs or doors for instance. Working on the problem "What makes a chair a chair?" is doing very very basic metaphysics. Trying to get to the bottom of where the concept ends and the physical reality begins. Again... may or may not be your cup of tea. But it's not so simple of a question once you start exploring.
The problem is that a great many different types of things can be used as chairs. To expect there to be a single common denominator seems rather of a stretch. It seems that quite a number of things can independently make a thing a chair, including personal inclination and social conventions.
It might not be a bad idea to use 'fuzzy' set theory since we expect there to be fuzzy boundaries.
The physical reality is very different than a social convention about what is and is not a chair, let alone whether something that is typically not chair is used as one on some occasion.
The physical thing is the 'thing in itself'. How we use it determines (at least party) its 'chairness'.
