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scotherns comments on The Featherless Biped - Less Wrong
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So if I removed the lungs of chicken, you would no longer consider it a bird? Or if I surgically modified some other creature (e.g. a pig) to have circulatory lungs, you would consider this to be a bird?
This kind of argument is why it is pretty difficult to come up with a comprehensive set of features for a broad category like 'bird'. Often the best you can do is produce a set of examples demonstrating the category. Humans are pretty good at such pattern recognition from a set of data.
Like a lot of things, it is hard to define, but you know it when you see it :-)
Different people's concepts of "bird" agree on most real-world examples, but I see no reason why they should agree on all conceivable hypothetical examples, so the task of "defining" a word is futile.
Warrigal gave a good recognition algorithm: it inspects a small subset of properties and gives an answer that accords with our judgment in most real-world cases. That's about as far as one can or should go when "defining" something outside of mathematics.
Even though no bird, in the history of the world, has ever been recognised using it ?
When someone proposes a new algorithm, "this algorithm has never been used" doesn't sound to me like a valid critique. More substantively, Cuvier proposed similar outlandish-sounding algorithms tuned to recognizing animals by teeth and bone fragments, which have enjoyed widespread use ever since.
A small anecdote: one of Cuvier's students once dressed in a devil's costume and entered his room at night to scare him. Cuvier opened his eyes, said "Horns? Hooves? You can't eat me, you're a herbivore" and went back to sleep.
Heh.
Plenty of herbivores can still do serious damage when they're annoyed, though. ;)
Well, if you remove the lungs of a chicken, its species is still a species whose members typically have circulatory lungs. What I was wondering is whether there are any species of bird that are not warm-blooded with circulatory lungs, or if there are any species of anything else that are.