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DSimon comments on Concepts Don't Work That Way - Less Wrong
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Comments (88)
Yes, strongly agreed. This idea makes me want to think of adjectives as tugging a concept-defining region of thing-space in a new direction.
That works especially well in languages like Lojban, where adjectives and nouns are not distinguished from each other. For example there is "blanu" which means "x is blue" and there is "zdani' which means "x is a house", and you can say "blanu zdani" (blueish-house) just as easily as "zdani blanu" (houseish-blue).
That actually is a good example of a brittle requirement, in ways that are even more directly problematic than shuttlecocks and bird-shaped staplers. What about a plucked chicken? What about a duck that, due to a genetic disease, never had feathers? What about (NOTE: This example isn't valid re: real evolutionary history) a member of an intermediary species between pterodactyl and modern birds?
Not that it particularly affects your point, but pterodactyls are not genetic precursors to birds (they split off before the clade Dinosauria,) and feathers predate the first true dinosaurs capable of flight.
Whoops, didn't know that, thanks.
Yeah, good point. I'm entirely convinced. Even for an apparently straight-forward category like 'bird', there's not a single necessary condition you can point to. Even if there are some examples of categories with necessary conditions (I don't know), this is evidence that the necessary conditions aren't an intrinsic part of the way we structure a concept.