Eugine_Nier comments on Living Metaphorically - Less Wrong

24 Post author: lukeprog 28 November 2011 03:01PM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 29 November 2011 06:22:10AM 1 point [-]

One might reasonably have hoped that the same admittedly unnatural mode would prove similarly worthwhile for concepts like "democracy". After all, unnatural doesn't necessarily mean worse. Now, for concepts like "democracy", the unnatural approach does prove to be worse.

That's because "democracy" involves dealing with interacting human minds and said minds run on metaphor.

Comment author: Tyrrell_McAllister 29 November 2011 05:21:36PM 2 points [-]

Conceptual analysis also seems to fail in some cases that don't involve dealing with human minds. For example, a conceptual-analysis approach to the concept of "living thing" versus "non-living thing" would probably be a mistake.