(December 6, 2018 at 6:32 am)Belaqua Wrote:(December 6, 2018 at 6:22 am)Grandizer Wrote: So a car may not have all the expected car parts but could still be a car if it has enough parts to render it a car (albeit not a "complete" car).
Once on a highway outside Mexico City I saw a guy driving along in an absolute minimum car. Wheels, tires, chassis, engine, steering. No body, doors, windows, even seats. He was sitting on a wad of foam rubber. Since it was running, I guess we can say it was a car, though the police might not have agreed.
Take away any of those parts, though, and I think it transitions into something else. Junk, maybe.
That would be arguing function, which is essentially teleological. How do you get essential and accidental properties without notions about what a thing 'should' be? Is a car any less a car because it doesn't have wheels? Only if it needs wheels to function as a car. Otherwise you're just arbitrarily cutting things up into parts and wholes and then the sense of whatever principle this is a part of becomes problematic as there's no determinate way to interpret the principle.